Norman Mailer's Existentialism; Or, the Divine Essence of Psychopathy

This short article offers an Existentialist reading of Norman Mailer's polemical essay 'The White Negro' (1957). Mailer's original depiction of the creative impulse is reinterpreted as an existential form of engagement: an engagement which foregrounds a transcendental ontology that borrows from the fundamentals of Sartrean Existentialism and Emersonian Transcendentalism, but which nonetheless remains largely idiosyncratic. I show that the distinctive nature of this engagement stems from its instinctual character: rooted in the body, its mode of expression is radically sensual and even sexual, demanding the satisfaction of the most primitive instincts in the here-and-now as a condition of its realisation. For Mailer, the instinctive energies and cravings of the self are nonnegotiable: they elicit a form of being, viewed as ultimate, which is nevertheless fiercely self-centred, seditious and amoral, epitomised by the figure of the psychopath in the essay. Provocatively revered, the psychopathic is conceived by Mailer as a quintessential form of existential authenticity; one through which the creative act is rapidly consumed in solipsism and confounds itself with self-destruction.