PR Norman Mailer - The White Negro

Norman Mailer, ‘The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,’ Dissent (Fall 1957)
[excerpts]
- The unstated essence of Hip, its psychopathic brilliance, quivers with the knowledge
that new kinds of victories increase one’s power for new kinds of perception; and
defeats, the wrong kind of defeats, attack the body and imprison one’s energy until
one is jailed in the prison air of other people’s habits, other people’s defeats,
boredom, quiet desperation, and muted icy self-destroying rage.
o One is Hip or one is Square (the alternative which each new generation
coming into American life is beginning to feel) one is a rebel or one conforms,
one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square
cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly
to conform if one is to succeed
- A totalitarian society makes enormous demands on the courage of men, and a
partially totalitarian society makes even greater demands for the general anxiety is
greater.
o Indeed if one is to be a man, almost any kind of unconventional action often
takes disproportionate courage. So it is no accident that the source of Hip is
the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and
democracy for two centuries.
- But the presence of Hip as a working philosophy in the sub-worlds of American life is
probably due to jazz, and its knife-like entrance into culture, its subtle but so
penetrating influence on an avant-garde generation—that post-war generation of
adventurers who (some consciously, some by osmosis) had absorbed the lessons of
disillusionment and disgust of the Twenties, the Depression, and the War. Sharing a
collective disbelief in the words of men who had too much money and controlled too
many things, they knew almost as powerful a disbelief in the socially monolithic
ideas of the single mate, the solid family and the respectable love life
- So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at
night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts.
o The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for
practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.
- There is a depth of desperation to the condition which enables one to remain in life
only by engaging death, but the reward is their knowledge that what is happening at
each instant of the electric present is good or bad for them, good or bad for their
cause, their love, their action, their need.
- It is this knowledge which provides the curious community of feeling in the world of
the hipster, a muted cool religious revival to be sure, but the element which is
exciting, disturbing, nightmarish perhaps, is that incompatibles have come to bed,
the inner life and the violent life, the orgy and the dream of love, the desire to
murder and the desire to create, a dialectical conception of existence with a lust for
power, a dark, romantic, and yet undeniably dynamic view of existence for it sees
every man and woman as moving individually through each moment of life forward
into growth or backward into death.
III
III
- It may be fruitful to consider the hipster a philosophical psychopath, a man

interested not only in the dangerous imperatives of his psychopathy but in codifying,
at least for himself, the suppositions on which his inner universe is constructed.
- For Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle, and so its appeal
is still beyond the civilized man.
o If there are ten million Americans who are more or less psychopathic (and
the figure is most modest) there are probably not more than one hundred
thousand men and women who consciously see themselves as hipsters, but
their importance is that they are an elite with the potential ruthlessness of an
elite, and a language most adolescents can understand instinctively for the
hipster’s intense view of existence matches their experience and their desire
to rebel.
- the psychopath knows
instinctively that to express a forbidden impulse actively is far more beneficial to him
than merely to confess the desire in the safety of a doctor’s room
o i.e. jazz
- 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. Orgasm is his therapy— he knows at the seed of his being that
good orgasm opens his possibilities and bad orgasm imprisons him. But in this
search, the psychopath becomes an embodiment of the extreme contradictions of
the society
- But the Negro, not being privileged to gratify his self-esteem with the heady
satisfactions of categorical condemnation, chose to move instead in that other
direction where all situations are equally valid, and in the worst of perversion,
promiscuity, pimpery, drug addiction, rape, razor-slash, bottle-break, what-have-you,
the Negro discovered and elaborated a morality of the bottom

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Norman Mailer, ‘The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,’ Dissent (Fall 1957)

- It may be fruitful to consider the hipster a philosophical psychopath, a man

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