What Is A Mazeppist? (Part One)

Based upon the information supplied in this Blog, one is entitled to assume that a Mazeppist is a variety of Romantic Orientalist. That no doubt seems like an odd thing to be and you won't get an argument from me on that score. It is a variety of madness--but not without method and, I would add, not without justification. In a post-9/11 world, a Mazeppist is the latest version of what Norman Mailer, after the madness of the Second World War and the dropping of the A-Bomb, called "the white negro."

If you do not recall this essay, allow me to refresh your recollection. It was originally published in Dissent in 1957.

Mailer argued that we may never be able to determine "the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. For the first time in history...we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonoured, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radioactive city..."

As if this were not bad enough, Mailer noted for the record that the threat which the Nuclear Age posed to the well-being of the planet and every one of its inhabitants was co-mingled with the threats of political repression that the governments which claimed to be protecting us from nuclear holocaust employed in the name of "national security" in a time of (albeit "cold") war. Not only could we not trust the "enemy," we could not trust our neighbors--for they might be in league with the enemy. The Myth of the Fifth Column is very powerful in this country.

Mailer wrote: "It is on this bleak scene that a phenomoneon has appeared: the American existentialist--the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l'univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry), if the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on the uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self..."

I think that this is an interesting piece of sociological writing--comparable to James Agee's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." It contains a number of compelling observations which appear to be mixed with a generous helping of Mailer's own desire to transform into virtues some of his own personal predilections. I do not intend by this criticism to undermine the work: I think it was brilliant when published and that it remains, to this day, suggestive. Indeed, I think it becomes more suggestive by the day, in light of the Bush regime's twisted, cynical, and exploitive relationship to the tragic events of September 11, 2001. But more on this anon...