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. ”

Norman Mailer’s “The Time of Her Time” explores themes of masculinity, sexual conquest, and existential identity, which are deeply emblematic of Mailer’s broader literary concerns. The story centers on Sergius O’Shaughnessy, a hyper-masculine, self-assured bullfighter and aspiring artist, who prides himself on his sexual prowess and ability to dominate women. The story is set in the 1950s in Greenwich Village, an almost surreal bohemian enclave where Sergius navigates relationships with various women, but most notably with a young Jewish woman named Denise Gondelman.

“Time” considers the complexities of power dynamics in sexual relationships, portraying Sergius as a man driven by a need to assert his dominance, which he equates with his sense of self-worth and artistic authenticity. Throughout, Mailer employs jouissance in Sergius’ quest for the apocalyptic orgasm; these ideas become central elements in his exploration of sexual power dynamics, masculinity, and existential authenticity. The apocalyptic orgasm, theorized in The White Negro, serves as an epiphanic moment of transcendence and confrontation, while jouissance acts as a vehicle for breaking societal norms and touching upon primal aspects of human experience.

The story’s climax occurs when Sergius, after a series of encounters, is finally confronted with Denise’s unexpected resistance and emotional depth, challenging his previously unshakable confidence. Mailer’s concept of the apocalyptic orgasm in this story is tied to his belief in the orgasm as a moment of radical transformation—a physical and emotional event that has the potential to break through layers of repression, societal constraints, and the fear of death. For Sergius, the orgasm becomes a battlefield where power, identity, and existential freedom are contested. Whereas Sergius positions himself as the matador is this bullfight, it’s Denise who ultimately makes him the bull.

Mailer intertwines the apocalyptic orgasm and jouissance in “The Time of Her Time” to depict a relationship dynamic that is both erotically charged and existentially fraught. The apocalyptic orgasm represents the moment of total immersion and surrender that Sergius strives for, while jouissance captures the complex, sometimes contradictory nature of this pursuit—its mixture of pleasure, pain, liberation, and loss of control.

A Touch of the Cosmos

In 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 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 has a touch of 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 sublimated 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:

“ 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. ”

Mailer’s experiments were risky, but his visions seem revelatory to the writer that Mailer becomes: “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 imply a divine or profound insight into the human condition and become personal, spiritual, and prophetic for Mailer. In addition, apocalypse also refers to revelations that concern the catastrophic or transformative end of the current world order, suggesting a new insight and outlook on life. In this sense, 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.

As I write about elsewhere, a critical aspect of Mailer’s project is in facing the unpredictability of experience. Life presents daily battles, and it’s through one’s ability to confront these battles that leads to authentic living. By living dangerously and confronting existential situations, Mailer’s protagonists attempt to define their identities. In Norman Mailer: A Double Life, J. Michael Lennon identifies Nietzsche’s exhortation to “live dangerously” as a key influence on Mailer’s philosophy, particularly as it appears in Mailer’s conception of honor and American existentialism. Nietzsche’s call to face danger and embrace uncertainty resonates with Mailer’s view that true fulfillment comes from confronting life’s inherent risks. This notion underpins Mailer’s idea of “honor” as the courage to face challenges directly and accept whatever outcomes may arise. In “The White Negro,” Mailer’s hipster embodies this existential stance, embarking on a perilous journey into self-discovery that involves defying societal norms. Mailer suggests that the hipster’s life is marked by an uncharted quest where the results are both serious and unpredictable. In his essay “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer further describes the existential situation as one where an individual faces significant events with unknown outcomes, reinforcing the idea that living dangerously is about defining oneself against external pressures. This struggle shapes the protagonist’s identity, highlighting the transformative power of confronting the unknown.

The pinnacle, or perhaps nadir from an H perspective, of sociostatis begins “The White Negro”: state-sanctioned violence of the concentration camps and the atom bomb that wreak a “psychic havoc” and could render both death and life meaningless. Out of this intolerable oppression, Mailer posits his rebel genius: the philosophical psychopath, the American existentialist, the Hipster, takes his cue from the African American who “has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries” and has the courage to speak with his own voice against “a slow death by conformity.” To combat the social malaise, the Hipster discovered that 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 that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. ”

The Hipster eschews the contemporary world of pop-culture analysis and neo-liberal conformity and seeks the “art of the primitive . . . in the enormous present” by “relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body”: “the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm.” The Hipster’s world is the jungle of contemporary life, and he embraces subversiveness and violence “to remain in life only by engaging death” all while seeking “an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it.” This “apocalyptic orgasm” is the Hipster’s gold, his fountain of youth, and “the oldest dream of power.” Yet it is elusive, since he must act in the drama of the civilized world of progress and setbacks “so that even as he drains his hatred in one act or another, so the conditions of his life create it anew in him.” The struggle is chronic, and little victories also produce defeats.

The apocalyptic orgasm becomes a slippery but key metaphor in Mailer’s thought at this time. It seems to echo another contemporaneous thinker’s own reaction to Western society in the mid-1950s: Jacques Lacan first theorized jouissance in 1953 to simply mean the enjoyment derived from the satisfaction of a bodily need, and later, after 1958, it became increasingly more nuanced, complex, and more closely associated with orgasm and taboo. After 1958, Lacan distinguishes desire (a limited pleasure (plaisir) that could be associated with sociostatis) from jouissance which comes to be associated with transgressing the limits imposed on pleasure into the excessive—the revolting, traumatic, and/or painful. It is an extreme form of pleasure: “ecstatic or orgasmic bliss that transcends or even shatters one’s everyday experience of the world” and touches upon the Real—a realm beyond symbolization and the conscious mind. This is not an isolated pleasure, but one that requires opening up one’s ecstasy to another and potentially losing control of oneself—similar here to what Freud terms lust or libido, and Mailer’s portmanteau lerve, or “life-energy.” For Mailer, lerve is “the determining thing in keeping people alive and functioning despite the heavy psychic armor they carry,” making it of utmost importance in the struggle between sociostatis and homeodynamism. Like jouissance, lerve is driven by external, ecstatic encounters with others that push into the taboo, the verboten, and ultimately allow the subject to grow in a positive way.

Mailer’s apocalyptic orgasm and the psychoanalytic concept of jouissance share intriguing similarities in their exploration of transcendent experiences that push beyond conventional boundaries of pleasure and societal norms. Mailer’s short fiction of this time acts as a fictional search for the White Negro’s apocalyptic orgasm that can defeat, if only temporarily, the sociostatic forces that seek to limit it. Sergius is Mailer’s hipster, perhaps not yet fully realized, who engages in a choreographed bullfight-like dance with Denise.

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