September 14, 2024

Bullfighting in the Village:
The Search for the Apocalyptic Orgasm in “The Time of Her Time”

“ I was working my way toward saying something unforgivable . . . my vision . . . was leading toward the violent and the orgiastic. I do not mean that I was clear about where I was going, it was rather that I had a dumb dull set of intimations that the things I was drawn to write about were taboo. ”

I n a 2001 interview, Lawrence Grobel asked Norman Mailer about the link between religious men and violence, and Mailer responds:

“ Violence is one of the existential states. So very often in a violent act you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. It’s different from the way that it seems in the movies or in books. It’s indefinable. Anyone who’s been in an automobile accident knows how the moments before the accident have some exceptional time changes. I once got hit by a car many years ago and it was an extraordinary experience. I bounced off a couple of rocks and ended up wrapped around a tree, but it all took place very slowly. . . . It was a sports car, and it just bruised my hip. But it’s just so different from the normal and the given that it leaves you with an echo that has a touch of the cosmos in it. ”

Mailer’s answer provides touches on subjects that have been a major point of his literary oeuvre: the role of violence, the existential moment, and the search for the authentic. Mailer’s linking of a car crash and violence suggests here that both contain an experience that that touches on the cosmos, or something greater and more profound than the everyday world. The experience is both jarring and disruptive, bringing not necessarily insight, but a sense that something more, perhaps something essential, lies in the realm of the unexpected sublimed by the quotidian. Many of Mailer’s protagonists search for this “exceptional time . . . that has a touch of the cosmos in it.”

Mailer first begins his search for in his 1954–55 journal Lipton’s where he considers Freudian psychology in a new light. Through marijuana, called “tea” or “Liptons,” Mailer gleans insights he otherwise have not—it acted like the car crash to take him out of time and allow him a glimpse of the cosmos: writes:

“ I had nothing less than a vision of the universe which it would take me forever to explain. . . . Anyway, the communicable part of my vision was that everything is valid and that nothing is knowable—one simply cannot erect a value with the confidence that it is good for others—all one can do is know what is good, that is what is necessary for oneself, and one must act on that basis, for underlying the conception is the philosophical idea that for life to expand at its best, everybody must express themselves at their best, and the value of the rebel and the radical is that he seeks to expand that part of the expanding sphere (of totality) which is most retarded. ”

In his experiments, Mailer risked insanity, but his visions seem revelatory to the writer that Mailer becomes: he writes “I was smack on the edge of insanity, that I was wandering through all the mountain craters of schizophrenia. I knew I could come back, I was like an explorer who still had a life-line out of the caverns, but I understood also that it would not be all that difficult to cut the life line.” His insights in Lipton’s might be called apocalyptic in the original sense: from the Greek “apokalypsis,” which means “uncovering” or “revelation.” His revelations implie a divine or profound insight into the human condition and become personal, spiritual, and prophetic for Mailer, with transformative implications. Lipton’s reverberates throughout his future work.

Over the course of Lipton’s, Mailer develops a dialectic where social conformity, what he calls sociostatis (which he abbreviates to “S”), is at odds with what he calls homestatis—then later homeodynamism (shorted to “H”)—which he considers as “the most healthy act possible at any moment for the soul.” In Lipton’s, this dichotomy is reflected an age-old struggle in humans, between individual desire, expression, and affirmation, and that of social pressures and expectations that society imposed, often violently, upon is members. For Mailer, the H “life-force” becomes integral in opposing the S forces of oppression that seeks ultimately to neuter the individual for the sake of social order. Mailer begins to associate the homeodynamic urge with the psychopath as a vital expression of individuality, making the Freudian id a positive force to be uncovered, rather than repressed through S therapy and neuroses.

In his 1957 essay The White Negro, Mailer calls

. . .

Works Cited

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