Soren Kierkegaard has … provided us with an exquisitely precise description of the kind of program which Mailer has adopted for himself. Mailer calls it the "philosophy of Hip" and "good orgasm"; Kiekegaard terms it "the despair of defiance." They come to much the same thing. (p. 82)

Mailer is no existentialist—unless we are to consider his brand of self-styled "American existentialism" as an existentialist heresy. Whereas Mailer claims to be a confirmed romantic who hopes to find his destiny through Hip and "good orgasm," the European existentialists have been consistently opposed to all varieties of romanticism. Kierkegaard expressed the antiromantic orientation of existentialism pungently and succinctly in his assertion that "there is no immediate health of the spirit." Yet, it is just such an "immediate health of the spirit" which Mailer professes as the fundamental doctrine of his "existentialism." Although he is referring specifically to the psychopath rather than the hipster, what Mailer says about orgasm expresses the basic tenet of "the philosophy of Hip": "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." The very notion of "orgasm," which might be construed as a self-chosen caricature of romantic imagery, is typical of the language and point of view of romanticism. Through the deliberate and repeated use of what is ordinarily considered to be obscene language, Mailer seeks to give his version of romanticism a more virile expression. He fails to recognize, however, that in obliterating the distinction between the sacred and the profane, he deprives obscene language of its shock value. When the language of the soldier becomes the language of the schoolboy—and even of female novelists—obscenity is transmuted into a pale vulgarity. Mailer is, if he only knew it, the worst enemy of Hip. As in so many instances, Mailer must depend upon the "squares" to preserve the purity of the distinction for him.

Whereas the existentialists have been sharply critical of romanticism, charging it with naiveté, "bad faith," or both at once, Mailer wants to recover the primeval vitality of romantic passion and reestablish it in a new power and glory. His quarrel is never with romanticism as such, but with those forms of romanticism which have become effete through social domestication. The chief difference between Mailer and earlier romantic reformers is that he is more violent in his attack upon social decadence and more desperate in his advocacy of the return to primitivism. Moreover, primitive freedom, as Mailer conceives of it, is far from the serene and idyllic affair envisioned by Rousseau. Mailer's faith, he tells us, is in the essential goodness of the uncorrupted (which means socially untrammeled) vitality of man's libidinal energies. Like Nietzsche, he represents himself as an antinihilistic nihilist who is summoning us to rebellion against a society which threatens to emasculate us. (pp. 85-6)

In his search for the interesting, for unexplored possibilities of human choice, Mailer has become fascinated with antisocial and psychopathic behavior. "For I wish to attempt an entrance into the mysteries of murder, suicide, incest, orgy, orgasm, and Time. These themes now fill my head and make me think I have a fair chance to become the first philosopher of Hip." But it is not as a spectator that Mailer sought to understand Hip; he was experiencing something of a psychic rebellion (liberation?) in himself. He reports that after his unhappy experience with the publication of Deer Park something broke in him and he was "finally open to my anger."… This anger, for which Mailer had become "open," was no ordinary anger, but the defiant rage of what Kierkegaard termed "demonic despair." "Now my will was a dictator; like all tyrants it felt the urgency of the present as unendurable." (pp. 86-7)

Unlike French existentialism (the only variety with which Mailer appears to be acquainted), "Hip is based on a mysticism of the flesh, and its origins can be traced back into all the undercurrents and underworlds of American life, back into the instinctive apprehension and appreciation of existence which one finds in the Negro and the soldier, in the criminal psychopath and the dope addict and the jazz musician, in the prostitute, in the actor, in the—if one can visualize such a possibility—in the marriage of the call girl and the psychoanalyst." Mailer is surely correct in calling attention to this difference—so great a difference, in fact, as to differentiate it completely from all other forms of "existentialism." Hip, as Mailer portrays it, is, indeed, a "mysticism of the flesh," a romantic glorification of the primordially instinctual. The trouble is that, like most nostalgia for the primitive, Mailer's advocacy of Hip is phony. Rape, murder, suicide, orgy, and even orgasm are anything but primitive "instincts." They are in their very nature culturally determined modes of behavior and highly sophisticated forms at that. And, what is more important, they depend for their meaning in Hip on their negative quality as rebellious acts against a predominantly square society. There are and could be no hipsters in a primitive African society, nor could hipsterism ever become a prevalent mode of conduct. If enough people became hipsters they would of necessity all turn out to be squares. Were the revolt which Mailer advocates to succeed, all would be lost. The Hip ideal is all too typical of romantic programs which have an essential term outside themselves and are, thus, negatively determined. Even as the romantic novel is over and, perhaps, ruined when the obstacles are finally removed, so it must be, also, with Hip as a program. It can succeed only in failure and be advocated only in "bad faith." (pp. 87-8)

The capacity to float gracefully on the surface of desire seems to be the very essence of the Hip view of life…. Mailer recognizes that the more highly the life founded upon desire is developed, the more it tends to lose its vitality…. He seeks to live only in the instant which is unchanged in being repeated. Unfortunately, this view ignores the fact that natural energy is intrinsically and incorrigibly temporal. To affirm the natural and reject development is practically absurd. Incurably a romantic, Mailer cannot tolerate the fruits of the romanticism which he embraces. His rage is not so much against the world or anything within the world as against the impossibility of finding ultimate satisfaction within the sensuous while refusing to give up the attempt. He wants to sweep aside the refinements of civilization in order to begin once more at the beginning with an upsurge of primitive vitality. But can the result be any different? Isn't Kierkegaard perfectly correct in maintaining that as the erotic is developed the rapist becomes a seducer? It is strange indeed for an artist to set himself in violent opposition to the life of art.

The fact is that Mailer, in his new self-consciousness, has come to the point of what Kierkegaard termed "despair over the worldly."… Mailer has discovered what countless men before him have known, namely that the world offers us no self-sustained meaning, no ultimate satisfaction. And he is enraged, blaming everything on the "squares" who have spoiled everything for him. He sees himself now as in the position of having to "make his own kicks."

But even though it is in some respects the rage of a man who has come to consciousness of himself, Mailer's rage is, also, like that of the small boy who has discovered that there is no Santa Claus. Disappointed as we all are at this discovery, Mailer is enraged and refuses to accept the fact. (pp. 89-90)

If Mailer is an existentialist he is an odd one, for he clearly cannot tolerate existence. He is enraged at his own freedom because it is finite. He will settle for nothing short of an omnipotence which would enable him to actualize every possibility. Failing that, he yearns to become fate itself in the hope that it might extinguish his miserable finitude…. It is not so much his action as the infinity of the murderer's passion which intrigues Mailer. As he half-knows, he is obsessed not simply with violence, but with death. (p. 90)

Mailer's hero, the hipster, corresponds nicely to Kierkegaard's esthetic hero, the "sensuous-erotic genius." Although Mailer chooses a primitive rather than a poetic expression of the erotic, the categories are essentially the same. The esthetic man, Kierkegaard argues, bases his life upon sensuous desire, lives only in the instant, and has no reality either for himself or others. The paradox of the esthetic life is that as the individual develops his own sensuousness he develops, also, his capacities as spirit and, hence, transcends immediacy. It is the inescapable fact of transcendence within immediacy which leads the sensuouserotic genius more and more deeply into despair. For he is ultimately confronted with the choice: either to surrender the attempt to live within natural immediacy and go on to the ethical mode, or to hold himself defiantly within immediacy. To have discovered that an immediate fulfillment of the human spirit is impossible and, yet, to refuse to abandon the attempt to achieve it, is to be in conscious despair. This is, I would argue, essentially Mailer's predicament as set forth in The White Negro. (p. 91)

Hip is the incarnation of the flesh from which spirit has been excluded and in which rape and murder are as significant as love and self-sacrifice. This is precisely what Kierkegaard means by "esthetic indifference." There are no genuine contradictions, no irreconcilable oppositions, within esthetic immediacy…. (p. 92)

Mailer's advocacy of Hip represents a curious blending of nihilism (demonic defiance) and a pagan faith in the essential goodness of elemental power. He identifies with the hipster both because the White Negro is in full-scale rebellion against civilization (defiant) and unleashes the life-giving force of primitive emotion. The very notion of the White Negro symbolizes the opposition between civilization (White) and instinctual passion (Negro). It is not only a dialectical but a contradictory idea in that rage and rebellion derive their force and meaning from civilized passion and can by no act of violence gain reentry into the innocence of immediacy. Mailer refuses to accept original sin as a fact of human life and would undo the Fall of mankind. He will, if need be, carry the human race back to the Garden of Eden on his own shoulders—even if he must tread upon all the edifices of civilization to do it. The courage he wants is heroic, epic, Promethean, but, also, futile. (p. 93)

Mailer has fixed himself in the esthetic mode of defiant despair. It is the demonic which he affirms as the heroic courage of Hip. The hope for redemption, as he sees it, lies in our capacity to surrender ourselves to a "dark and mysterious unconscious power" in which we must trust blindly. If we are fortunate, it will carry us along to a freeing and purging release in "good orgasm." But such a project cannot arrest despair, for it is based upon an illusory view of the natural. It evades the recognition that it is spirit which posits the flesh as flesh and that, once developed, spirit cannot be reabsorbed into the flesh. It only postpones the problem of ethical and religious choice. It is the dread of being responsible for himself that Mailer is as yet unwilling to confront. Either he must go on to an ethical-religious courage in which he affirms existence with all its finite blemishes—or remain in pathos. And, whether personally or as a novelist, for him the pathetic has only a limited scope. If he can free himself of his self-established bondage to the esthetic, he may yet be the outstanding novelist he so desperately wants but does not yet will to be. (p. 95)