The Beatster, the White Negro, and the Evolution of the Hipster in Fight Club
Keywords:
The White Negro, Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk, hipster and Beat Generation, masculinity and violence, existential anti-heroAbstract
Out of the chaos and destruction of World War II emerged the hipster, a figure variously represented in works such as John Clellon Holmes’, Go, which is about the group of figures at the center of the Beat Generation: Lawrence Lipton’s The Holy Barbarians, a sociological study of the lives of some West Coast hipsters; and Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” (1957), in which he introduced his titular existential anti-hero. The White Negro is a cultural icon who may or may not have existed in reality as Mailer described him: was he a true composite of certain marginalized characters, or was he merely a projection of Mailer’s own racial and sexual fantasies about African-Americans and their relation to white, middle-class intellectuals like himself. The Beatster was a teahead or junkie, jazz musician or aficionado, artist or intellectual, sexual adventurer or deviant, and Buddhist or spiritual seeker, in many ways mirroring Mailer’s hipster but without the violence.
