The story depicts macho Irish Catholic bullfighting instructor Sergius O'Shaugnessy and his sexual conquest of a young, middle-class Jewish college girl, Denise Gondelman.
"[2] In light of this fact, Mailer wrote to Dwight Macdonald, and thirteen other critics, to solicit support for publication in order to avoid prosecution for obscenity.
[1] When Minton published it, "a great many of us, not only writers, but critics as well, novelists collaborated to a degree, in the sense that we were fighting the Philistines who wanted to hold literature back".
[7] The story — set in what could be inspired by the airy Lower East Side loft Mailer rented during a career downturn in the early 1950s[10] — follows Sergius O'Shaugnessy after he has adjusted to life in Greenwich Village and his sexual exploration and conquests there.
[11] Rumor of his sexual prowess and stamina spreads quickly through the Village until he is "scoring three and four times a week, literally combing the pussy out of my hair.
He continues his penchant for the long sentence — developed in Barbary Shore and perfected in later pieces like An American Dream and The Prisoner of Sex — but rather than experimental and ponderous, it's witty and more playful, perhaps reflecting the bravado of its narrator.
"[8] The character of Sergius O'Shaugnessy is Mailer's first active narrator, "a Nordic superman who tackles Denise Gondelman... in a sweaty sexual slugfest, a great sporting bout.
Indeed, Gerald R. Lucas links the Hipster's quest for the "apocalyptic orgasm" in "The White Negro" to Sergius' own sexual romps through the Village, as if the latter seems to be Mailer's literary exemplar of his figuration.
[23] Like the Hipster, Sergius is a larger-than-life figure, at least in his own mind, as he teaches bull fighting in Greenwich Village; Lucas suggests that Mailer is setting up the audience's expectations by giving a Hemingway-like hero that must save the girl from her repressive and numbing psychoanalyzed life.
[23] For Mailer, notes Diana Trilling, the orgasm seems to be the measure of psychic well-being, speaking for its paramount importance in "Time" and its attack on civilizing psychoanalysis.
This leaves both parties battered by the end, and Denise "bound again for the Freudian couch" where she initially learned how to defeat Sergius in the first place.
[23] Sex "takes on the qualities of a championship boxing match, an encounter between a matador and bull or an epic struggle for survival between two savage beasts in a jungle clearing.
Thus Sergius must conquer "the male in her to acquire ("ingest") her desirable masculine qualities ... he needs to reduce her to the status of helpless female."
Here "a man must be a sexual master in order to achieve and maintain social and cultural power," while the admission of femininity, "which O'Shaugnessy equates with homosexuality ... is to lose."