Reverse-passing for real and the will to be Savage

McInerney points to extensive play with the word "savage" when he puts it in the title and uses it as the family name of Patrick's friend and alter-ego. Savage takes on a double meaning in the novel: the savage as primitive and the Savage as civilization's elite. The person Will Savage, a member of that elite, seeks the primitive as liberating, the "real"

which opposes the social sham/e. He doubles the savage doubling, confusing savage as a signifier and the separation of the savage and the civilized as opposing concepts. The rest of the Savage family only further blurs the distinction, leaving no justification for their privilege except for their skill at manipulating power according to their will. Will, then, as the name indicates, embodies this will, a capacity he shares with his father to shape the world despite their diametric difference of opinion.

Patrick's closeness to Will arises initially as an attraction to the world of privilege the Savages enjoy. Their tie strengthens as Will subverts Patrick's ideals simply because he can. Patrick, who strains under those ideals, envies that ability. Will comes to represent liberation from his struggle with his bifurcated sham/e. The tragic flaw of the mythic character of Will, however, is that he is just as much a prisoner of the world from which he would liberate himself . He cannot escape the social categories that drive him to seek black music and black women, motivated largely by Mailer's White Negro adoptive reverse-passing ethos. In his efforts to break free of that discursive field, he nearly destroys himself through excessive drugs and sex, developing a strong reliance on Patrick to "play superego" (114). In the end, the interplay of will and the savage arouses the suspicion that his faux negritude may be just a guise for the fact that he has become like his father, part of a shadowy world of power and manipulation. Negritude may even be the new face of that world, the "new colors" of reverse-passing.

Will exists in the narrative through Patrick's point of view, so his role in the novel is characterized by Patrick's own paradoxical sham/e concerns of becoming white and liberating himself his not-quite-whiteness. Will himself embodies a dual whiteness, as his first appearance in the novel, a flashback of Patrick's, indicates. Confronted in a hotel in the 1970s by black revolutionaries demanding money for their cause, Will offers to write them a generous check. When they challenge its worth, he responds with icy disdain "exactly like his father – perhaps his great-great-grandfather, the slave owner, who’d killed a man in a duel over an obscure point of honor. He was a hippie one moment and a Savage the next, though of course he was both all along." (10).

As such he also embodies both sides of the "apology" for Patrick's family. When they first meet at school, Will "already was almost everything I wanted to be" (20). A party in the South that Will takes Patrick to recalls the longing: "a luminous white mansion floating on a wide dark lawn, its circular drive an enchanted ring of white Cadillacs, red Mustangs and a matched pair of British racing-green MGs. This looked

remarkably like the world to which I wanted to belong." (46). Patrick also gravitates to Will for his apparent consistency, the opposite of his own socially-determined other- directedness: the bold, ruthless Savage character. At the juke joint where Patrick reverse-passes, he contrasts his weakness of character with Will, "Spending much of his life among black people, he preserved his dignity and possibly his life by never pretending to be anything but a white man. He seemed to belong, but not by virtue of aping the behavior of the local populace, nor of a moist heartiness." (33).

It is through w/Will that the embodiment of Savage privilege becomes a savage attack against that system of privileging at the base of Patrick's sham/e. Will is patently shameless and as such desires as much as possible to tear down the sham of civilization in favor of a new "real" space of transcendent community. While Patrick adopts new colors, Will "was also transforming himself, sloughing off the dry shell of familial expectations." (20). He is the "errant son" who late at night will "defiantly jam the brakes and slam the doors as if to insist they'll never stoop to stealth" (38), quite the opposite of Patrick's career of hiding.

Will transfers his individual anti-authoritarian reflex to a larger social struggle. In his first meeting with Patrick, he pronounces, "Tell you what – I'm gonna design my own crest with the motto, Free the Slaves. And let me tell you, Pat – the slaves are you and me." (15-16). He elaborates later, "The whole shiteree started off with the thieving of the land from its rightful owners. And guys like my father have been perverting the democratic process for years. ... Checks and balances system my ass. It's a cash and carry system." (54). He explains early on his passion for the blues in the same terms:

"Even before civil rights," he told me, "the musicians were breaking down the barriers, secretly integrating the city. I'd hide under the covers in my parents' house in East Memphis and listen to Rufus Thomas on WDIA in Memphis and WLAC out of Nashville and when I was older I'd sneak down to Beale Street with Jessie Petit – our yardman till my old man fired him – we'd split a pint and listen to the rhythm and blues and I'd say to myself, Shit, the segregationists are right – if white folks find out what they're missing they ain't never going to work for the man anymore. That's why the old man sent me here, they wanted to get me away from that Memphis scene. But the shit's out of the box now and it's spread way beyond Memphis." (15)

As a promoter of the blues, his self-reinvention becomes messianic. Already at school, boys reverse-pass through him, forming "the first incarnation of the entourage which became a feature of Will's adult life." They "gathered to listen to Will's records and talk about black music and Indian religion and Beat literature." (85).

His wife Taleesha observes a conflict there: "He can't make up his mind whether he wants to be a preacher or a politician or a rock star." (184). In fact, he is none of

those three things in particular but rather an example of the kind of liberation through music he seeks, living in mythic excess according to his will. The first journalist to interview Patrick about Will, signaling the public interest to follow, was "looking for colorful anecdotes with which to embroider the nascent Savage legend." (4). The interest others have in him is in "the careers he helped to create, the empire he constructed, the millions he accumulated and, in true rock-and-roll fashion, the millions he pissed away." (4). Patrick, however, comes to admire Will because, "The music was not an end in itself but the expression of a deeper program. Will was always trying to free the slaves." (4). That project meets only limited success, perhaps even failure, by the end of the novel, where "he put me in mind of some great Georgian rakehell who discovers to his surprise that he has survived into the Victorian era." (269).

These conflicting sides – politician, preacher, rock star, businessman, visionary, and rakehell – are his problem. They represent social roles that crystallize because those forces he opposes actually determine his forms of social opposition and therefore subvert his resistance. The key to this paradox is that his liberation is based on reverse-passing, the logic of the White Negro, the desire to perform "black" as "real" in order to subvert the structures of whiteness and the unmanly impotence Mailer felt it brought with it. This illustrates three problematic facets of the social project of reverse-passing as described at the beginning of this chapter. First, blackness as a social identity is constructed in conjunction with whiteness and thus requires a rigid form of whiteness in order to oppose it. Second, such a project requires, as the critique of Mailer described in chapter 1 of this study point out, a rigid stereotype of the black for one to imitate. It reinforces stereotypes created in asymmetrical power contexts. Third, this is only a prescription for whites, especially white men who feel emasculated, an ultimately egotistical project that does little to establish new forms of social community. Reinforcing stereotyped blackness as a form of liberation allows for its commodification to feed a market of white men who seek liberation from their fears of being square. Blackness remains a resource for white male wish fulfillment. The different sides of the white male w/Will emerge as this liberation project runs aground on these conflicts.

When Patrick regards Will in that first juke joint scene, he admires him for preserving his whiteness amid a black crowd, but that does not mean there is no reverse- passing. In fact, Will is slumming, that reverse-passing practice of visiting those of a lower class, assuming objects of their stereotyped Other identity to live out fantasies