Existentialism, Violent Liberation, and Racialized Masculinities: Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” and An American Dream
Maggie McKinley's chapter on Mailer in Masculinity and the Paradox of Violence in American Fiction, 1950–75 (2015), excerpted here by the author's permission: Mailer's existential masculinity set beside Beauvoir, Sartre, and Arendt, and the hipster of The White Negro and Stephen Rojack of An American Dream read as protagonists whose liberating violence re-enacts the oppressions it means to escape.
McKinley, Maggie. “Existentialism, Violent Liberation, and Racialized Masculinities: Norman Mailer’s ‘The White Negro’ and An American Dream.” Masculinity and the Paradox of Violence in American Fiction, 1950–75. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015.
The Mailer chapter of Maggie McKinley‘s study of violence and masculinity in Ellison, Wright, Mailer, Bellow, Baldwin, and Roth. Taking Mailer’s remark in Advertisements for Myself that it is not enough to feel like a man, one must think like one, McKinley reads his existentialism beside Beauvoir and Sartre: individual liberation as a step toward transcendence out of a totalitarian, “cancerous” society, and an Other, racial or female, against whom the liberated masculine self is defined. Where Mailer differs is in his Manichean, religious cast and his faith that individual violence is “a cleansing force,” a position she tests against Hannah Arendt’s critique of violence as domination.
The excerpt reprinted here covers “The White Negro”: the hipster as sexual outlaw whose violence is meant to purge violence, the “masculine argument” that excludes women by definition, and the racialization that James Baldwin answered in “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy.” McKinley holds that Mailer intended the essay to “destroy stereotypes” and imagined a better world of love and justice, yet that the violent means re-submerge the people the hipster was to liberate. The chapter goes on to An American Dream, where Stephen Rojack carries the hipster’s attributes and Mailer shows much of his project of violence to be a failure; the Rojack section is not part of the excerpt. The excerpt is reproduced by permission of the author from the digital edition prepared for Project Mailer.