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 self-ascribed “messiah of the one-night stand,” who prides himself on his sexual prowess and ability to dominate his environment. The story is set in the 1950s in Greenwich Village, an almost surreal bohemian enclave where Sergius navigates the “tenement jungle” and various relationships, 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 a “scientific temperament.” Throughout, Sergius pushes at the boundaries of gratification and aggression in search of the new experience that will significantly alter his understanding of life. In theoretical terms, Sergius seeks the orgiastic, perhaps a similar concept to jouissance, in his quest for the apocalyptic orgasm, or authentic experiences as a way of affirming life in the face of death. For Mailer, the orgiastic and the obscene were ways to get to the truth of human desire hidden beneath social repression and decorum. 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 sexual insights, 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 would not have—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 he 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,” then to “Sup”), is at odds with what he calls homestatis—then later homeodynamism (shorted to “H,” then to “er”)—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 imposes, often violently, upon is members. For Mailer, the H “life-force” becomes integral in opposing the S forces of oppression that seek ultimately to neuter the individual for the sake of social order. Mailer begins to associate the homeodynamic urge with the psychopath’s violent search for the orgiastic as a vital expression of individuality to uncover “the truths of the universe” that “are hidden in all degraded forms.” Mailer views the orgiastic not as a deviant act but as a more authentic reflection of human nature than society’s sanitized version of sexual expression. Mailer turns Freud on his head, making the 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. Steps to achieving 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 the symbolic 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. I see the apocalyptic orgasm as a sort of somatic epiphany, or an insight achieved through the body as distinct from the mind. Epiphany, like apocalypse, comes from the Greek epiphanea, meaning “a manifestation” or “striking appearance” which seems also to link it to revelation. For the ancient Greeks, an epiphany was the appearance of a god who brings an insight or perhaps an experience that takes characters out of time. Unlike a traditional literary epiphany which is more closely associated with reason or a psychological insight, the apocalyptic orgasm comes from the body’s experience or collision with the external world, like Mailer’s car crash, which contains a “touch of the cosmos” and seems to take place in a moment of “exceptional time.” While the apocalyptic orgasm does share some traits with epiphany—like they both contain an insight “out of proportion to the significance or strictly logical relevance of whatever produces it”—the former is inextricably tied to the physical through subversive, violent, or forbidden acts of joiussance, lerve, or the orgiastic. It is a more violent and disruptive experience that is experienced through the body.

Sergius is Mailer’s hipster, perhaps not yet fully realized, who engages in a choreographed bullfight-like dance with Denise.

The Saint, the Bullfighter, and the Lover

Mailer sets up a dichotomy between existential understanding and rational explanation very early in “The Time of Her Time.” Sergius’ world is the one Mailer defines in The White Negro: a place where “psychic havoc” of the hyper-rational and technological have dislodged the moral center and given life over to “conformity and depression.” Thus, Sergius O’Shaughnessy attempts to tame the wilds of Greenwich Village by working outward: first he sets his palatial apartment in order, marking his territory, before setting out on his sexual conquests. He is the new bull in town playing the matador, and the east Village is his pasture.

This matador/bull duality reflects Sergius’ personality: he sees himself as a sexual saint, but he acts more like a self-serving psychopath. Yet, as Mailer reflects, the saint/psychopath are “twins,” as they both act outside of social constraints and operate with an acute awareness of their immediate desires and impulses. While their motives might be different, both the saint and the psychopath represent the homeodynamic impulse, yet the latter’s energy is directed outward, focused on manipulating and exploiting the external world to fulfill his own needs.

In “The Time of Her Time,” Mailer’s first-person narrator is Sergius O’Shaughnessy who lives in Greenwich Village and sees himself as a sexual saint bestowing his erotic gifts on all comers. He teaches bull fighting out of his apartment—but of course he does—and continually puts himself in risky situations. The story is broken into two uneven chapters: the first is in October and has Sergius arriving in the slums of Manhattan’s lower-east side, setting up an apartment, and marking his territory. This short chapter is the prologue that establishes the arena for the Battle Royale with Denise in chapter two. Sergius is a handsome Irishman—a stranger in a strange land of “barbarians” living in a “jungle . . . of old detritus, alluvium and dross.” His apartment is six-stories above the fetid streets, enormous—“over twenty-five hundred feet of living space”—and whitewashed; it has nineteen windows, Sergius remarks three times. Denise is also nineteen-years-old, perhaps foreshadowing that it will be her that allows Sergius to see beyond his carefully constructed, yet ultimately limiting, domicile.

The second is set six months later in the spring and centers around his involvement with Denise Gondelman, a nineteen-year-old student of psychoanalysis. Mailer uses chapter one to set Sergius up as the machoman Hipster before introducing Denise, the character stifled by society and who must be shown her true self, in Sergius’ estimation. In this sense, Mailer is also setting up his audience, members of the same tranquilizing society who have certain expectations from him and his fiction, especially one that so obviously alludes to Hemingway via the bullfighting. Serguis is the stud protagonist, and he must save the repressed and frigid Denise Gondelman by giving her an apocalyptic orgasm. Simple.

Mailer writes this story in first-person, and it probably wouldn’t have worked as well in third. He wants us to sympathize with and support his protagonist, like we are trained to do when reading a first-person narrative. Mailer even devotes two pages early in chapter two to Sergius’ “sexual saint” narrative, and he has us convinced that he treats women well at the same time we see his womanizing: they mean as little to him afterward as a fly drowning in some spilled coffee. His actions tell another story, so Mailer seems to hint that he’s not totally reliable and perhaps a bit of a psychopath.

For example: Sergius calls his penis “the avenger.” It needs to be asked: what is it avenging? Who is getting paid back for what? Interesting, too, that this links sex with the idea of payback for him—a revenge, or getting even. What great wrong does his penis set right? In other words: what egregious trespasses have women done to Sergius that all must be paid back for? Sergous’ misogyny links sex to a potentially violent contest, like a duel, perhaps here like an allegorical one between the champion of Psychoanalysis, Denise, and the Hipster, Sergius. The former seems to be a creature of the mind which stifles her ability to feel and ultimately achieve satisfaction in sex. Sergius, while clever with language, is a man of the senses: a bullfighter, a handsome aficionado, a sexual conquerer. He does what he wants, it seems, but in calculated ways. He understands his environment  and moves in that jungle like a beast born there. In his realm, he is king, and Denise is the other in need of local domestication. In his world, he is the bullfighter, and Denise is the bull to be broken.

However, what Sergius doesn’t seem to see, but what the perspicacious reader might pick up on, is that it’s really Denise who plays the matador, and Sergius the beast. Mailer gives us plenty of textual hints, all revolving around her final pronouncement of Sergius: “your whole life is a lie, and you do nothing but run away from the homosexual that is you.”

There are likely many more examples than I give here, but these stick out to me. Sergius describes Demise in masculine terms, even suggesting that she might be a lesbian; she had an “ugly New York accent,” small breasts, and the “flat thin muscles of a wiry boy.” During their first sexual encounter, she sticks a finger in his posterior, arousing him once again from his refractory period. She runs sexual marathons, seems forever angry, and plays the aggressor: “When I kissed her she answered with a grinding insistence of her mouth upon mine, and a muscular thrust of her tongue into my throat, as direct and unfeminine as the harsh force of her voice.” She shows up on their last night together with short-cropped hair and smelling like her boyfriend. This excites Sergius so much, he ejaculates prematurely.

Sergius and Denise are in a tug-of-war, pushing and pulling each other with their own separate agendas. Sergius’ is predictable: he must prove his virility and superiority by brining Denise to climax, or giving her an apocalyptic orgasm that will open her eyes to his perspective and allow her to dispense with the psychoanalytic nonsense of Dr. Joyce and embrace a more genuine life of the body.

The title of the story seems to refer to Denise’s achieving orgasm: as in it’s about time she did. However, it could also refer to the fact of her victory over Sergius and his realization of it. Indeed, how else can we read the final line: “And like a real killer she did not look back, and was out the door before I could rise and tell her that she was a hero fit for me.” Perhaps it’s less the fact of her win, but more Sergius’ realization of her now heroic status. Indeed, this reflects an earlier sentence where Sergius foreshadows her victory: “this new chick had been a mistake” — a statement made less in the harsh reality of morning, but more upon their later experiences. This is not a defeat for Sergius, but as a new experience that the Hipster constantly craves.

It’s difficult not to (psycho)analyse “The Time of Her Time,” perhaps to Mailer’s amusement. Even if Denise is correct about Sergius, it seems to matter little to Mailer’s Hipster, for he’s always on the search for “new kinds of perception.” Denise’s conclusion about Sergius is only a fact in terms of psychoanalysis, not existentially where those labels remain insignificant. Indeed, Sergius is able to make Denise orgasm — we have to take his word for it — a little victory in his world. She, too, is also able to claim victory in hers. They part with mutual respect (this might be a stretch in Denise’s case). Perhaps Sergius believes his minuet of macho ends with Denise in a draw.

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