What Is A Mazeppist? (Part Two)

We have, for starters, a post-9/11, post-Saidian Romantic Orientalist: one who understands that even "Orientals" (including a group of Egyptian poets and literary critics who flourished during the first half of the 20th century) embraced Romanticism--and, at the same time, staunchly opposed European colonialism and imperialism; who understands that the Romantics--who were human, all-too-human--often looked "East" for inspiration. In so doing, these Romantics saw the "Orient" in flawed ways, yes, but they also cherished the differences from the "West" that the East represented. Salutary differences as far as these Romantics were concerned. Easterners had not lost touch with mystery, with the inexplicable. Enlightenment did not necessarily entail the banishment of all shadow from the intellectual landscape. The Romantic Orientalist wishes to sit at the feet of Eastern wisdom--without repudiating her Western sense of self. What she repudiates is the exclusivist either/or of Aristotelian logic, arguing instead for an inclusive (Romantic) logic of both/and.

Those who respond to the Mazeppist's allegiance to his or her nuanced reading of the Romantic Orientalist project with censoriousness only affirm, through their censoriousness, that exclusionary thinking is something to oppose. Those who jump uncritically upon a Saidian band-wagon are fighting the last war.

The Mazeppist is the "spiritual heir" to the Atomic Age's "White Negro" or, as Mailer puts it elsewhere in his essay of that name, an "American Existentialist." Now there is a loaded term; before we go about unpacking it, I want to add another term that I think belongs in the mix: what Victor Turner called "liminal personae" or "Threshold Persons." This needs to be added BEFORE we start thinking left-bank intellectualisme, because left-bank intellectualisme has very little purchase upon the meaning of the phrase "American Existentialist" (or Romantic Orientalist or White Negro or Mazeppist). The Mazeppist is a threshold figure, someone who exhibits the ambiguous attributes of Turner's "liminality": a condition or person who eludes or slips through "the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial." Turner, The Ritual Process, p. 95.

Mazeppa, a European, is rejected by his own people and sent to die in the wilderness (Turner: "...liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness..."). The wild horse he is lashed to gallops east. Gallops EAST. Mazeppa is rescued (I will not say "saved") by Tartar tribesmen. These tribal peoples recognize him as one who has cheated the fate assigned to him by the cultural space into which he was born and raised. Many recognize his liminality and prize him for it: he is special, a rare occurrence, a rare occasion. He has died to the old nonsense and risen to new possibilities.

Among Europeans, these possibilities raise to a fever pitch inculcated ancestral anxieties . The Mazeppist's personal embodiment of cultural miscegenation is a screaming obscenity in his place of origin. It is a test for those who rejected him and, as we shall see, it is likewise a test for those who embrace him thinking that he intends a repudiation of his past.

Once one has died to the old nonsense and risen to new possibilities, someone else's old nonsense is no more acceptable to him than the old nonsense he has risen above.