MORRIS DICKSTEIN
503
In "The White Negro" Mailer calls on the myths and values of
the ftfties only to undermine them. Where the ftfties had substituted
the isolated man, the competitive capitalist monad, for the radical
dream of collective man in a just community, Mailer brandished the
ftgure of a Nietzschean adventurer seeking experience beyond good
and evil. Where the ftfties had substituted religion for Marxism,
Mailer discovered' 'the American existentialist" who transcended the
sham of suburban religiosity and churchgoing. Where the ftfties
theorized about totalitarianism in far-off places, Mailer found a
creeping totalitarianism here at home, "a slow death by conformity ,' ,
he said, "with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled." Mailer's
psychopathic hero is a bomb that explodes beneath the bland surface
of the ftfties, constructed out of all its repressed violence and rebel–
liousness, composed of the longings for personal autonomy and ex–
treme experience that could not be satisfted by respectability, domes–
ticity, maturity, and competitive success. The ftfties also believed in
love, if its popular plays, songs and books are to be credited, and here
too Mailer expropriates the period's values for his own purpose.
At bottom, the drama of the psychopath is that he seeks love .
Not love as the search for a mate, but love as the search for an
orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it....
But in this search , the psychopath becomes an embodiment of
the extreme contradictions of the society which formed his
character ...
At bottom Mailer's purpose is to explore those contradictions-and
the contradictions in himself-not to recommend violence. The key
works of the new sensibility are all disguised or overt critiques of the
ftfties , written during that time, but suffused with a sense of isolation
unparalleled in our cultural life since the ftrst stirrings of modernism.
The appearance of works like "The White Negro" in the late
ftfties makes it more difficult for us to treat that period as a single
entity . In fact of course the sensibility of any period is plural ; its
strands are diverse and contradictory . What we in hindsight call
change is usually the unexpected swelling of a minor current as it
imperceptibly becomes a major one, and alters the prevailing mood .
We can now see that such a change was occurring in the late ftfties,
and it was prophetic of Mailer and Paul Goodman (in
Growing
Up
