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CHAPTER 5 Last Man Standing Sex and Survival in the Interracial Apocalyptic “When it comes,” observed Norman Mailer at a climactic moment in his Beat classic “The White Negro” (1957), “miscegenation will be a terror” (292), and he described this terror in suggestively post-nuclear terms. Though Mailer denounces the bomb and the moods of fear and conformity it has instilled, he deploys the atomic metaphor positively through the later pages, indicating that the existentially selfish “apocalyptic organism” (284) of the Hipster—and of his cultural forebear, the embattled Negro—is both the ironic and the ideal response to the pervasive and unrelenting threat of sudden annihilation in the atomic age: between “instant death by atomic war” and “slow death by conformity,” the Hipster chooses “the only life-giving answer . . . to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to . . . encourage the psychopath in oneself” (277). The Negro outcast has always known “in his cells that life was war, nothing but war” and thus “subsisted for his Saturday night kicks . . . , his orgasm” (279); now that all America discerns itself on the brink of world-ending war, the oracular Hipster is he who has “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro” (279). The era of atomic nihilism, notes Mailer, both coincides with and encourages black striving for equality and will lead to “matings” between “the Negro” and “the White” and perhaps ignite “the last war of them all . . . between the blacks and the whites, or between the women and the men, or between the beautiful and the ugly . . .” (292). Scott Saul reads the “photographic negative that inverted the white face” on the essay’s City Lights edition as having “a space-alien stare, a klieg-bulb keenness” (67). Yet this image is also readable as a racially ambiguous human figure at the atomic flashpoint, nanoseconds before being vaporized into nothingness. 171 Explicating Hipster lingo, Mailer considers the immediate, explosive nature of the terms “go,” “swing,” “with it,” and “make it” (all potential references to the sex act) and notes that “when the crisis comes, whether of love or violence , [the Hipster] can make it, he can win, he can release a little more energy for himself since he hates himself a little less” (286). Elsewhere this sexual chain reaction is figured as “giv[ing] energy to another” and as “the paradise of limitless energy and perception just beyond the next wave of the next orgasm” (287). While the concept of sex as “energy” emerges in the writing of many psychoanalytic intellectuals of the day, and especially in Wilhelm Reich’s notion of the orgone—“a form of tangible, measurable libido that activates all living things” (A. Gordon 49)1 —Mailer’s particular interest in the conversion of matter (human bodies) into not only energy but surplus energy echoes his atomic preoccupation. Another key term, “groove,” where likeminded cats meet to get it on together, calls to mind both the “ever-extending radii from the center” of the jazz record and the concentric circles of atomic destruction that were iconic in this era. Finally, Mailer literalizes “dig” in terms both psychoanalytic and atomic: to “unearth” the deepest energies of one’s unconscious through “digging ” is not to burrow into the bomb shelter of cowardice and denial but to execute a powerful underground detonation: to “allow to come to consciousness a pain, a guilt, a shame or a desire which the other has not had the courage to face.” For Mailer, the Negro’s explosive sexuality is sought after by the rebel-Hipster, who understands that therein lie the energy, honesty, violence, and creativity essential to survival in an apocalyptic age. While Squares fretted over the atomic-induced end of time, Mailer, like a fundamentalist awaiting the Rapture, searched out and celebrated the Negro’s psychopathic, nihilistic focus on “the present,” sprung free of its ties to the past and the future. “The White Negro” thus draws into explosive, (pro)creative relation the twin bogeys of the postwar era—the atomic threat and “the Negro problem”— that this era’s predominant white mindset insistently relegated to separate categories . As has been obvious throughout this study, African Americans were as averse to the prospect of nuclear attack as were most white Americans of the period, and would have been as physically, psychologically, and environmentally devastated by such an attack as would have been the lilyest...

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