Mind of an Outlaw Read Free

“Our noble idea of democracy was forever being traduced, sullied, exploited, and downgraded.” Every fiber in Mailer’s being fought the onslaught of assaults against the country that he served throughout his life, as in his lifelong critique of government and governmental abuse of authority.From his criticism of the devastating failure of the Vietnam War to his late essays attacking America’s war acts in Iraq, Mailer tried to live a life of affirmative rebellion.
    Mailer’s acute political consciousness is explicitly connected to his view of art and the artist. In his mid-1950s essay “What I Think of Artistic Freedom,” Mailer describes the social responsibilities of the artist: “It is the artist, embodying the most noble faculty of man—his urge to rebel—who is forever enlarging the walls.” A cornerstone of Mailer’s approach to restructuring the political and social landscapes was the strategic use of productive conflict. A politically sensitive artist cannot be aloof and uninvolved. Mailer followed this prescription his entire adult life. Never was a public intellectual so intimately interconnected with his audience through constant appearances in print and electronic media, especially television. There were other celebrated novelists who commented publicly on events (James Baldwin and Gore Vidal, for example), and there were other public intellectuals, like William F. Buckley, Jr., who were consistently in the fray of controversy, but no single person rose to Mailer’s stature, and certainly no one has filled the void left by his death. Mailer established a complex persona that, I would argue, performed public service at its very best.
    In these pages, a previously unpublished essay on Sigmund Freud gives sharp insight into Mailer’s conception of public responsibility. Freud is described less as a pioneering theoretical psychiatrist than as a public doctor, one who administers to the generic ills that plague twentieth-century society. According to Mailer, Freud, more than his findings, was the antidote to the vast range of threats to contemporary living. Society, with its wars and poverty and hypocrisies, was sick and barbaric and threatening to become even worse without Freud’s ameliorating contributions, especially his emphasis on the importance of a civilizing culture. Mailer obviously felt a strong kinship with Freud, whom he describes as “a lower-middle-class middle-European Jew who rose in bourgeois society.” His description of Freud’s mental acuity could easily be a description of himself: “[H]e was capable of the finest intellectual distinctions.” Freud and Mailer were interlocutors,mediating the tense, ongoing negotiation between cultural values and their representatives. Mailer often spoke for (and of) himself, of course, but he also felt a responsibility to speak for us all in his investigation into the collective remembrance of time and change.
    This characterization is not to say that Mailer was a narrow ideologue. He was, first and foremost, an interrogative intellectual for whom the cast of a question was even more important than the reach of its answer. Foremost among his identities is that of a probing, hectoring teacher—the very best kind of educator. Mailer never fully lets go of either his reader-student or his topic. A common mode in his writing-teaching included an unrelenting questioning of his subject matter, infused with an unceasing challenge to the status quo, as we see in his probing analysis of the existential minority as part of his theory of violence in “The White Negro.” In Mailer’s view, the existential minority comprises individuals who are neither inherently good nor bad but who represent a series of divergent perspectives (such as feeling superior while also doubting this sense of superiority). In other words, individuals might
appear
to exhibit contradictory thinking or actions when in actuality they are reflecting different views that they hold