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ABSTRACT
MAILER'S SEARCH FOR A HERO: THE AMERICAN EXISTENTIALIST

By

Morris Wei-hsin Tien

This study examines Norman Mailer's work from The Naked and the

 

933g_(1948) to Of a Fire on the Moon (l970) in an attempt to account
for his search for a hero both in fiction and in reality. Mailer's
persistent quest for a hero mainly derives from his passionately held
conviction that life in America is hopelessly dehumanized by science
and technology. Unless some radical transformation takes place in the
consciousness of our time, it has become increasingly difficult for any
individual to assert his authenticity in life. Mailer insists that
science is insufficient to explain the mystery of life. Each individual
has unlimited possibilities to act out his heroic potential. By
removing all the restraints of a manipulative and totalitarian society,
every individual has the ability to live up to the best that is in him.
The hero that Mailer has finally found in reality and created in fiction
is an American existentialist.

Chapter One examines Mailer's attempt to re—define American heroism
and formulate his own concept of an ideal hero who may rebel against the
tyranny of social conventions and political domination. Chapter Two
traces in what respects the four major EurOpean existentialists--
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre-—have directly influenced
Mailer in the formation of his own existential vision. Although Mailer
has by no means adopted any of their existential systems, their attitudes
toward life, death, and Being have aroused his ardent responses, either

positively or negatively. The willingness of Mailer's hero model, the

hipster, to "accept the terms of death," "exist without roots," and
seek growth through the "unchartered journey with the rebellious im-
peratives of self" all reflects how closely Mailer is related to the
original idea of existentialism developed in EurOpe.

It is in Chapter Four of my study that Mailer's hero, the American
existentialist, makes his first appearance as Marion Faye in The Deer
Bark, In this novel, we find that sex, art and politics are existential-
ly related to unveil the thoughts and actions of the three major
characters, Eitel, Sergius, and Faye, as the three stages of Mailer's
development of a hero: non-hero, hero-in-training, and the hero as
the American existentialist. Mailer believes it is at the very point of
social stagnation that his hero of opposition emerges as a force to
challenge the conventions, norms, mores and the empty rituals of American
contemporary life. In "The White Negro," Mailer conceptualized Faye's
thought and action in the image of the hipster. For Mailer then, the
only "life-giving answer" to the mid-twentieth century condition of
death is embodied in the hipster, the "American existentialist." It
is the hipster rather than the "square” who is able "to live with death
as immediate danger," because the hipster believes that "every man and
woman is moving individually through each moment of life forward into
growth or backward into death."

With the idea of an American existentialist hero image in mind,
Mailer found in the early l960's President Kennedy as close to any to
being the hero that he was searching for. Kennedy's personality and
life style attracted Mailer. He thought Kennedy's administration would
instill a dynamism in American life after fifteen years of political

stasis. But Kennedy's assassination put an end to all Mailer's

practical hopes. Instead, he created Rojack in An American Dream, the

 

hero who was the closest image that Mailer was able to make to resemble
Kennedy in the fictional world.

But upon the appearance of D. J. in Why Are We in Vietnam? Mailer

 

creates an American existentialist, no longer the hipster of opposition,
but a hero who not only fails to make contact with God but also falls
inescapably into evil. D. J. turns out to be a tragi-comic hero of a
kind. He is tragic in the sense that he has deserted Mailer's original
code for growth, and his act of going to Vietnam would lead to his own
destruction. He is comic because his obscene language provokes humor
more often than not.

With D. J. leaving for Vietnam, Rojack exiled to the jungles of
Central America, and the hipster only as model of abstraction, Mailer
has not created another American existentialist hero for ten years in

fiction since the time of Why Are We in Vietnam? (l967). With the

 

deaths of Kennedy and Hemingway, Mailer has not yet found another
public figure whose life style could embody his existentialist thoughts.
In these years, Mailer the existentialist has become more and nore

tied up with Mailer the artist. Instead of looking for a hero in the
outside world, Mailer has been searching for the heroic in himself.

With the ideas and concepts of a mature American existentialist and the
talent and aesthetic energy Of a fully devel0ped writer, Mailer finds
himself more qualified than ever as the hero he has been searching for

more than a decade.

MAILER'S SEARCH FOR A HERO: THE AMERICAN EXISTENTIALIST

By

Morris Wei-hsin Tien

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Program in American Studies, Department of English

T977

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE .............................. ii

I. Introduction: Heroism Re-defined .............. 1

II. European Existentialism Assimilated ............. 21
III. The American Existentialist Hero Searched:

IV.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore .......... 69

 

 

The American Existentialist Hero Emerged:
The Deer Park and Advertisements for Myself ......... 121

 

 

The American Existentialist Hero Found in Reality and
Re-created in Fiction: The Presidential Papers and

 

 

An American Dream. . . ............. . . . . . . 171

The American Existentialist Hero Sought Among Politicians
and Artists but Discovered as a Young Hunter Contaminated:
Cannibals and Christians and Why Are We in Vietnam? ..... 223

 

 

Norman Mailer the American Existentialist as the Hero:
The Armies of the Night and Of a Fire on the Moon ...... 276

 

 

Conclusion: The American Existentialist Hero in Retrospect. 330

BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................ 353

PREFACE

As a student of American culture, I was first drawn to Norman
Mailer by his all-encompassing public personality which has made itself
felt in so many areas of American experience--"the literary world,
politics, filmmaking, prize fighting and street fighting, marital in-
fighting, drinking and partying, debating ardent female liberationists,
and traveling the pervasive airs of TV talk show."

However, as I started reading him seriously, I was convinced that
it is still Mailer's voice, the ideas he expresses in his extraordinary
prose, that makes him more than a famous writer. As Richard Stratton
recently wrote, "A reading of the important literature of this century
would be incomplete without a thorough examination of Mailer's work."
To a foreign student like myself, it is Norman Mailer, even more than
Hemingway or Faulkner, who has led me to the understanding of contem-
porary American culture-~of course, it can still be argued whether my
understanding is in a sense accurate or inaccurate--at a deeper psychic
level and on a broader basis than any other contemporary American
writer is able to. In each of Mailer's books he manages to capture the
mood and sentiment of his time. As Robert Lucid noted, ". . . by T966

and the publication of Cannibals and Christians, Norman Mailer has

 

become the most talked about, the most prominent, in the frankly blatant
sense the most celebrated writer in America."

Most of the major critical writings about Norman Mailer have

ii

enlightened me in my study of him, particularly the recent three book-

length studies--Robert Solotaroff's Down Mailer's Way_(l974), Jean

 

Radford's Norman Mailer: A Critical Study_(l975), and Laura Adams'

 

Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer (l976). Yet, since

 

each of these books has its own angle of approach to Norman Mailer, they
have helped me only to a certain extent. And my purpose in this study
is not to sum up the critical views that have preceded me; but I have
concentrated on Mailer's own work, trying to shore up my arguments with
quotations from his work wherever possible. I have further observed
what Sartre has said, "A fictional technique always relates back to the
novelist's metaphysics. The critic's task is to define the latter
before evaluating the former." In discussing Mailer, I stress the
evolution of his existential thoughts embodied in his characters before
examining his art.

To the following people I would like to express my deep grateful-
ness for their help in my study: Dr. Victor Howard, Dr. Donald F. Koch,
and Dr. Joseph J. Waldmeir. Dr. Howard has taught, encouraged and
aided me throughout my four-year stay at Michigan State University. He
also served as the chairperson of my committee. Together with him were
Dr. Koch and Dr. Waldmeir: They were thorough readers and perceptive
critics, who kept their patience and sense of proportion through their
careful readings of my manuscript. Without their generous assistance
this dissertation could not have been completed in time to meet the
deadline of my Fulbright study grant. I would like to thank them for
their time and close attention to my work.

My heartfelt thanks are also given to two other members of my

committee: Dr. Linda W. Wagner and Dr. Douglas T. Miller. Both of

iii

them have also taught and helped me through my graduate study at MSU.
While it was in Dr. Wagner's class that I was introduced to a serious
reading of William Faulkner whose stylistic influence on Mailer I
could easily trace out, it was in Dr. Miller's class that I was first
encouraged to study Mailer as a social critic. I

Next, I would like to thank the Fulbright Foundation in the
Republic of China and the Institute of International Education in the
United States whose financial support of me for four years made pos—
sible the pursuit of my advanced study at Michigan State University.
My academic achievement here will undoubtedly benefit me in my future
teaching career back in Taiwan.

Finally, I owe my wife Su-O the most for whatever worth this
study has. For the past four years, she bore the daily struggles, not
only as wife, graduate student, and mother to our children, but as

critic, collaborator, and upholder of spirit.

iv

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction: Heroism Re-defined

From his immediate success in l948 with The Naked and the Dead to

 

the appearance of Of a Fire on the Moon (l970), Norman Mailer has been

 

unswervingly concerned with the existence of an individual in the
cultural milieu of America. As the modern technology and the various
forms of totalitarianism are hand in hand developed in American society,
Mailer sees that the authentic life for an individual becomes increas-
ingly difficult. Both as an American novelist and social critic Mailer
assumes the mission of finding or creating a hero for the second half
of the twentieth-century America, a hero with the potentiality to ‘
alter the course of American society before the total destruction of
Americans in particular, and mankind in general, begins. As Emerson
said, “The true work of genius should proceed out of the wants and
deeds of the age as well as the writer."1 It is Norman Mailer, I
believe, who fulfills Emerson's requirement in the twentieth century,
for "more than any other American writer, Norman Mailer. . . appears

as the chief representative of the age."2 And furthermore, more than
any other novelist of the contemporary age, Mailer, as noted by
Theodore L. Gross, "has been spcifically concerned with the authority
of institutionalized life in America, with what he characterizes as

the totalitarianism of America."3

2

Since the Second World War, Mailer sees Western man as having
been witness to the proceSs of dehumanization in all phases of cul-
ture and of social life. In the second half of our century, rocketing
through space and on the point of conquering the whole universe, man
is even, however, more rapidly losing touch with his world than before.
Scientific and technological revolutions, and unparalleled economic
growth have not eliminated all the human miseries, nor have they al-
leviated man's struggles for freedom. As Mary Josephson has put it,
"Powerless in the face of modern mechanical and social forces, we
have reached a point in history where knowledge and tools intended
originally to serve man now threaten to destroy him.“4 The machine
has obviously dehumanized human life more severely than one might
expect. "Man, desiring no longer to be the image of God, becomes the

"5

image of machine. Illustrations of this idea can be found almost

everywhere in our daily life. The New York Times of OCT. 22, l972:

 

The impact of the computer is felt in virtually every
corner of American life, from the ghetto to the moon.

And data-processing is the world's fastest growing major
business; sometime during the next decade, it is expected
to become the world's largest industry.

Therefore, even more so in the second half of our century
"Western man has become mechanized, routinized, made comfortable as

an object; but in the profound sense diSplaced and thrown off as a

 

subjective creator (Italics, mine)."6 And what Nicolas Berdyaev said

 

more than forty years ago is still true today, perhaps even more true
than at that time:

Man has ceased to be the supreme value: he has ceased to
have any value at all. . . Man is subject either to cosmic
forces or to technical civilization. It is not enough to
say that he subjects himself: he is dissolved and disap-
pears either in cosmic life or else in almighty technics;

3

he takes upon himself the image, either of nature or of
the machine. But in either case he loses his own image
and is dissolved into his component elements. Man as a
whole being, as a creature centered within himself, .
disappears. . . there remains only certain of his functions.
This dissolution of man into certain functions is the
product, first of all of technical civilization. The pro-
cess of dehumanization attains its climax in the technique
of modern war, where human bravery is no longer necessary.
Technical civilization demands that man shall fulfill one
or another of his functions, but it does not want to reckon
with man himself--it knows only his functions.

The idea that man has lost all his authentic individuality and
been rendered powerless and at most is able to fulfill only one func-
tion or another at a time can certainly be further substantiated by
many recent writings in various fields. But just a few examples will
be sufficient to demonstrate the situations in the l960's and l970's.

Herbert Marcuse in two of his books, An Essay on Liberation (l968) and

 

One Dimensional Man (l969), sees the contemporary era as dominated by

 

highly industrialized, bureaucratized societies in which human nature
is twisted and destroyed by the structures it encounters.‘ He describes
the United States, with its capitalist ethos, as the leading example
of the prevailing mode. One example he gives is that in industrial
society, man is constantly bombarded with messages concerning commodi-
ties and gadgets connected to accumulative and violent life styles.
The media also manipulate political judgments, presenting alternatives
such as socialism as beyond the pale. The cumulative effect of train-
ing and media manipulation is so great that it not only affects
attitudes, but structures the physical needs of men. "The people
recognize themselves in their commodities, they find their soul in
their automobiles, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.“8

Man has been transformed into "one dimensional man" in whom "the inner

4

dimension of the mind in which Opposition to the status quo can take
root is whittled down," in whom the power of critical thinking is
absent.9

With the power of critical thinking being stripped off, men are
"other-directedf rather than "inner—directed." In David Riesman's
terms they are attempting to determine what is appropriate as defined
by the status definition and rules provided by those around them rather
than by having any inner imperatives or principles to determine their
behavior. Thus their presentation of self is geared to others rather
than to the Self principles. They have limited if any interior defini-
tion for their behavior which is thus dominated by image or status
requirements set by the surrounding society. Finally, the whole
society is transformed into a mass society which respects "model
citizens" or "model students" but shows hostility toward those who
act out of their spontaneity.

C. Wright Mills presents a view of society that, in general, is
similar to that of Marcuse. His work, however, focuses more specifi-
cally and in more detail upon social institutions and is more expli-
citly political. Mills sees that the United States has been transformed
into what he termed a "mass society," one in which masses of individuals
are manipulated by remote rulers and lose any potential for democratic
direction of important social institutions. Thus the great mass be-
comes politically powerless. This point has been fully proved and
enthusiastically justified by a more recent work entitled Political

Alienation in Contemporary America (l975). As Robert S. Gilmour and

 

Robert B. Lamb indicate in the first chapter of their book:

5

In this book we define political disillusionment and

alienation as the combination of several distinct feelings:
distrust of government and politicians, a sense of the
meaninglessness of electoral politics and political choices .
and personal powerlesSness to influence or change the

course of American poTitical life. Disillusionment with
government might begin with any one of these feelings, but
thoroughgoing alienation--the end of faith in the practice

0; American politics--we contend, is a combination of all

t ree.

 

 

Before the book was written, these political scientists made
hundreds and hundreds of interviews throughout the United States,
espeéially about the middle and working classes. A sense of meaning-
lessness in choice between poor candidates and outmoded parties was
echoed wherever they went. "It dOesn't matter which way you vote;
they are all the same, talk the same, promise the same. But all out
for themselves, that's all," was a Boston doorman's way of summing up
this meaninglessness of choice.11 A sense of powerlessness to make any
political impact or to make needed changes of direction was another
repeated theme. "I am powerless to influence any political vote, any
political decision, or any politician," a New Jersey housewife explained.
"There's no relation between my vote and what any politician does," a
New York City cabdriver Said. "It's like worshipping a pagan god,
'cause once you vote for them they never again have any contact with
you," a heavy-equipment Operator in Iowa summed up all these feelings.12
Of course, it was the Watergate scandals, the numerous indictments and
convictions, and the investigation and the subsequent resignations of
Vice President Spiro Agnew and President Richard Nixon that are the
cause of the widespread sense of distrust. All in all, disillusionment
and political alienation, according to Robert Gilmour and Robert Lamb,

have now become well rooted in the public mind of America.

6

What has been perceived and attacked by Norman Mailer about the
social ills and the plight of individuality of the contemporary
America is therefore not merely visionary but based on the actual feel—
ings of his fellow Americans. Mailer also asserts that the America of
the Fifties was a period of "dull anxiety," in which "one is more like-
ly to look for security than a dramatic confrontation."13 Eisenhower's
"new conservatism" shifted the public mood of the country to the
defensive side. The whole country was divided by “the unspoken war. . .
between the city and the small town:

the city which is dynamic, orgiastic, unsettling, eXplosive

and accelerating to the psyche; the small town which is rooted

narrow, cautious and planted in the life-logic of the family.1d
Eisenhower only satisfied "half the needs of the nation,

the needs of the timid, the petrified, the sanctimonious,

and the sluggish. What was even worse, he did not divide

the nation as a hero might (with a dramatic dialogue as the

result); he merely excluded one part of the nation from the

other. The result was an alienation of the best minds and

bravest impulses from the faltering history which was made.15

When it came to the Sixties, the American society stifled man "not
in the brutal straightforward manner that primitive capitalism or
fascism did, not by violence, but by subtler almost untraceable pro-
cesses involving the cultural apparatus and institutions of advertising."
Within this period, Mailer focused his attention on one target--"totali-
tarianism"--which penetrated the whole society and contaminated the
American culture. By "totalitarianism" Mailer means more than the
merely political system of an authoritarian government. "Totalitarian-
ism" includes any means which, physically or mentally, dominate or

manipulate an individual's life style. In this broad sense, Mailer saw

that it was totalitarianism that broke upon the incompatible military

7
force of Russia and America. And it was totalitarianism that altered
America "from a nation of venture, exploitation, bigotry, initiative,
strife, social justice and social injustice, into a vast central swamp
of tasteless, toneless authority whose dependable heroes were drawn
from FBI men, doctors, television entertainers, corporation executives,
and athletes who could c00perate with public-relations men."16 Mailer
also believed that totalitarianism appeared first in Nazi Germany as
"a political juggernaut" and in the Soviet Union as "a psychosis in
ideology." But totalitarianism has slipped into America with no
specific political face. "There are liberals who are totalitarian,
and conservatives, radicals, rightists, fanatics, hordes of the well-
adjusted." And

totalitarianism has come to America with no concentration
camps and no need for them, no political parties and no desire
for new parties, no, totalitarianism has slipped into the body
cells and psyche of each of us. It has been tranSported,
modified, codified, and inserted into each of us by way of
the popular arts, the social crafts, the political crafts,
and the corporate techniques. It sits in the image of the
commercials on television which use phallic and vaginal
symbols to sell products which are otherwise useless for

sex, it is heard in the jargon of educators, in the synthe-
tic continuums of prose with which public-relations men learn
to enclose the sense and smell of an event, it resides in

the taste of frozen food, the pharmaceutical odor of tran-
quilizers, the planned obsolescence of automobiles, the lack
of workmanship in the mass, it lives in the boredom of a

good mind, in the sexual excess of lovers who love each
other into apathy, it is the livid passion which takes us

to sleeping pills, the mechanical action in every household
appliance which breaks too often, it vibrates in the sound
of an air conditioner or the flicker of fluorescent lighting.
And it proliferates in that new architecture which rests

like an incubus upon the American landscape, that new
architecture which cannot be called modern because it is

not architecture but Opposed to architecture.

Mailer continues, "The essence of totalitarianism is that it beheads.

It beheads individuality, variety, dissent, extreme possibility,

8

romantic faith, it blinds vision, deadens instinct, it obliterates the
past."17 Thus, to Mailer, the plague in America is the insidious and
cancerous growth of totalitarianism, the destruction of the individual
consciousness, and the evolution of a mass man without personal distinc-
tion. Most contemporary Americans, Mailer assures, have been suffering
from this plague and have as a consequence been deprived of their
existential authenticity.

After stating all the soCial ills and various pathological forms
that the American institutionalized life has contracted, Mailer feels
strongly that the alternative that modern Americans are faced with is
precisely what F. H. Heinemann thinks that modern Western man is con-
fronting:

The alternative . . . is: either atrophy of our brain power;

degeneration of man; decline of His intellectual and spiri-

tual activities which become more and more mechanical; and

in the end slavery in new totalitarian regimes with over-

centralized control; gr_a spiritual revolution; an awakening

of man to the fact that he, after all, is a spiritual being

with inexhaustible spiritual powers; and a stern determination

to defend his liberty and to subordinate the so-called pro-

gress of science and technology to moral and spiritual ends

of humanity within a democratic order.

What reflects more of Mailer's intention of creating a hero to cope with

"totalitarianism" in America is Heinemann's one statement after this

either-or alternative: "Courage, faith, and heroic defiance may be the

 

only means for mastering a dangerous development which we are unable to

 

stgp_(ltalics, mine)."18 There can be no doubt that in his considering
the heroic qualities Mailer has seriously contemplated the ideas of
courage, faith, heroic defiance as means, though not the only means, to
cope with many a dangerous situation. The subsequent chapters of this

study will show how Mailer has converted these ideas into his code for

9

his hero to act upon. But it suffices to say that Mailer at this point
declares that "America's need in these years [the Fifties and the Six-
ties] was to take an existential turn."19 And he further points out,.
"It was a hero America needed, a hero central to his time." The reason
for his insistence on finding or creating a hero is that "At the bottom
the concept of the hero is antagonistic to impersonal social progress,
to the belief that social ills can be solved by social legislating, for
it sees a country as all-but—trapped in its character until it has a
hero who reveals the character of the country to itself."20

With his recognition of the importance of finding or creating a
new hero who might be allowed every possibility to act against the
plagued America, Mailer tries to formulate the basic assumptions of his
new hero. From the outset, however, Mailer eliminates all the stereo-
types of heroes. For instance, this new hero should not be allowed to
represent the major themes of his ethos, because this would mean that
the hero conforms to the norms of his society and therefore he would
feel at home with the "plague." Instead of reacting against the plague,
a hero of this kind would merely be a conformist. Nor has Mailer in-
tended to create heroes "by making them gods and eliminating through
reductive generalization the very things which make them distinctive."
William H. Gilman further explains what he means by "reductive general-
ization":

The habit of generalizing, or mythologizing, has given us

concepts of the hero in which the status is accorded by

mere label. "Natty Bumppo is a saint with a gun." Ahab

is Prometheus--or rather, a "false Prometheus." Joe

Christmas is Jesus Christ--and so is Stephen Crane's Jim

Conklin, and Billy Budd, and the old man of the sea, and
Faulkner's 33-year-old idiot Benji--they are all Christ.21

IO

Mailer has never attempted to create a hero with a fixed label. Al-
though his heroes, such as Marion Faye, John F. Kennedy, Rojack, or
D. J., do have similarities, but they are not identical in any sense..
A mythical figure like the Adamic man, who is said to be Nthe
hero of American fiction generally," and whose success consists in
non-involvement instead of involvement with his society, will not be
a hero for Mailer, either. Mailer wants to create a hero who might be
defined as "an embattled cultural hero." "Cultural forms or institu—
tions appear to him insofar as they perpetuate human energies that
contemporary life tends otherwise to suppress."22 He might psycholog-
ically divorce himself from society, to exist without roots, but
physically he is deeply involved in action and process, and is con-
fronted by the immediate dangers of physical violence and death.
Certainly Mailer does not want to mold his hero in the image of
another, such as Ahab resembles Prometheus, Joe Christmas, Jesus Christ,
or Melville's Pierre "is Oedipus-Romeo-Hamlet—Memnon-Christ-Ishmael-
Orestes-Timon-Satan-Cain-Manfred."23 Mailer believes that Gilman has
conVincingly argued, "A man, a hero, is distinguished first of all by
being himself, not be resemblances he may bear to somebody else. The
hero virtually disappears when he merely becomes the first factor in
a simple equation of which the second factor is a universal figure."24
Mailer likes his hero to be Kierkegaard's "that individual," "to be
alive, to be the whole man alive," like no one else and to be a hero
who is able to make "a revolution in the consciousness of our time."25

He will be a hero who refuses to capitulate to the repressive dehuman-

izing death-force of a "totalitarian" society.

11

Believing that each age creates its own heroes and defines its
own ideas of what the heroic actually is, Mailer has never considered
a kind of hero with one outstanding quality of a different century, .
such as an intellectual hero like Emerson's American.Scholar, an
ethical hero like Hawthorne's Arthur Dimmesdale, or a Southern
Gentleman who functions as a kind of social hero of the nineteenth
century. Of the first half of the twentieth century, the Hemingway
hero is perhaps closest to the type that Mailer intends to create for

his own time. Both the Hemingway hero and the Mailer hero-to-be would

like to observe what Hemingway said in The Sun Also Rises, "I did not

 

care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in
it."26 Both the Hemingway hero and the Mailer hero-to-be have a dis-
trust of civilization and are determined to face the central conflict
between human possibility and institutional power, between hOpe and
despair, between idealism and authority. Self-reliance assumes the
practical function of self-survival. However, the similarities end
here. The differences between Hemingway and Mailer are down deep and
even more lasting. "The time may have gone too much out of joint to
include Hemingway and Mailer in the same slice of literary history
. .u27

According to Donald Kaufmann, the "generation gap" between
Hemingway's best years and the first twenty years of Mailer's literary
life Iboks like a chasm. It is because "The radical transfiguration
of American life and letters in the l950's and '60's has pushed

Hemingway and Mailer into separate spheres of no-man's lands.

12

In the Hemingway canon, a thin slice of experience repeats

itself. Heroes look and sound alike. A code emerges with

an inner order. . . . The Hemingway hero enters as a fix-

ture. His face fits the contour of a generation more letdown .

than lost. He is masculinity plus with a next-door name.

He sports a big wound (scarring body and soul) but puts down

any self-pity. With heavyweight thought in hock, he leads

with his body, seeks out a life of sensation with much

courage and coolness until hedonism turns into his religion.

If Nada still bothers, the hero counters with an ironic lip

and enough cosmic stoicism to insure belief in selfhood.

Such a life style clings to the Hemingway hero with little

variation--Nick Adams, Jake Barnes, Frederic Henry, Robert

Jordan, and others all resembling the same Papa with the

same message. The code to be emulated enables an individual

to erect a no-man's land between himself and the Establish-

ment.28
Although I cannot agree with Kaufmann on his commentary on the Mailer
hero, I think that his description of the Hemingway hero is precise
and can be generally accepted. But Mailer's America is cancerous, too
sick to justify Hemingway's heroism. Mailer simply cannot let his hero
escape to "a no-man's land" and abide by the code of "grace under
pressure." On the contrary, he must be social and be involved in
action. In the pursuit of his ends he shows unusual intensity of
thought and feeling. As Mailer has not found a hero of this kind, in
his early novels he creates non-heroes, or heroes-in-training, but
not the Hemingway code heroes. The code hero can no longer reflect
one's struggles with the authority of America seen in all its ugly
manifestations.

Because of the ugly manifestations in every corner of American
society, many contemporary writers tend to create the hero of the
absurd. The absurdist vision may be defined as the belief that "we
are trapped in a meaningless universe and that neither God nor man,
theology nor philOSOphy, can make sense of the human condition."29

For instance, in Saul Bellow's writing the absurd hero seeks freedom

13

from a purposeless suffering in his desire to achieve human dignity,

a measure of affirmation. As Bellow has said of himself, "I seem to
have asked in my books, How can one resist the controls of this vast .
society without turning into a nihilist, avoiding the absurdity of
empty rebellion? I have asked, Are there other, more good-natured
forms of resistance and free choice?"30 From the heroes he has
created, we may understand that his own answer is obviously negative.
David D. Galloway interprets Bellow's absurd heroes as picaroes, wan-

dering aimlessly, meaninglessly in the world. He finds that there is

a striking similarity between Bellow's Dangling Man and Camus's Ihg_

 

Stranger. "Both Dangling_Man and The Stranger describe the absurd

 

 

experiences seem to fit no logical pattern: they are simply there, and

their presence announces itself with the same apparent lack of reason

to both reader and participant."31
Bellow's later masterpiece, ngggg, in some respects, resembles

his Dangling Man. The absurd hero Herzog reminds one of Joseph's

 

digressive journal and his long dialogue with himself. But Herzog is

a wanderer in the mind as well as heart. His actual travels to Europe,
the abortive trips to Martha's Vineyard and'Chicago, the retreat to

the ruined house in the Berkshire--these are sharply detailed and mem-
orable episodes, but the real pilgrimage is internalized. His
absurdity results from the fact that he must learn to live with
reality without sacrificing heart, without crippling the "vital part,"
without denying "Spirit; courage, center." However, only contact and
engagement can keep the law of the heart alive; only brotherhood can
legitimate feeling. In a world dominated by "actors" who depress and

exploit and distort this law, such an intention is purely absurd.

14
Mailer's own criticism of Herzog is exceedingly severe but penetrating
at the same time:

Not one of the critics who adored the book would ever have
permitted Herzog to remain an hour in his house. For Herzog
was defeated, Herzog was an unoriginal man, Herzog was a
fool--not an attractive God-anointed fool like Gimpel the fool,
his direct progenitor, but a sodden fool, over-educated and
inept, unable to fight, able to love only when love presented
itself as a gift. Herzog was intellectual but not bright,

his ideas not original, his style as it appeared in his letters
unendurable--it had exactly the leaden-footed sense of phrase
which men laden with anxiety and near to going mad put into
their communications. Herzog was hopeless. We learned nothing
about society from him, not even anything about his life.

And he is the only figure in the book. His wives, his mis-
tress, his family, his children, his friends, even the man

who cukolds him are seen on the periphery of a dimming vision.
Like all men near to being mad, his attention is within, but
the inner attention is without genius. Herzog is dull, he

is unendurably dull--he is like all those bright pedagogical
types who have a cavity at the center of their brain. 2

.Mailer's criticism of Herzog is not without reference to his
own ideas as to what a Mailer hero ought to be. Mailer would by no
means attempt to create a hero Who is "defeated," "hopeless," and
"unendurably dull." The Mailer hero is to be defined as someone to
be emulated in terms of cultural survival. Unlike Herzog, the Mailer
hero, to exist without roots, will "set out on the uncharted journey
into the rebellious imperatives of the self."33 He is convinced that
every man is absolutely free and potentially extraordinary. He is
free to cope with chaos, evil, and the grim reality without appealing
to any kind of transcendent view of man's fate. The world could be
oppressive, sickeningly absurd, and meaningless. It is in such a
world that man must create his own purpose and meaning by the sum total
of his free acts. Thus heroism can be redefined, but not in the
traditional sense of creating an ethical hero, nor in the modern

popular sense of creating an absurd hero, but in Mailer's American

15

existentialist sense of creating a value-asserting hero.

Nevertheless, although Mailer's heroism is not.to.be defined
by the traditional sense of romanticism, nor by the modern pOpular
sense of absurdity, his very act of searching for a hero still
relates him to America's hero-worshipping tradition. And his very
belief that the national character is to be reflected in the character
of its hero is still romantic in a sense. It is in this sense that
Mailer has not entirely separated himself from the American tradition.
It is in this sense that in whatever doctrine or metaphysical system
he is going to develop in the future its American qualities will be
exhibited at the same time. These and more American qualities are
revealed in this paragraph:

Nowhere, as in America, however, was this fall from in-
dividual man to mass felt so acutely, for America was

at once the first and mast prolific creator of mass com-
munications, and the most rootless of countries, since
almost no American could lay claim to the line of a family
which had not once at least severed its roots by migrating
here. But, if rootless, it was then the most vulnerable
of countries to its own homogenization. Yet America was
also the country in which the dynamic myth of Renaissance--
that every man was potentially extraordinary--knew its
most passionate persistence. Simply, America was the land
where people still believed in heroes: George Washington;
Billy the Kid; Lincoln, Jefferson; Mark Twain, Jack London,
Hemingway; Joe Louis, Dempsey, Gentleman Jim; America
believed in athletes, rumrunners, aviator; even lovers,

by the time Valentino died. It was a country which had
grown by the leap of one hero past another--is there a
country in all of our ground which does not have its
legendary figure? And when the West was filled, the ex-
pansion turned inward, became part of an agitated, over-
excited, superheated dream life. The film studios threw
up their searchlights as the frontier was finally sealed,
and the romantic possibilities Of the old conquest of

land turned into a vertical myth, trapped within the skull,
of a neo-renaissance man, be it Barrymore, Cagney, Flynn,
Bogart, Brando or Sinatra, but it was almost as if there
was no peace unless one could fight well, kill well (if
always with honor), love well and love many, be cool, be
daring, be dashing, be wild, be wily, be resourceful, be

a brave gun. And this myth, that each of us was born to

16

be free, to wander, to have adventure and to grow on the
waves of the violent, the perfumed, and the unexpected,

had a force which could not be tamed no matter how the na-
tion's regulators--politicians, medicos, policemen, .
professors, priests, rabbis, ministers, ideologues, psycho-
analysis, builders, executives and endless communicators--
would brick-in the modern life with hygiene upon sanity,
and middle-brow homily over platitude; the myth would not
die. Indeed a quarter of the nation's business must have
depended upon its existence.’ But it stayed alive for more
than that--it was as if the message in the labyrinth of

the genes would insist that violence was locked with cre-
ativity, and adventure was the secret of love.34

 

The chief significance of this quotation lies in the expression
of Mailer's own understanding, or interpretation, of America's hero-
worship and its heroism. Built by rootless peOple drawn from every
part of the world, America has nothing to believe in but heroism. The
concept of heroism is based on the fundamental assumption that "every
man was potentially extraordinary." So heroes may be discovered in
all walks of life: from politicians to moVie stars. Americans also
have a strong belief in athletes whose physical strength illustrates
the-fact that "violence was locked with creativity." No matter how
the dogmatists or doctrinaires try to suppress America's spontaneous
voicing of its "dynamic myth"--hero-worshipping--it will stay alive
with its people because of their "passionate persistence."

By its tone and language, this paragraph implies that the con-
flict between the traditional individualism and modern mass culture
lies at the center of American society. Mailer's own hero-search has
its historical significance. In the process of totalitarian control,
a rootless country like America may collapse at any moment. But what
may still hold it together as a whole is its deep conviction of the
individual potentiality and great reSpect for the heroic. The ideas

of hero and heroism may change in accordance with time, but the

17

conviction itself is too deep-rooted to be eradicated by any means of
the modern institutionalized life. A hero of the present age must
"fight well, kill well, love well," and "be cool, be daring, be '
dashing, be wild, be wily, be resourceful, be a brave gun." Only a
hero of this kind may avert the leveling tendencies of the authoritar-
ian system and break the stagnation of all possibilities for
individuals. Mailer calls this the "existential mobilization," which
will awake the nation to its creative spirit.

After formulating the general concepts of a hero for his own time
and redefining the meaning of heroism, Mailer starts searching for a
rebirth of heroism everywhere--in the American Negro, in President
Kennedy, in the younger generation, in the American writer, in the
Hollywood direCtor, in the architect and athlete and artist and lover,
finally in himself. The real hero that Mailer has found has emerged
as an American existentialist.

The Mailer hero possesses not only the qualities inherited from
the American tradition, as has been analyzed so far, but also the ,
existential qualities derived from European existentialism. As this
study will demonstrate, there can be no doubt that in the development
of his literary career Mailer has become increasingly indebted to the
continental existentialist thought for the central themes in his novels
and prose writings. But most Mailer critics, while belittling this
indebtedness, emphasize more often than not Mailer's American heritage
and his originality as a social critic, or a prOphet, or even a
moralist. Even up to the time of writing this study, not a single
essay of well-balanced view on Mailer's hero—~the American existential-

ist-~has been offered. As will be prOposed, it is due to Mailer's

18
discovery that because existential medicine is the only kind of medicine
which is able to cure the worsening plague in America that he con-
sequently conceptualizes his ideas of a present-age hero as an American
existentialist. It may still be open to question whether the Mailer
heroes have ultimately achieved the purpose-¥"making a revolution
in the consciousness of our time"--that Mailer has set fOr them; but
they are unquestionably a group of memorable American existentialists
who have consciously demonstrated their "courage, faith, and heroic
defiance" in acting against the "impersonal social progress“ of

America.

9.
10.

11.
12.
13.

14.
15.

16.

17.

Notes to Chapter One
J

Quoted by F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and
Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1941), p. 16.

 

 

Ihab Hassan, Contemporary American Literature, 1945-1972: An
Introduction (New York: Frederick Unger Publishing Co., 1973),
p. 31.

 

 

Theodore L. Gross, The Heroic Ideal in American Literature (New
York: The Free Press, 1971), p. 272.

 

Mary Josephson,_ed., Man Alone: Alienation in Modern Society (New
York: A Laurel Edition,Tl973), p. 9. TE

 

Nicolas Berdyaev, The Fate of Man in Modern World (Ann Arbor;
Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1935, 1963), p. 26.

 

Man Alone, p. 10.
The Fate of Man in the Modern World, pp. 25-33.

 

Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969),
p. 9. '

 

Ibid., p. 10.

Robert S. Gilmour and Robert B. Lamb, Political Alienation in
Contemporary America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975), p. 5.

Ibid., p. 4.

 

 

Ibid.

Norman Mailer, The Presidential Papers (New York: Bantam Books,
1964), p. 43.

 

Ibid., p. 43.
Ibid.

Norman Mailer, The Idol and the Octopus (New York: A Dell Book,
1968), p. 119.

Ibid., pp. 199-20.

 

19

18.

19.
20.
21.

22.
23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.
29.

30.

31.

32.

33.
34.

20

F. H. Heinemann, Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (New
York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), p. 29.

 

The Presidential Papers, p. 43.- -

 

Ibid., PP. 41, 42.

William H. Gilman, "The Hero and the Heroic in American Literature:
An Essay in Definition," in Patterns of Commitment in American
Literature, ed., Marston La France (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1967), p. 3.

 

 

Richard Poirier, Mailer (London: William Collins Co., 1972), p. 13.

Richard Chase, Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1949), pp. 45-47.

 

"The Hero and the Heroic in American Literature: An Introduction,"
p. 4.

Advertisements for Myself, p. 15.

 

Quoted by Philip Young, “The Hero and the Code," in Critical
Approaches to American Literature,II, ed., Ray B. Browne and
Martin LightTNew York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1965), p. 275.

 

Donald L. Kaufmann has made an excellent comparison between

Hemingway and Mailer in almost every respect in "The Long Happy
Life of Norman Mailer," Modern Fiction Studies, XVII, 3 (Autumn,
1971), 347-359.

 

Ibid.

Charles B. Harris, Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd
(New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press, 1971), p. 17.

 

Quoted by Theodore L. Gross, The Heroic Ideal in American
Literature, p. 194.

 

David D. Galloway, The Absurd Hero in American Fiction (Austin,
Texas: University of Texas Press, 1966), pp. 82-83.

 

Norman Mailer, Cannibals and Christians (New York: A Dell Book,
1967). pp. 100-101.

 

Advertisements for Myself, p. 313.

 

The Presidential Papers, pp. 39-40.

 

CHAPTER TWO
European Existentialism Assimilated

Like many other existentialist writers of this century, Norman
Mailer only regards himself as an "amateur philoSOpher," but repeatedly
affirms that he is primarily a novelist. Thus, rather than doing any
systematic study of European existentialism, Mailer first came to
existentialism through his personal eXperience: "Willy-nilly I had
had existentialism forced upon me."1 And further, his existentialism
is closely related to his experience as an American. I consider his
version of existential philoSOphy as American existentialism simply
because it must be understood with relation to his Americanness--
specifically his awareness of the American "dynamic myth" and his own
"mysticism of the flesh."2 Mailer believes that man must understand
and cope with the imperatives of the flesh. Unless the individual
begins the search for the self with an inquiry into his psychic and
physical nature, he will simply become a reflection of mass, industrial
society and thereby advance the potential and actual twentieth-century
totalitarianism. Mailer is thus convinced that by understanding his
biological and psychological nature, man can discover both personal
and universal values, leading him to existential philosophy, the
religion of modern man.

In this chapter I would like to concentrate on a few major

European existential philosophers and describe only those ideas of
21

22

theirs which have had both positively and negatively influenced
Mailer in formulating his own eXistential scheme. By "negative
influence“ I mean those existential ideas which are either repudiated.
by Mailer or expanded to a certain extent to meet his own system.

Fundamentally speaking, existentialism is a kind of revalued
attitude toward human existence. One feels himself separated from
the world, from other peOple. In isolation, one feels threatened,
insignificant, meaningless, and in response demands significance. He
may constitute himself as a hero or anti-hero, as a prophet or a
revolutionary. Thus existentialism begins with the expression of this
self-discovery by a few isolated individuals of genius, "who find
themselves cut adrift in the dangerous abyss between . . . the warmth
and comfort of the 'collective idea' and the terror of finding oneself
alone."3 Since these isolated individuals of genius stress so much
the importance of the individual, their writings bear the unmistakable
mark of their own individuality. If it makes sense to Speak at all of
"existential philosophy," it is only because of those shared attitudes
and problems which constitute a distinctive philosophical orientation.

Problems such as freedom, decision, and responsibility are
prominent in all the existentialist philoSOphers. These matters form
the core of personal being. It is the exercise of freedom and the
ability to shape the future that distinguished man from all the other
beings that we know on earth. It is through free and responsible
decisions that man becomes authentically himself. In John Macmurray's
language, the "self as agent" provides the central themes for exis-
tentialism, whereas traditional Western philosophy, especially since

the time of Decartes, has concentrated attention on the "self as

23
subject“--and by Rsubject” is understood as "thinking subject."4

Topics such as finitude, guilt, alienation, despair and death
form another group of existentialist problems. Discussions of these .
concepts have not been prominent in traditional philosophy, yet they
are treated at length among the existentialists, for all of existen-
tialists seem aware of the tragic elements in human existence. Man's
freedom and his quest for authentic personal being meet with resistance
and sometimes with frustration. In any case, as far as the individual
is concerned, existence ends in death. Perhaps the tragic side of
existentialism is already implied in its starting point where human
existence is set over against the inanimate world. For the existential-
ist, man is never just part of the cosmos but always stands to it in a
relationship of tension with possibilities for tragic conflict.

The last problem that occurs in the writings of existentialists
which has been seriously treated is the emotional life of man. This
again is something that has been in the main neglected by philoSOphers
of the past, or else turned over to psychology. But the existentialists
claim that it is precisely through these that we are involved in our
world and can learn some things about it that are inaccessible to a
merely objective beholding. From Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Sartre,
the existentialists have provided brilliant analysis of such feeling
states as anxiety, boredom, nausea, and have sought to show that these
are not without their significance for philoSOphy.

While our attention has been drawn to those problems that have
been commonly treated by existentialists, the divergences among them
are just as striking. Indeed, it would be difficult to find many

thinkers prepared to acknowledge themselves existentialists at all,

24

and those whom we might regard as existentialists in spite of their
protests could certainly not be counted as forming a "school" in the
usual sense. Roger L. Shinn observes, "Almost any self-respecting
existentialist refuses to call himself an existentialist. To say, 'I
am an existentialist,‘ is to say 'I am one of that classification of
people known as existentialists;' whereas the existentialist wants to
say, 'I am myself--and I don't like your classification.”5 What all
this means is that each existentialist demands an individual treatment
if we think that his thoughts do lead us to a better understanding of

human existence.
Soren Kierkegaard

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), referring to himself as "that
individual," is widely held as the father of modern EurOpean existen-
tialism. Like Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, he first diagnosed the
sickness of modern man at a time when most people could not believe
him. Kierkegaard's influence on Mailer is deep and wide; even recently
in an interview Mailer still expressed, "Well, it could be said that
all I'm doing is leading people back to Kierkegaard.

I'd remind you I've written this several times: Kierkegaard
taught us, or tried to teach us, that at that moment we're
feeling most saintly, we may in fact be evil. And that
moment when we think we're most evil and finally corrupt, we
may, in fact, in-the eyes of God, be saintly at that moment.
It's a Dostoevskian, Kierkegaardian notion. Its first value
is that it strips us of that fundamental arrogance of as-
suming that at any given moment any of us have enough
centrality, have a seat from which we can expound our

dogma, or measure our moral value.6

 

It Was certainly against the rationalistic and dogmatic life of his
time Kierkegaard was all fighting. For his whole_life, Kierkegaard

was in revolt against three aspects of his contemporary world: the

25
widely accepted rationalist idealism of the German philosopher, Hegel,
the institutionalization of the Lutheran Church, and the spiritual
shallowness of so-called Christian civilization. Basically, his
criticism of all three factors stems from a single belief, namely,
that each in its own way negated the importance of the individual and
glossed over the necessity for making the authentic choice--God or
the world.

Kierkegaard repudiated Hegel on both philosophical and religious
grounds. Hegel had attempted to explain all history as the result of
the working out in time of the power of World Spirit. This World
Spirit reveals itself in all the events of our daily experience in an
orderly plan. The dialectical process, by which each new phase of
history arises out of the resolution of the tension between every
object and its self-generated opposite (thesis, antithesis, synthesis),
provides for the process of becoming and explains the apparent
dichotomy between the world of spirit and the world of matter. All
of this Hegelian system, Kierkegaard dismissed as pure logic. In
his view, Hegel was trying to explain the world of experience by the
Operation of logic--and logic, said Kierkegaard, never made anything
happen. Nothing happens in the world of man without the presence of
an actual person who wills to do a particular thing. Further, the
Hegelian dialectic reduces man to the role of a mere actor in a drama
which completely transcends his personal experience. As Ernst
Breisach has noted,

The grand design of world history reduces the place of

the individual's existence and actions to that of a grain

of sand in forming a desert. While the grain of sand

certainly makes contribution, it hardly has decisive im-
portance. . . . Man has become the agent of an all-powerful

26

process. The world is the stage, history the drama, man

the actor, and the self-realization of the spirit its final

denouement.7 r

Opposing the pursuit of pure logic and the passion for totality.
which he found in Hegel, Kierkegaard proposed the notion that truth
lies in subjectivity; that true existence is achieved by intensity of
feeling. "In the principle," wrote Kierkegaard, "that subjectivity,
inwardness, is the truth, there is comprehended the Socratic wisdom,
whose everlasting merit it was to have become aware of the essential
significance of existence, of the fact that the knower is an existing
individual."8 Truth thus defined certainly reflects Kierkegaard's
stress on the existing individual. He alone will find truth, whereas
what Kierkegaard calls the objective thinker, disintegrated from his
own personality and purely speculative, will find little more than
pale abstractions. "The thinker who can in all his thinking forget
also to think that he is an existing individual will never explain
life. He merely will attempt to cease to be a human being in order to
become a book, or an objective something which is possible only for a
machine."9 One of his reasons for reformation of the concept of truth
was actually to combat the Hegelian de-emphasis of human responsibility.
Human choice, decision, and action should carry real weight and not
just be means or tricks of reason.

Just as Kierkegaard directed his wit and irony against Hegel's
philosophy, so did he indict the institutionalized Christianity and
the complacency of middle-class materialism. The Church, with its
creeds and dogmas and sacrements, presumed to smooth the path of the
Christian by irationalizing" his beliefs, by making God in some degree

comprehensible to the human mind--whereas in fact there was an impassable

27

gulf between God and his creatures. For Kierkegaard, God is syn-
nOnymous with the principle of eternity, infinity, and the absolute.
Man was created in the image of God. In his freedom he has estrangedf
himself from God. Man above all is a finite and particular being.
Between him and God there is therefore an impassable gulf. The infi-
nite absolute and the finite particular cannot be "united" in any
way. Whether one tries as a mystic to leap over this gulf in moments
of ecstasy or hopes to bridge it by building theological or philoSOph-
ical systems subsuming God and man alike in their paragraphs, the
result will be total failure. As an example, Kierkegaard points to
Hegel, whose attempts to integrate God, man, and religion in general
into a universal system led to the loss of the real importance of all
of them.

If, then,the enormous gulf between God and man is accepted as a
basic fact, what does it mean to live as a Christian? Kierkegaard
approaches this question empirically, i.e., he not merely speculated
but used the total experience of his life to bring forth an answer.

He proceeded in a logically quite consistent way to trace through

the stages of his own life the answer to what it meant to lead a
Christian life. There are three stages he came to distinguish: the
aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. The aesthetic stage of

living shows man deeply involved in the world of immediacy.

Kierkegaard defined what he called the "aesthetic," as a dimension of
existence and an overall design for living, by means of the immediate.
"The aesthetic in a man is that by which he immediately is what he is."10
Like the child, the aestheté we 511 are at one time, he lives in that

moment. He tries always to remain in the moment of pleasure and to

28

forget all continuity and personal involvement in his life. The
aesthete is essentially a driven man, even if he thinks he is pursuing
a life of purpose. He is easily fascinated, but just as easily tires.
of everything. And in this pursuit of the sensuous and the sensual
which is the last essence is a chasing after enjoyment, man is unable
really to communicate because he is solely concerned with himself.
George A. Schrader thought that Mailer's hero, the hipster, corresponds
nicely to Kierkegaard's esthetic hero, the 'sensuous-erotic genius.‘

. the categories are seesentially the same."11 My later analysis
will show that Mailer's American existentialist hero, the hipster, does
not correspond "nicely" to Kierkegaard's esthetic hero, nor do they
belong to the same category. What can only be said is that in formu-
lating his idea of the hipster hero Mailer is undoubtedly influenced
by Kierkegaard's three-stage approach to the study of a real Christian
life. The hipster at most bears some qualities of Kierkegaard's aesthete.
However, the hipster is no more a fixture of the Mailer hero than
Kierkegaard's aesthete is the final stage of a Christian life.

In the ethical stage, man finds himself abandoning the attitude
of the speculator and making commitments. He begins to wrestle with
the concept of responsibility. Kierkegaard's own experience led him
to discussing the ethical stage mainly in terms of marriage. Here a
general code makes demands and man decides to live according to it.

He decides but once, yet the consequences are life-long. However, the
ethical man is infinitely superior to the aesthetic in that he has

the freedom of choice and the sense of concrete selfhood. "The aesthe-
tical in a man is that by which he is immediately what he is; the

ethical is that whereby he becomes what he becomes."12 By giving up

29

the vain endeavor to be himself (aesthetic), a man is first enabled to
become himself (ethical). As Louis Mackey has said, "What exists before
the choice is the self as immediately given. The self that comes to .
be by the choice is the same self lifted from nature to self-
consciousness by means of freedom."13

Nevertheless, ethics is still based on rational considerations.
Universal demands are made in the form of codes which man accepts. He
thus submits to abstractions and abstract bodies like societies. This
submission leads at last to a dead end. The obstacle which prevents
any real further progress in the ethical stage is still the attempted
self sufficiency of man. The way to break out of this containment is
to accept the way to God. In confronting God, man finally recognizes
himself as the unique individual and his unique situation becomes ob-
vious. He experiences lonesomeness, risk, or as Kierkegaard puts it,
fear and trembling. Kierkegaard uses the example of Abraham to illus-
trate the religious stage of living. Abraham puts his living personal
relation to God above all moral laws when after a fierce struggle he
decides to sacrifice his son. Here is the Kierkegaardian "leap" which
projects man into a new stage of being. Abraham did not reason in
syllogism; a momentous decision gave his whole life a new direction.
Not that man has now arrived once for all at an ultimate goal and
possesses it. On the contrary, he has immersed himself in a most
exhausting struggle, the struggle to be worthy. He has accepted not
a doctrine but a new way of life. Summarizing Nstages of life's way,"
Kierkegaard wrote, "While aesthetic existence is essentially enjoyment,
and ethical existence, essentially struggle and victory, religious

existence is essentially suffering."14

30

When Kierkegaard asserts that a religious life is a life of
suffering, he actually means that it is a life of anxiety. If the
individual chooses to base his life totally on the ground of his
relation to God, there are nevertheless no sure signposts, no reli-
gious "categorical imperatives" that will tell him specifically what
he should or should not do. The true Christian's only recourse is
absolute, unquestioning faith in what he believes to be the will of
God. Faith for Kierkegaard is a completely subjective affair, invol-
ving the solitary individual and his God. Neither his family, his
friends, nor his pastor can tell him whether what he proposes to do
is right or help him to achieve the necessary faith to do it. The
final stage is marked by a series of acts of commitment which he
must make in the blindness of absolute trust in God. This is what
Kierkegaard means by the "leap of faith.“ No single act assures the
rightness of any other, and no single act, however crucial for the
individual, can "prove" his faith and release him thereafter from the
anguish of uncertainty in his future decisions. It is this radical
discontinuity of experience that constitutes man's perpetual Christian
opportunity and his continual "crucifixion by faith." While
Kierkegaard demanded the "leap of faith" from a Christian in his life-
time, what Mailer demands from a Christian of his own time is a belief
in the "embattled vision" that God is no longer "all-powerful" but
"exists as a warring element in a divided universe.“15 But the con-
clusion Mailer has arrived at is the same as Kierkegaard's that no
single act can free one from the anguish of uncertainty in his future

decisions. With the exception of some important elements to be added

31
by Nietzsche, Kierkegaard's thought has laid the foundation of modern

existentialism.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Whereas in discussing Nietzsche (1844-1900) Karl Jaspers carefully
catalogues the similarities between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard in his
essay, "Kierkegaard and Nietzsche," Walter Kaufmann stresses that it
is the differences between the two that strike us. Perhaps, the best
balanced observation is from H. J. Blackham:

Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are as divided as the poles and
as close as twins. Nietzsche cast his supreme chOice upon
the finite world Kierkegaard rejected and resigned.
Kierkegaard wrote in flesh and blood his epigram, Nietzsche
his rhapsody. For both, their drama moved its inevitable
catastrophe: Kierkegaard precipitated himself into the
irrevocable either-or of his final unforgivable attack on
the Church, Nietzsche into his dionysian nihilism, his
euphoria and eventual madness. Both are formidable and
command respect. Both Opposed themselves to the culture
of the day and returned to the Greeks. Kierkegaard cast
himself for the role of Socrates for the salvation of the
age; Nietzsche denounced the role of Socrates as the ruin
of the age; both are solitaries, self-driven into desola-
ting isolating. Both are existentialists.16

They are existentialists in the sense that the essence of existential-
ism is not concerned with points of school doctrine but with the
recall of philosophy as to how the existing individual may lead an
authentic life of his own.

Nietzsche preached the danger of nihilism to his contemporaries
and he despaired at their lack of understanding. At times he even
hoped for nihilism to reach its peak so that doubters might at last
recognize its presence. Mailer even pushes "nihilism" further and
sees it with positive function. When silence, exile and cunning can-

not undercut modern civilization's obsession with control, Mailer

32

concludes that "nihilism might be the only answer to totalitarianism."17

Nietzsche diagnosed the disease of nihilism in three specific areas in
the system of his time: science, humanism, and liberalism. The total
scientific endeavor of Nietzsche's time was as deeply penetrated by
the spirit and methods of natural sciences as is ours. Nietzsche
argued that in human sphere there are never the equal conditions which
alone make situations comparable for experiments patterned after those
in the natural sciences. Even the slightest differences are signifi-
cant sources of error. Neither can exact measurements really be made
since man is a part of a whole, the moving and therefore constantly
changing world system. For Nietzsche the scientific world view, pat-
terned after the natural sciences, is only the world view of a special
generation. Contrary to the generally held Opinion, its objectivity
is no greater than that of previous views. Like all of them, it is
based not on facts but on interpretations. Man knows no facts in the
sense Of statements which contain no elements of interpretation. Truth
is always a subjective creation, knowledge always contains evaluation.
The scientific world view is so widely accepted only because of its
usefulness and not because it is the ultimate truth.

However practical this vieWpoint may be, it certainly offers no
final explanation of the world. It does, however, do something else,
something unexpected and unintended. It paves the way for nihilism.
This is because of the tragic fact that the scientific world view
destroys what it considers illusions but is totally unable to fill a

human life with meaning. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche thus

 

wrote:

33

. . science is a hiding_place fOr every kind of coward-
ice, disbelief, remorse, despectio sui, bad conscience--
it is the very anxiety that springs from having no ideal,
the suffering from the lack of a great love, the discontent .
with an enforced moderation. Oh, what does all science not
cover to- -day? How much, at any rate, does it not try to
cover? The diligence of our best scholars, their senseless
industry, their burning the candle of their brain at both
ends--their very mastery of their handiwork--how often is
the real meaning of all that to prevent themselves continu-
ing to see a certain thing? Science as self-anaesthetic:
do you know that?18

 

 

Modern science, like Hegel's world-history, was one of the many
elaborate ways in which the modern individual took refuge from him-
self and sought to lose himself and dodge the decisive struggles
of human destiny. It seems that Mailer's criticism of modern science
is a direct continuation of Nietzsche's. Mailer surely knows "science
as self-anaesthetic," because he notices that "Our scientists are
only experts; those of the last decade are dull in person as experts,
. they write jargon, their minds are narrow before they are deep.
Their knowledge of life is incarcerated."19 And Mailer further
mentions that "Modern science may prove to be the final poisoned fruit
of the rich European tree, and plague may disclose itself as the most
characteristic invention of our time."20
For liberalism with its political ideal of democracy Nietzsche
has two criticisms, one of which even a person who views democracy as
the most practical form of political lifémust heed and the other
related to Nietzsche's own answer to nihilism. The first is directed
against blind relief in inevitable progress, exaggerated expectations
from democracy, and a too simple interpretation of man as good and
liberty-loving. Democracy, however, is not his ideal. As William M.
Salter stated, fHe [Nietzsche] desires a rule of the intelligence

rather than of the many. . . "21 At this point, we find that Mailer

34
is Nietzschean again. Mailer at one point lables himself a "Left

Conservative" and desires to be an aristocrat by birth. In The Armies

 

of the Night, Mailer wants to ask Robert Lowell, who is an aristocrat

 

by birth whereas Mailer must win his aristocracy.
What do you know about getting fact against your will, and
turning into a clown of an arriviste baron when you would
rather be an eagle or a count, or rarest of all, some 22
natural ar1stocrat from these damned democrat1c states.
The phrase "natural aristocrat from these damned democratic states"
suggests that Mailer feels the conflict between the idea of egalitarian-
ism in democracy and the special need for heroism and natural nobility
be specially cares for. Mailer's many statements about the necessity
and possibility of heroism in the modern society show the truth of the
remark for him.
Nietzsche's second criticism of democracy concerns the validity
of the aim of democracy itself, which Nietzsche sees as the happiness
of all or at least of the most. What democracy wants to do is to create
and guarantee independence for asimany as possible--independence of
thought, of manner, of life, and of occupation. To this end, however,
it must make restrictions--must deny the right to vote on the one hand
to the prOpertyless, on the other to the rich. "These are the two
unpermissible classes in the community, for whose removal democracy
must constantly labor, the one because they are without independence,
the other because they threaten it; they and the party system are the
three great foes ofindependence."23 For Mailer, he has doubted from
the very beginning in his career both as a novelist and social critic
that the modern American political system, when develOped to this

stage, has ever guaranteed independence for individuals. He has no

1

35
regard for a political system in which power is diffused among the

bureaucrats in a state in which no one is any longer accountable.
Neither the reactionary Cannibal nor the liberal Christian is capable
of a creative evolution in which man's independence-and dignity are
enhanced.

For Nietzsche, the problem of nihilism arose basically out of
the discovery that "God is dead." And in the absence of God,
Nietzsche saw not an occasion for rejoicing but a terrifying challenge:

God is dead. God remains dead.' And we have killed him. How

shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?

What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has

yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe

this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean our-

selves? What festival of atonement, what sacred games shall

we have to invest? Is not the greatness of this deed too

great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem

worthy of it?24
With God, meaning and value system depart from the world. A situation
arises which threatens human dignity itself. But this also offers the
first and supreme challenge for man to realize himself fully. Because
of this he hopes man will become part of a "Higher History" than all
history hitherto. The crucial point‘ is that in order to overcome the
onslaught of nihilism, man must go beyond his previous answers, which
Nietzsche viewed as highways for the advent of nihilism. For far too
long a time man had been clinging to answers, which comforted him and
alleviated his premonitions. These comfortable systems of thought,
however, are not easily given up. And thus the advent of nihilism
is coming in a quiet manner since it is well hidden behind a thick
veil. In the belief that he is choosing means against nihilism, man

embraces ideas which actually accelerate its comming: for instance,

the dangerous intellectual playing offered by the humanist, who first

36
abolishes God and then shifts the functions of God to some such sub-
stitutes as the goodness of man or benevolent natural laws. But with
the vanishing of God who created man, "the“ authority dies. No .
pseudo-gods can be substituted. The attempt to escape the impact of
the death of God in the human heart through a humanistic view of the
world still fails.

Mailer has not, as noted earlier, altogether abandoned God; nor
has he adopted a humanistic view of the world to comfort himself. He
only feels that God's authority is dead and "there is the greater
agony of God at the mercy of man's fate, God determined by man's
efforts, man who has free will and can no longer exercise it and
God therefore in bondage to the result of man's efforts."25 Mailer
has certainly accepted Nietzsche's assumption that man is "offered
the first and supreme challenge to realize himself fully." 50 Mailer
told his interviewer Richard G. Stern:

Maybe we are in a sense the seed, the seed-carriers, the

voyagers, the explorers, the embodiment of that embattled

vision; maybe we are engaged in a heroic activity, and not

a mean one.

After all his criticisms Of scientism and the ideologies of the
nineteenth century, Nietzsche directed his sharpest criticism against
religion, and particularly ChriStianity, in which he had detected all
the elements of nihilism and decadence. Like Kierkegaard, he saw the
first proof of those in the hypocritical and lukewarm attitude toward
religion on the part of the Christians themselves--an attitude which
he regarded as infinitely more demoralizing than honest atheism. To
call oneself Christian, when the whole of life is in practice one

continuous refutation of Christianity was, according to Nietzsche,

the height of indecency and moral cowardice at its worst. Such a

37

state of things he could only despise. In one of his latest books, The_

Anti-Christ (1888), he argued:

 

0

That which separates us from other people is not the fact

that we can discover no God in either history or nature,

or behind nature-~but that we regard what has been revered

as "God" not as "divine" but as wretched, absurd, per-

nicious; not as an error but as a crime against life. . . .

We deny God as God. . . . If the existence of this

Christian God were proved to us, we should feel even less

able to believe in Him. . . . A religion such as Chris-

tianity which never once comes into touch with reality,

and which collapses the very moment reality asserts its

rights even on one single point, must naturally be a mortal

enemy of the "wisdom of this world. "27

Nietzsche's real objection to Christianity is a fundamental one.
It is essentially a question of his interpretation of mores and
morality. For him, "Customs (mores) represent the collective exper-
iences of bygone generations with regard to what is useful and harmful
--but morality does not refer to these experiences as such but rather
to the age, holiness, and unquestioned acceptance of the customs.
And these feelings prevent man from making genuinely new experiences
and from changing his customs. This means that morality obstructs
the creation of newer and better customs--it makes man dull."28 It
is the charge that Christianity had develOped into a tranquilizer
for man which Nietzsche was Opposed to. He accused Christianity of
remaining on the plane of mere morality, as in codes of conduct which
require adherence, rather than stimulating creativeness out of one's
full personal life. Thus Christianity sins against the very prin-
ciple of life itself which demands that creativeness go on as long
as there is life in this world. To suppress this creativeness.in
man by forcing him merely to accept the products of bygone acts of

creativity is to kill life itself. Over the centuries Christian

38
morality had killed the personal and creative elements in morals.
Nietzsche was convinced that Jesus himself would deny such a follow-
ing.

Mailer could never agree with Nietzsche more than on his sharp
criticism against Christianity, for in Mailer's time, Christianity
altogether collapsed as a religion. In a Christian country like
America, the deterioration of workmanship, the erecting of aesthet-
ically drab buildings, the sexual revolution sustained on drugs,
the survival of "mediocrities" by surgery, the perpetuation of a
society on welfare, an economy based on war and war production are
all symptoms of a world:

. not of adventurers, entrepreneurs, settlers, social
arbiters, prolitarians, agriculturists, and other egocentric
types of dynamic society, but instead a world of whirlpools
and formlessness where two types remerge, types there at
the beginning Of it all: Cannibals and Christians.29

”What characterizes the Cannibals is that most of them are born
Christian, think of Jesus as Love, and get an erection from the
thought of whippings, blood, burning crosses, burning bodies, and
screams in mass graves." Christians-are the commerical. "The com-
mercial is the invention of a profoundly Christian nation--it proceeds
to sell something in which it dOes not altogether believe. . ."30
These Christians

are utterly opposed to the destruction of human life and

succeed within themselves in starting all the wars of our

own time, since every war since the Second World War has

been initiated by liberals or Communists; these Christians

also succeed by their faith in science to poison the nourish-

ment we eat and the waters of the sea, to alter the genetics
of our beasts, and to break the food chains of nature.

Mailer seems to say that society cannot survive the Christians nor

can it endure the Cannibals. But he finally accepts some of Nietzsche's

39

final answers to the problems of man.

Nietzsche's final answers can be put in three phrases: the will
to power, the eternal recurrence, and "Higher Man" (Superman). .
Nietzsche hoped that his answers would not give rise to new illusions
about man's position in this world and thus lead man further into
decadence. Going beyond "the will to live" of Schopenhauer, he posited
as the animating force behind all life, the will to power. This was
definitely not to be understood as the will to success, wealth, or
military, racial, or political power (although at certain times
Nietzsche proved not to be free from such ideas). As Horton and
Edwards have observed, ”This will manifests itself in an eternal pro-
cess of becoming and gives to human nature its secret, universal
quality of the desire for power--ideally, the power to overcome
(transcend) the weakness and insufficiency of mere human capacity."32
In other words, man must overcome himself in order to become what he
is. Will, of course, implies both a force and an aim and is not merely
aimlessly rushing streams. It also means that man should strive for
the truly human in himself. To do this would make him free and inde-
pendent of what hinders his spontaniety and creativity, whether it be
traits of character, powerful traditions, or other restraints.

Mailer's reaction to "the will tO power" is that it can be easily
taken to mean only "the will to military or political power." To
illustrate this point, Mailer created a character, General Cummings,

in The Naked and the Dead. Cummings is a power-mad fascist; the only

 

morality he worships is the power morality; "The general sees the
entire war as a consolidation of power, a preparation for the immi-

nent time when a few strong men (ideally one strong man--himself) will

4O

subordinate the great mass of individuals to the machine."33 Cummings
believes that man's deepest urge is

not religion, that's obvious, it's not love, it's not

spirituality, those are all 50ps along the way, benefits

we devise for ourselves when the limitations of our

existence turn us away from the other dream. To achieve

God. When we come kicking into the world, we arg_God,

the universe is the limit of our senses. And when we

get older, when we discover that the universe is not us,

it's the deepest trauma of our existence.34
With the exception of the last two sentences, Robert Solotaroff con-
siders that "this is straight Nietzsche." But he believes that
"Mailer has misunderstood the philosopher."35 I think he himself has
misunderstood Mailer, because Mailer never meant to have Cummings as
a hero in the novel but as a non-hero. For, as the novel ends, the
power morality is rendered useless for the campaign. Even Cummings
himself finally realizes that all his planning and tactics meant nothing
in winning the war on the island. Obviously, Mailer meant to ridicule
Cummings' misunderstanding of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche also emphasizes the Superman as future development, as
a new chapter in human history. The Superman is the one who has sub-
limated his will to power into a creative power over the force of life
itself. He is the passionate man who is at the same time in control
of his passion, who makes both passion and reason serve in the enlarge-
ment of his creative powers. In discussing his ideal Superman,
Nietzsche also implies a strong biological foundation. As Janko
Lavrin has said, "His defense of life thus became also a defense of
the body against any encroachments on the part of the 'soul,' of

traditional morals, and the world 'beyond."'36 With Nietzsche's

Superman, nothing supernatural will happen; but through the creation

41

of a strong will to power the Superman may be just as totally inte-
grated into the realm of nature as man has been before. Only a new
unprecedented height will be reached in human existence. The mass man.
will be overcome. Though mass man has been pledging allegiance to all
kinds of aims, he has really followed only one--comfortable security.
In him the passion for creation has burned itself out or has never
been lighted. What is left is the willingness to accept whatever public
opinion preaches. The most frightful aspect of this is that the mass
man would even sacrifice freedom and the right to creativity for the
feeling of security. That is why Nietzsche saw in his "Superman" the
last hope. If the mass man were ever to glimpse even a tiny part of
the nihilism he was actually confronting, then he would sell himself
to the Leviathan of the totalitarian state in order to escape the
frightful prospect and obligation of creativity. The mass man is
constitutionally unable to accept the Nietzschean solution of viewing
the specimens of Superman in his midst as sufficient meaning for his
own life. Instead he tries to prevent their very appearance. The mass
man is and has been an opponent of all that is new and harbors only
feelings of resentment toward it. He is preoccupied with opposition
and does it through what Nietzsche called a slave morality. This is
designed to prevent anyone's rising above the level of the mass man
himself. Nietzsche nevertheless hOped for the victorious emergence of
Superman in the coming decades despite this determined opposition. He
would bring the morality of positiVe creation.

Seventy-five years before the appearance of "The White Negro,"
Nietzsche incorporated his existentialism with his defense of body

in the Superman. And there are striking similarities between

42
Nietzsche's Superman and Mailer's American existentialist heroes.
Robert Solotaroff saw these similarities, too:

Once we throw out the God-Devil part there are consider-
able resemblances between Mailer's existential heroes

and Nietzsche's superman, tapping his will to power as

he extricates himself from a biologically bankrupt society
and rises toward moral horizon which he has created.37

As has been shown, it can be in many aspects that Mailer has been
influenced by Nietzsche for his social criticism even though Mailer
has not made as many references to Nietzsche as he has done to Sartre,
Kierkegaard, and Heidegger. As for Nietzsche's position in the ex-
istentialism, Kaufmann has made a clear observation,

In the story of existentialism, Nietzsche occupies a
central place: Jaspers, Heidegger, and Sartre are un-
thinkable without him, and the conclusion of Camus'
The Myth of Sisyphus sounds like a distant echo of
NietzSEhe. CamusThas also written at length about
Nietzsche; Nietzsche is the first name mentioned in
Sartre's philOSOphic main work, Beingpand Nothingness;
Jaspers has written two whole books about him and
discussed him in detail in several others; and
Heidegger, in his later works, considers Nietzsche
even more important than Jaspers ever did.

 

 

Nietzsche might not agree with Mailer in spreading the idea of a
White Negro hero with so much emphasis on violence and sexual orgasm,
but he would surely appreciate Mailer's intention to defeat the mass

man of the totalitarian society.
Martin Heidegger

Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche point up a profound dissociation,
that has taken place in the being of Western man, which is basically
the conflict of reason with the whole man. According to Kierkegaard,
reason threatens to swallow up faith; Western man now stands at a

crossroads forced to choose either to be religious or to fall into

43

despair. Having chosen the former, he must, being rooted historically
in Christianity, enact a radical renewal of the Christian faith. For
Nietzsche the era of reason and science raises the question of what
is to be done with the primitive instincts and passions of man; in
pushing these aside the age threatens us with a decline in vitality
for the whole species. What lies behind both prOphetic messages is
the perception that man is estranged from his own being. Now, the
estrangement from Being itself is Martin Heidegger's (1889-1976)
central theme. Since his major effort in philOSOphy has been to dis-
cover the meaning of Being itself, rather than to describe the
relation to the existent individual to the world as given, Heidegger
insistently dissociates himself from existential philOSOphy. "My
philosophical tendencies," wrote he in his letter to Jean Wahl, "can

not be classed as Existenz-philospphie. . . . The question of Being

 

in its totality and as such."39 For all that, Heidegger isinescap-
ably put among the existentialists because he is one of them in his
themes and ideas and in his treatment of them and in the language he
uses, as well as in his debt to Kierkegaard and in his influence upon
others especially upon Sartre. ‘
Nearly all Heidegger's works reiterate the theme that philoSOphy
must return to the truth of Being and that only through a rediscovery

of Being can modern man be saved from the chaos which threatens him.

The beginning Of his major work, Sein und'Séit (Beingpand Time) sets

 

 

forth in great detail his own concern with this problem. According to
Heidegger, the concept of "Being" is the most universal one, as was
also realized by Aristotle, Thomas and Hegel; and its universality

goes beyond that of any Fgenus." At the same time it is obscure and

44
indefinable; "Being" cannot be comprehended as anything that is; it
cannot be reduced from any higher concepts and it cannot be represented
by any lower ones; "Being" is not something like a being, a stone, a.
plant, a table, a man. Yet "Being" seems somehow an evident concept.
We make use of it in all knowledge, in all our statements, in all our
attitudes toward ourselves. We are used to living in an "understanding
of Being," but hand in hand with it goes the incomprehensibility of
what is meant by "Being."

Instead of starting his investigation of Being with the things
encountered in the world, however, Heidegger takes "human Being"--
"Dasein," or "Being-in-the world" as the starting point of his in-
vestigation. His first task is the examination of human existence
with a view to describing its characteristic mode of Being. Since

the existential analysis of human being occupies the major part of

Being and Time, it is not surprising that--in spite of Heidegger's

 

protests--existentialism can claim to have received considerable
inspiration from his work.

Superficially, man looks like many other components of the
world, but this is not affirmed by a closer analysis of man's situa-

tion. The phrase closer analygjs, of course, means existential

 

analysis, the analysis of the connection between Being and human
being. The fact that man can make such an analysis is in itself

a decisive characteristic of man. He alone of all beings is con-
cerned with his connection with Being, and he alone can ask what it
means "to be.’I Heidegger emphasizes that he aims at no more than
the intrinsic meaning of the word "be." He also frequently puts it

in the more common question why there is anything rather than nothing.

45
Always, however, the questioning focuses on the great puzzle of how
man himself is connected with Being, since it is here that Heidegger
sees the only access to an answer, Man is that place in Being where .
the question about Being can be put. Heidegger refers to man as
that particular being which stands as the only access to what it means
to be, as Dapgjp,

According to Heidegger, Dasejp_obviously has two dimensions.
First, the Da§ejn_is not an essence clothed with certain "qualities,"
which are intelligible apart from its particular existence. It "has"
no qualities; it i§_this concrete way of existing and nothing else.
In all questions concerning the nature of Da§g1n_existence will
always have priority over essence. As specifically human existence
Qasgjn_has as its second dimension the possibility of being aware of
or knowing about its connection with Being, asking questions pertain-
ing to its own being, and thus transcending all other beings. As
Ronald Grimsley has interpreted, "The Dasein can 'pro-ject' itself,
and so to Speak, hurl itself forward."40 But this second dimension
is possibility only. Man can ignore this question and just not ask
it. He can exist like other beings not knowing and not caring about
his connection with Being.

When a man exists like others not caring about moving "beyond"
or "ahead" of himself, Heidegger calls that he is in the condition
of banal existence. This kind of existence may provide an excuse
and justification for the flight from responsibility and individual
choice and it may also enable the individual to take refuge in the
seeming solidity of a socially approved mode of existence, thus

giving comfort and assurance as to the reality and stability of his

46
life. Actually what the individual is doing is behaving as though he
were a thing among other things, a substance with a given number of
prOperties, with no power or responsibility to project himself toward.

his possibilities. As Heidegger himself put it:

We enjoy and amuse ourselves as 9pg_enjoys; we read, see!1
and judge literature and art as Qne_sees and judges. . .

This gpg_who presides over our daily life is not this person or that
person, or is it all other people. But still it is One who presents
the appearance of doing our judging and deciding, thereby taking away
responsibility from the Person. This condition Heidegger calls a
state of fall.

Like Kierkegaard, Heidegger believes that man should transcend
this banality and achieve authentic existence. Why so? When he does,
two things happen. Man, as Nietzsche would have said, becomes the one
he "is,9 meaning that only then does he become truly man. And, second-
ly, as Heidegger puts it, only in authentic existence Dasgjp_experiences
Being in its immediacy. This experience comes to man in the fullness
of his life and not after leaving the world on paths of abstraction.
But "to become aware of Being involves the whole person, not just
'pure consciousness,‘

Dasgip_is, therefore, first like a closed, darkened window.

Only in authentic existence is it Opened. And then it is

done not for a disinterested look at Being, . . but in order

to gain the deepest personal experience man can have.42

As we can see, it is Heidegger who makes most clear about the idea
of authentic existence for an individual. And only in authentic ex-
istence does man experience Being; also the time of the fullness of

his life. In this respect, Heidegger has influenced both Sartre and

Mailer. Based on Heidegger's metaphysical concept of the nature of

47

pure Being, Sartre develOps his own concepts of Being-for-itself,
Being-in-itself, and Being-for-others, which will be discussed later
in this chapter. Out of his understanding of Heidegger's concept of.
Being, and with the help of his knowledge of Freud, Mailer is concerned
with discovering the "authenticity" of the self and he is searching for
extreme situations, those situations which "burn out the filament of
dull habit and turn the conscious mind back upon its natural subser-
vance to the instinct."43 This means that the individual is encouraged
to liberate himself "from the Super-Ego of the society."44

The other concepts that arouse Mailer's deep interest are
Heidegger's speculations on dread and death. According to Heidegger,
dread is the most powerful of the feelings that affect man's attitude
toward his existence. Like Kierkegaard's Apgg§t_this is an unlocalized
but deeply disturbing feeling that something is wrong with one's life.
Kierkegaard had analyzed "the concept of dread" in order to penetrate
to the deepest layer of human feeling, and Heidegger uses it for the
same purpose. Dread differs from fear. Fear refers to the feeling of
being threatened by something particular, like a thunderstorm or a
dark room. Dread is always undermined in the sense that it does not
depend upon Specific Objects. In dread the whole pattern of worldly
objects dissolves away and sinks into meaninglessness. Dread is not
dread of anything, for the object of dread is "nowhere"; dread is of
Nothing.

Dread is therefore not in any way similar to a fear caused by
a superstition or a misunderstood context. As H. J. Blackham has

interpreted,

48

The decisive character of dread is that it cannot be

localized and it refuses to be pinned down to anything

in which we are interested and which we feel to be

threatened, by emptying everything in the world of all .

interest for me: it invests everything alike with a

common worthlessness.45
Dread thus gradually empties man's life of all enjOyment and meaning
and finally brings him to the point where he has to decide whether
to continue his inauthentic existence or to take charge of his life
and accept his responsibility to become what he can will to be. In
other words, dread has its roots in the confrontation with nothingness
and offers the way to an authentic life, to a finding of one's ground
in Being, in authentic existence. In this positive evaluation of the
experience of nothingness Heidegger is closely akin to Nietzsche. But
NietzSche's answer to nihilism was his call for “Superman." Heidegger
takes another way. For him, dread can lift man out of the limbo of
the seemingly natural condition of everyday life and gives him the
awareness of being alone and thrown back on himself.

Thus it is dread which finally reveals to the individual the true
nature of Dasgip, Being-in-the-world, and is the foundation of his
attitude toward it. He findshimself in a condition of perpetual
becoming, facing an open future, and bound up with other things. The
generalized word which Heidegger uses to characterize this attitude of
concern is "Care.“ Since Care is the definitive attitude of one who
exists by anticipating what he will be in a world into which he is
thrown and to which he is bound, the one possibility he should be most
concerned about is his own death. As Morton and Edwards have expounded,
'Since his existence is really only a constant self-projection into a

realm of possibilities, his life is never finished except by death,

which differs from all other possibilities by being peculiarly hj§_

49

and by being imminent, that is, possible at any moment."46

It is precisely the constant taking into consideration of death
as man's most personal destiny which the average man tries to escape..
He lives "as if" his life were, in the near future-at least, without
end. For some it is even in bad taste to mention death. Others try
to dull the impact of death by finding worlds beyond death. For them
death constitutes not a true end but a change from one life to another.
For Heidegger all these evasive positions take from death its positive
dimension. Man must realize in its full immediacy that death comes
not in general (everyone must die) but to each individual (one dies).
For a literary representation of this idea Heidegger refers the reader
to Tolstoy's story, "The Death of Ivan Ilych."

For Heidegger, however, the story has interest as an illustration
of "the shattering and the collapse of the 'One dies.'" Prior to his
illness Ivan Ilych's attitude toward death was no different from that of
the doctOr. He knew, of course, that he would die, but death to him was
a biological or social category. He was neither more nor less mortal
than a dog. He was someone who would die in the same way as a lawyer
and a family man. The category of death, indeed, had even less
significance for him than that of lawyer or married man. His illness
changed all this. The insignificance of his social functions as
lawyer, husband, and father was impressed upon him forcefully; and
it may well have occurred to him for the first time that men alone
among the animals know that they are gOing to die. The sh0pworn word
"death,f which had been previously no more than a coin used in the
business of social intercourse, began to take on a unique meaning-~a

meaning for him as an individual human being. At last he was obliged

50

to face the truth which he had for so long and with such art concealed
from himself.

Heidegger's analysis of death reveals in thought the truth that .
the novelist Tolstoy had revealed in his story. The authentic meaning
of death-~90ne diesf--is not as an external and public fact within
the world, but as an internal possibility of my own Being. Nor is it
a possibility like a point at the end of a road, which I will in time
reach. So long as I think in this way, I still hold death at a dis-

tance outside myself. The point is that I may die at any moment, and

therefore death is my possibility now. It is like a precipice at my

 

feet. It is also the most extreme and absolute of my possibilities:
extreme, because it is the possibility of not being and hence cuts off
all other possibilities; absolute, because man can surmount all other
heart-breaks, even the deaths of those he loves, but his own death
puts an end to him. Hence, death is the most personal and intimate of
possibilities. 1

According to Heidegger, only by taking my death into myself does
an authentic existence become possible for me. I am projected in
advance of myself becoming what I will be, whether I will to be or not,
but I can anticipate here and now what I will be, not waiting for the
end, and this is the only way in which I can command and possess my
existence and give it unity and authenticity. I anticipate death not
by suicide but by living in the presence of death as always immediately
possible. This flat acceptance of death, lived out, is authentic
personal existence. By doing this, I cease to be the impersonal and
social One among many, as Ivan Ilych was, and I am free to become

' myself. Though terrifying, the taking of death into ourselves is also

51

liberating: It frees us from servitude to the petty cares that
threaten to engulf our daily life and thereby open us to the essential
projects by which we can make our lives personally and significantly .
our own. Heidegger calls this the condition of "freedom-toward-death."

Of Heidegger's interpretation of death, what Mailer could not
accept is the idea that death is the very end, the extermination, of
one's existence. What difference does it make between the authentic
existence and the inauthentic if death is the same end for any kind of
life? Since death itself is meaningless, the flat acceptance of death
as the mOst imminent, personal and immediately possible still brings
no meaning to death. Mailer believes that

the reluctance of modern European existentialism to take on

the logical continuation of the existential vision (that

there is a life after death which can be as existential as

life itself) has brought French and German existentialism

to a halt on this uninhabitable terrain of the absurd--to

wit, man must lead his life as death is meaningful even

when man knows that death is meaningless.47
Mailer's criticism of Heidegger is that Heidegger's "working hypothesis"
has ended I'the possibility that one can construct a baSe for the exis-
tential ethic." And "Heidegger can give no deeper explanation why man
should bother to be authentic than to state in effect that man should be
authentic in order to be free."48 Mailer is convinced that "existential-
ism is rootless unless one dares the hypothesis that [the confrontation

"49

with] death is an existential continuation of life, that we forsake

our potential unless we are willing to risk the plunge into eternity.
Thus,

by accepting this hypothesis, authenticity and commitment
return to the center of ethics, for man then faces no peril
so huge as alienation from his own soul, a death which is
other than death, a disappearance into nothingness rather
than into eternity.50

heroi
was i
Much

note

52

Jean-Paul Sartre

We may as well begin with Jean-Paul Sartre in a moment of his .
sm, because Sartre's search for heroism in France in the 40's

n many respects anticipating Mailer's search for it in the 50's.
in Sartre's writings is distinctly unheroic in nature, but the

of heroism does sound, and here it is in The Republic of Silence,

 

where Sartre is describing the life of French Resistance from 1940 to

1945:

We were never more free than during the German occupation.
We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to
talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to
take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as
workers, Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported

en masse. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers,

on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid
picture of ourselves that our suppressors wanted us to
accept. And because of this we were free. Because the
Nazi venom seeped into our thoughts, every accurate thought
was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to
force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value
of a declaration of principles. Because we were hunted
down, every one of our gestures had the weight of a solemn
commitment. ~.- . Exile, captivity, and especially death
(which we usually shrink from facing at all in happier
days) became for us the habitual objects of our concern.

We learned that they were neither inevitable accidents,

nor even constant and inevitable dangers, but they must

be considered as our lot itself, our destiny, the profound
source of our reality as men. At every instant we live up
to the full sense of this commonplace little phrase: "Man
is mortal!" And the choice that each of us made of his
life was an authentic choice because it was made face to
face with death, because it could always have been expressed
in these terms: "Rather death than. . ." And here I am
not speaking of the elite among us who were real Resistants,
but of all Frenchmen who, at every hour of the night and
day throughout four years, answered No.51

It is necessary to emphasize a passage like this one to understand why

"Existentialism in its French version is basically a philosophy of

freedom. . .

.u52

53

Sartre came to maturity during the 1930's. The atmosphere of
Leftist politics was pervasive, and Sartre has never ceased political-
ly to be on the Left. But over France also hovered the stale and .
tired atmOSphere of a world already doomed to defeat; The Popular
Front government of Leon Blum drifted, nerveless and flaccid, incapable
of meeting the crisis of the time; the French bourgeoisie hung on,
entrenched and petty, unable even to conceive the possibility of any
great action. "Les salauds" became a potent term for Sartre in those
days--the salaUds, the stinkers, the stuffy and self-righteous peOple
congealed in the insincerity of their virtues and vices. This atmos-
phere of decay breathes through Sartre's first novel, Naupga, The
nausea in Sartre's book is the nausea of existence itself: Nausea is
the intuitive awareness of the contingency of all beings. By contin-
gency Sartre means lack of necessity. Reality was not caused by anything
and is not kept in existence for any reason. But for Sartre it is
better to encounter it at a11--as the salaug_in his academic or
bourgeois or party-leader strait jacket never does. The Resistance
came to Sartre and his generation as a release from disgust into
heroism. It was a call to action, an action that brought men to the
very limits of their being, and in hearing this call man himself was
not found wanting. (He could even rediscover his own irredflcible liberty
in saying No to the overpowering might of the occupying forces.

The essential freedom, the ultimate and final freedom that cannot
be taken from a man, is to say No. This is the basic premise in
Sartre's view of human freedom: freedom is in its very essense
negative, though this negativity is also creative. At a certain

moment, perhaps, the drug or the pain inflicted by the torturer may

54
make the victim lose consciousness, and he will confess. But so long

as he retains the lucidity of consciousness, however tiny the area of
action and freedom are thus given together. Only if consciousness is
blatted out can man be deprived of this residual freedom. Where all
the avenues of action are blocked for a man, this freedom may seem a
tiny and unimportant thing; but it is in fact total and absolute, and
Sartre insists upon it as such, for it affords man his final dignity,
that of being man.

As F. H. Heinemann has observed, "Sartre's philosophy arises from
a combination and analysis of these two experiences, i.e. of liberty
in resistance, and of the apparent absurdity of being and experience,
both of which are primarily negative."53 He experiences his freedom
in saying "no" to the Oppresser, and he experiences reality in that
it says "no" to him, that it is repulsive to him. He also discovers
himself able to say "no" to the situation. When we find that the three
concepts of freedom, situation, and negation are fundamental for our
understanding of Sartre, the remarkable thing is that negation is
dominant and that it enters the concept of freedom as well as that of
situation.

Sartre's influence on Mailer is both positively receptive and
negatively opposed. In formulating his own existentialist position,
Mailer has never been indifferent to Sartre. What we must understand
is that Mailer's positive reception of Sartre usually remains unnoticed
because Mailer seldom mentions his indebtedness to Sartre. But when
disagreeing with Sartre, Mailer denounces him openly. For instance,
in presenting the hipster's struggle to assert his own freedom in

"White Negro," Mailer derives his ideas in good part from Sartre's

55

"Existentialism Is a Humanism.” Throughout the essay Mailer has never
referred to Sartre in this connection. But, instead he accuses Sartre
of his neglect of the unconscious and of Sartre's insistence on atheism
and eXistential absurdity:

Only the French, alienated beyond alienation from their

unconscious could welcome an existential philosophy without

ever feeling it all; indeed only a Frenchman by declaring

that the unconscious did not exist could then proceed to

explore the delicate involutions of consciousness, the

microscopically senuous and all but ineffable frissions

of mental becoming, in order finally to create the theology

of atheism and so submit that in a world of absurdity is

more coherent.54
Actually, two of the fundamental tenets presented in the essay are
directly derived from Sartre's analysis of freedom. They are that
political freedom and sexual freedom are inextricably connected, for
the sex act can only express the totality of the individual when the
individual isfree from socially-induced tensions and anxieties. The
hipster is asserting his freedom by saying "no" to the totalitarian
society.

There can be no doubt that Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943)

 

was charged with concrete, personal experiences when it was written
in the early forties. An individual who was faced with the permanent
threat of annihilation discovered that non-being is a permanent pos-
sibility connected with being, and that Nothing haunts Being. Out
of this experience arises his metaphysics. The theme Of Being and

Nothingness is individual freedom, and its central intention is to

 

characterize human existence in such a way that it is "without excuse.’
To begin with, the fundamental distinction is that between different

modes of being, Of these there are three: Being-in-itself, Being-for-

 

itself, and Being-for-others. Being-in-itself (en-soi) is the

56

self-contained being of a thing. A stone is a stone; it is what it is,
and in being just what it is, no more and no less, the being of the
thing always coincides with itself. At this point, Sartre refuses to.
accept Heidegger's Being as the basis of all beings, and rejects any
view of the world as an entity which in its very core harbors some
meaning apart from the one man himself creates. But, Sartre accepts
Heidegger's Da§§1n_as the particular being of man which Opens a fissure
in the otherwise solid front of beings. Yet, it is not that man through
this fissure can discover his root in Being. What actually happens is
that out of the fissure there grows like a solitary plant in seemingly
solid rock the new phenomenon, consciousness.

Being-for-itself (pour-soi) is identical with consciousness. Human
beings are often referred to as "the For-itself." As the seat of con-
sciousness, man is forever "that individual" whom Kierkegaard had so
passionately believed in--but with no possibility of being able to make
"the leap of faith" to Kierkegaard's God. Yet, although man is never
at home in the world, he is irretrievably attached to it. This attach-
ment is evidenced by the psychological fact that consciousness, to be
at all, must always be consciousness pf_something. Sartre says that
consciousness is vacancy or an emptiness. It essentially consists of
a gap--a gap, that is, between thought and the object of thought. The
gap between the thought and its object actually consists in the power
which consciousness has of affirming or denying; of accepting what is
false or of rejecting it. Freedom consists in this ability to affirm
or deny, and to imagine what is not the case; and this freedom turns

out to be the essence of consciousness.

57

Sartre, however, warned that this consciousness must be understood
in a special sense. It is not an intelligent projection of a world as
seen from within (Dannarte§:_gpgitg,_ergp_smn) but exists only as an
intuition of its presence to something which it is not. Consciousness
is always present to an object and to itself (I am aware that I am
aware), but always in form of not being the object. As previously
emphasized, consciousness is a perpetual No which constitutes the world
around it by separation and denial of itself-~i.e. it is ngt_what it
is aware of, and it is continually becoming other than what it is. Thus
since consciousness exists as possibility, it has the power of transcen-
dence of going beyond itself which brute existence has not. Further,
Sartre insists that external objects have no meaning except for the
individual human observer, nor do they have any structure or pattern
except insofar as man organizes them in the carrying out of his projects.

Since it is man who imposes pattern or meaning upon the external
world and since freedom is the essence of man the consciousness, man
thus has the total freedom to choose and is entirely responsible for
his choice. It is because man is "condemned to be free" and must carry
its burden alone, without the traditional aids of conventional morality,
God, or an all-justifying Absolute. Sartre here makes a vivid descrip-
tion of the feeling of anxiety:

I have not and cannot have recourse to any value when I am

confronted with the fact that it is I who maintain the values

in being: nothing can protect me against myself--cut from

the world and from my essence by the nothingness I am, I have

to achieve the sense of the world and of my essence: I make

the decision concerning that sense, alone, unjustifiable, and

without excuse.55 ‘

Anxiety is thus the twin brother of this responsibility, and is not to

be separated from it. This is especially so if one realizes that one's

58
own choices and responsibility carry beyond one's own life into the
lives of others.

Furthermore, in a world without a God or gods, man is left withOut
any comforting support, and he is forlorn. There'are no guide posts
along the road of his life. Man himself builds the road to the destiny
of his choosing. He is the creator. What he gets from tradition, like
values and moral codes, are only the remainders of former men's deci-
sions and acts of creativity. They hinder more than they help, since
they pose as seemingly easy guides. They cannot relieve man of his
destiny to create, invent, and project himself forward. In a world in
which man must act without hope of any meaning other than what he him-
self introduces, he also feels despair. Of course, it means that no
hope exists for man outside himself. Sartre teaches that man should
not pin their hope on God, nor should he let such things as mass move-
ments carry the meaning of world history. The mass in this function is
an illusion. Sartre here says "no" to Marxism and its reliance upon
the collective, the proletariat. For Sartre this is a cathartic and
energizing despair. Stripped of all illusions and having accepted the
full responsibility of his freedom to perpetually transcend himself, man
can set about achieving the authentic existence which is the goal of the
existentialist approach to life.

There are no problems for Mailer to be agreeing with Sartre's
basic assumption that the existentialist approach to life is through
freedom. But there are problems for Mailer at this point in accepting
Sartre's pessimistic interpretations that in a world without a God or
any hope, man is both forlorn and despair. Both Mailer's heroism and

romantic vision are incompatible with Sartre's hopeless understanding

59

of freedom. Mailer's own perception of freedom is not necessarily
without hope of any kind:

I was free, or at least whatever was still ready to change

in my character had escaped from the social obligations which

suffbcateothers. I could seek to become what I chose to be,

and if I failed--there was the ice pick of fear! I would

have nothing to excuse failure. I would fail because I ha

not been brave enough to succeed. So I was much too free.
And Mailer further believes that "To be a real existentialist (Sartre
admittedy to the contrary) one must be religious, one must have one's
sense of purpose."57 One is religious in the sense that he has faith
of his own courage and believes that an existential God relies on his
victory in the world. Sartre's pessimistic interpretation of freedom
primarily results from his atheism and the absurd situation in which he
believes man falls. Mailer argues that "given its roots in atheistic
philosophers like Sartre, existentialism has always tended toward the
absurd."58 Recently, Mailer made it very clear that he is an existen-
tialist but not in the sense that Sartre is:

By way of Sartre, we are to act as if there were a purpose

to things even we know there is not. And that has become

the general concept of existentialism in America. But it's

not mine. I'm an existentialist who believes there is a

God and a Devil at war with one another.59

However, it should be understood that unlike the great majority of
people who deny their freedom, hiding it-from themselves with all kinds
of deterministic excuses, Mailer states that his theology is the ex-
istential kind: the end of the war between God and the Devil is still
unknown. Toward the great majority of people, Mailer holds the same
attitude as Sartre does. By denying their freedom, they try to flee
from anxiety by grasping themselves from outside. They flee from what

they are in order not to know what they are. They are, in Sartre's

terms, "in bad faith." Sartre treats Bad Faith as both a very important

60
and a completely familiar human trait. Basically, Bad Faith is an
attempt to escape from the anxiety which men suffer when they are
brought face to face with their own freedom. It arises from our effdrt
to escape our responsibilities by accepting some ready-made, socially
acceptable, stable values as our true and fixed identity. Bad Faith
also consists in pretending to ourselves and others that things could
not be otherwise-~that we are bound to our way of life, and that we
could not escape it even if we wanted to.

One of Mailer's recurrent terms for twentieth century civilization
is "totalitarianism," by which he means not merely a political system,
as was pointed out earlier, but a quality close to Sartrean Bad Faith.
"The crucial characteristic of modern totalitarianism is that it is a
moral disease which divorces us from guilt."60 Indeed, "totalitarian-
ism" is almost exactly the equivalent of Bad Faith, for it is not only
an escape from accountability, but an escape from the constants of the
human condition--"anybody who wants a quick solution for a permanent
problem is a low grade totalitarian."61 It is finally an escape from
all the existential anxieties:

In our flight from the consequence of our lives, in our flight

from adventure, from danger; and from the natural ravages of

disease, in our burial of the primitive it is death the

Twentieth Century is seeking to avoid.62

So far we have treated Sartre's view of man--Being-for-itself--as
a solitary and creative individual, but have never touched upon the last
mode of existence, Being-for-others, and the relation between Being-for-
itselflandBeing-for-others. Sartre has described how, in Bad Faith, we
aim to evade our responsibilities by pretending to be like Being-in-
themselves; and how we do this either by treating ourselves as wholly

determined in our behavior by the view which others take of us. If I

61

am thought by others to be a waiter, and labelled as such, then this is
the role I may decide to play. Sartre defines Being-for-others in two
related ways. First, I am aware of my own bodily existence as someth1ng
which is known to other people. Secondly, I am aware of the bodies of
other people, and then of their existence in the world. Therefore, we
must not search for the Other outside us. He is in us, in our heart.
He is a presence; a presence which Sartre says reveals itself to each
of us through a familiar conduct: gnang, Just as nausea and anxiety
had brought us in the presence of freedom and of ourselves, respective-
ly, so shame would place our consciousness before the Other.

As noted already, consciousness is always consciousness of some-
thing. It has an object, and here the object is me. It is of myself
I am ashamed, because, while I was acting, I felt that I was being seen.
Here lies Sartre's theory of "look.". If I exist for the Other, I do so
through the "look." Consequently my fundamental relation to the Other
is determined by the permanent possibility of being seen by him. The
look of the Other reveals himSelf to me as a Being-for-itself, a
subject, a consciousness, a free project of itself, able to transcend
all given data toward its own possibilities, its own ends. But this
means also that by his look this Other can transcend me and change me
from a Being-for-itself into a Being-in-itself, from a free project
into a determined thing--as I can change him by my look. By looking
at other people, I measure my power, and by looking at me, they measure
theirs. Thus, Being-for-others is basically a conflict, a struggle of
two transcendences, each of which tries to "out-transcend" the other.
And our relations with others must ultimately be defined in terms of

conflict and not cooperation in a given situation.

62

Confronted by the inescapable existence of the other person I may
adopt two attitudes. As Ronald Grimsley has summarized:

(a) I allow the other to keep his freedom but at the same
time I try to hold it captive without destroying it as
freedom. This attempt to assimilate the other person's
freedom gives rise to love, language, and masochism.

(b) In order to protect myself against the petrifaction and
alienation effected in me by the other's look, I may
seek to objectify him in my turn. This desire to trans-
form the other into an object is at the basis of desire,
hatred, and sadism.

 

Grimsley concludes, "Whichever of these attitudes I adopt, I shall be
engaged in a fundamental conflict which expresses the meaning of my
Being-for-others."63 Thus the social relations of man is in a perma-
nent state of conflict. It is due to man's incapability of fusing two
subjects into a harmonious whole.

However, pessimistic as Sartre's view of man's social relations
may be, he has not called for a retreat of man from social involvement.
Man is predominantly seen in a situation no matter how much Sartre
insists On man as Being-for-itself. Sartre himself has not led a
solitary life, nor has he shied away from speaking out about French
public affairs. Even his often debated cooperation with the French
Communist Party, particularly until 1956, has to be viewed as growing
out of what a traditional philosopher would not hesitate to call sym-
pathy with one's fellow man, in this case the French worker.‘ In many
ways this was a contradictory choice he had chosen. Since that time
he has struggled to overcome the contradiction between the individual-
ism inherent in his existentialism and the collectivism required by
his ethics of commitment.

Finally, Mailer is in many respects reflecting Sartre's life. Once

a fellow traveler of the American Communist Party, Mailer campaigned

63

for Henry Wallace, the presidential candidate on the Progressive Party
ticket in 1948. In that campaign Mailer blamed American capitalism for
most postwar problems with Russia. Yet, in the Fifties, Mailer found
Russia a monolithic totalitarian country and, as unaligned radical,
called himself a "libertarian socialist" which "is equivalent to ac-
cepting almost total intellectual alienation from America."64 But in
the Sixties he said that he was a "private mixture of Marxism, conser-

vatism, nihilism, and large parts of existentialism (Italics, mine)."65

 

All these changes of labelling himself indicate that Mailer has never
tried to shy away from social involvement in America, nor has he ever
hesitated to speak out, loudly and outrageously, about American public
affairs. All these also prove that Mailer, like Sartre, for all his
insistence on individualism, insists on seeing man in an experiential
context. There is no constant self since the self is constantly
creating itself act by act. The self is no solid identity, but a
series of actions in reaction to the context in which it Stays. That
is why Mailer could see:

the context as generally dominating the man, dominating him

because his character is less significant than the context

in which he must function.66
However, a creative man is still able to manage to dominate the context.
In freedom he is provided a supreme opportunity to give meaning to his
character in the context. Sartre agrees, too, that man is the being
through whom values come into being, and as soon as man realizes that
it is he who posits all values, he will want freedom as the basis of

all values. In this sense, existentialism is a humanism, because it

makes man the only legislator in the realm of values.

64

It is obviously true that the existentialist influence over Mailer
is not confined merely to the general problems, nor to the four major
figures described in this chapter. More specific existential qualities
can only be elaborated when each particular occasion requies in the
following chapters. But it should be emphasized that I have not in-
tended to interpret that Mailer owes every aspect of his existentialist
thought to the continental existentialists. Yet, as has been analyzed,
I do see that Kierkegaard's radical individualism and his interpretation
of truth are harmoniously assimilated in Mailer's American existential-
ism. Nietzsche's diagnostic analysis of European nihilism of his age
anticipates Mailer's obsession of American totalitarianism of the
contemporary time. In many an aspect, Nietzsche's Superman reminds
one of the existentialist heroes that Mailer is in search of. And it
is Heidegger's detailed study of the existential meaning of death that
inspired Mailer to outline his own concept of death for his philosoph-
ical scheme. Sartre's existential ideas are both accepted and rejected
to formulate his own system throughout Mailer's work. In answer to a
question concerning his politics, Mailer once replied, "Let me put it
that today I'm a Marxian anarchist, which is a contradiction in terms,
but a not unprofitable contradiction for trying to some original
thinking."67 By considering all his relationships and conflicts with

the European Marxists, Sartre could have made the same statement.

10.

11.

12.
l3.

14.
15.

Notes on Chapter Two

Advertisements for Myself, p. 86.

 

Ibid., p. 292.

Robert C. Solomon, Existentialism, ed. (New York: The Modern
Library, 1974), p. x.

 

John Macmurray, The Self as Agenp_(New York: Humanities, 1957),
p. 84ff.

 

Roger L. Shinn, ed., Restless Adventure: Essays on Contenporary
Expressions of Existentialism (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1968), p. 13.

 

 

Laura Adams, "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman
Mailer," Partisan Review, 42 (1975), 203.

 

Ernst Breisach, Introduction to Modern Existentialism (New York:
Grove Press, 1962), p. 151

 

H. J. Blackham, ed., Reality, Man and Existence: Essential Works
of Existentialism (New York: Bantam Philosophy, 1971), p. 24.

 

 

Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by
David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton
University Press, 1941), p. 85.

 

Soren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life's Way_(Princeton, N. J.:
Princeton University Press, 1945), p. 182.

 

George A. Schrader, "Norman Mailer and the Despair of Defiance,"
in Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Leo Braudy
(Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 91.

Stages on Life's Way, p. 182..

Louis H. Mackey, "Soren Kierkegaard: The Poetry of Inwardness,"
in Existential Philosophers: Kierkegaard to Merleau-Ponty, ed.
George A. Schrader, Jr. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), p. 65.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 256.

Advertisements for Myself, p. 351.

 

65

16.

17.

18.
19.

20.
21.

22.

23.
24.

25.

26.
27.

28.

29.
30.
31.
32.

33.

34.

35.
36.
37.

66

H. J. Blackham, Six Existentialist Thinkers (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1959), p. 23.

 

Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (New York: A Signet Book,.
1968), p. 199.

 

Quoted by Blackham, Six Existentialist Thinkers, p. 28.

 

Norman Mailer, Cannibals and Christians (New York: A Dell Book,
1966), p. 307.

 

Ibid., p. 308.

William M. Salter, Nietzsche the Thinker (New York: Frederick
Ungar Publishing Co., 1968), p. 135.

 

 

The Armies of the Night, p. 54.

 

Nietzsche the Thinker, p. 137.

 

Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre, p. 105.

 

Advertisements for Myself, p. 302.

 

Ibid., p. 351.

Quoted by Janko Lavrin, Nietzsche: A Biographical Introduction
(London: Studio Vista Limited, 1971), p. 66.

 

Quoted by Ernst Breisach, Introduction to Modern Existentialism,
p. 46.

 

Cannibals and Christians, p. 3.

 

Ibid., p. 4.
Ibid.

Rod W. Horton and Herber W. Edwards, Backgrounds of American
Literary Thought (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967), p. 473.

 

 

Robert Solotaroff, Down Mailer's Way (Urbana, 111.: University of
Illinois Press, 1974), p. 15.

 

Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: ‘A Signet Book,
1948), p. 255.

 

Down Mailer's Way, p. 16.

 

Nietzsche: A Biographical Introduction, p. 82.

Down Mailer's Way, p. 99.

 

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.
43.

44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.

52.
53.

54.
55.

56.
57.
58.

59.

67

Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
(New York: Meridian Books, 1965), pp. 21-22.

 

Quoted by Jean Wahl, A Short History of Existentialism, trans. by
Forrest Williams and Stanley Maron (New York: The PhilOSOphical
Library, 1949), p. 23.

 

Ronald Grimsley, Existentialist Thought (Cardiff Wales: University
of Wales Press, 1960): p. 46.

 

Quoted and explained by Fernando Molina, Existentialism as
Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 66.

 

 

Introduction to Modern Existentialism, p. 83.

 

Norman Mailer, The Presidential Papers (New York: Bantam Books,
1964), p. 198.

 

Advertisements for Myself, p. 328.

 

Six Existentialist Thinkers, p. 94.

 

Backgrounds of American Literary Thought, pp. 482-83.

 

The Presidential Papers, p. 213.

 

Ibid.. PP; 213-14.
Ibid., p. 214.
Ibid.

Quoted by Alfred Stern, Sartre: His Philosophy and Existential
Ppychoanalysis (New York: Delacorte Press, 1967), p. 106.

 

 

Ibid.

F. H. Heinemann, Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (New
York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), p. 116.

 

Advertisements for Myself, p. 315.

 

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. by Hazel B. Barnes
(New York: The Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 77.

 

Advertisements for Myself, p. 86.

 

Ibid., p. 315.

Laura Adams, "Existential Aesthetics: An Interview with Norman
Mailer,“ 202.

Ibid.

60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.

68
The Presidential Papers, p. 176.

 

Ibid., p. 127.

 

Ibid., p. 176.

Existentialist Thought, p. 122.

 

Advertisements for Myself, p. 202.

 

The Armies of the Night, p. 35.

Advertisements for Myself, p. 327.

CHAPTER THREE

The American Existentialist Hero Searched:

The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore

 

 

When Ihab Hassan writes that Mailer is a novelist of shifting
ideologies, "from liberalism to radical socialism, and from the latter
to anarchic existentialism,"1 he obviously has Mailer's first two

novels, The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore, in mind for Mailer's

 

 

first shift, and the later writings, for his shift to existentialism.
It is certainly true that any critical analysis of Mailer's writing
should acknowledge his own desire to be read in chronological order.
Each of his major works does represent a stage in his intellectual and
literary development, and all are interrelated parts of a comprehensive

social and artistic vision. This is Barry H. Leeds' approach for his

 

The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer (1969), Robert Solotaroff's, for

his Down Mailer's Way (1974), and Laura Adams', for her Existential

 

 

Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer (1976). It is because Mailer has

 

chosen to imitate what he believes was the intent of Hemingway and
Lawrence: an author's books, taken in their entirety, should be a
historical document of a man and his times. Rather than following suit
with the above critics of Mailer but observing his own intention to

be understood, this study will also adopt the chronological approach

to understanding his constant effort in search of a hero who may

eventually make "a revolution in the consciousness of our time."
69'

70
As stated in Chapter One, from the very beginning, Mailer has been
a social-minded novelist and concentrated in his work on analyzing the
collapse of sustaining democratic values and attacking the sickness ahd
corruption of American society, deploring the fact that indiviudalism

has declined as totalitarianism has grown. Both The Naked and the Dead

 

(1948) and Barbary Shorg_(1951) contain in embryo the political ideas

 

which he later developed into his criticisms of totalitarianism and
mass culture on the one hand, and his hopes for changes in conscious-
ness, a psychic revolution on the other. Therefore, Mailer is not,
strictly speaking, a novelist of "shifting ideologies," because he has
not shifted from one ideology to another, rather, his liberal and
socialistic ideas, and existentialist thinking have been simultaneously
developed from the very beginning. It is only through his gradual
realization that neither the liberal reform nor the radical change
provides the solution for an individual to survive the wounds which
society inflicted upon him and to grow, does Mailer abandon all other
ideologies except existentialism. The following readings of Mailer's

first two novels will make this point self-evident.

The Naked and the Dead

 

Although The Naked and the Dead, technically speaking, was a novel

 

half-heartedly dismissed by Mailer himself as "a conventional war
novel" and repeatedly pointed out by critics as the most derivative of
his novels2 and though it was conceived and composed in a manner that
Mailer was not to use again, it is much more than a "war novel." "The
embracing action of the novel--the taking of a Japanese-held Pacific

island in World War II--is rendered with the skilled realist's commitment

71
to the truthful and vivid depiction of actuality."3 But in the year
of its publication Mailer put on record his view that The Naked and the
pp g though cast in the realist mold, is "symbolic," expressive of .
"death and man's creative urge, fate, man's desire tO conquer the
elements--all kinds of things you never dream of separating and stat-
ing so baldly."4 From Mailer's truthful depiction of actuality and the
symbolic meanings he himself suggested, the novel ought to be read on
several different levels. On the socio-political level, the book bears
the theme of conflicts between individual and society, and between
liberalism and fascism. On the existential level, the book takes on

the significance of the annihilation of authentic existence and the loss

of individual identity. Consequently, The Naked and the Dead is a

 

novel without a real Mailer hero. As will be shown, all six or seven
major characters have failed, in one aspect or another, to achieve
the stature of the heroic of any kind although a couple of them do
demonstrate a few prototypic qualities of an existentialist hero that
Mailer will make full development in his later writings.

The society Mailer was depicting in The Naked and the Dead was a

 

sick one which was to be viewed in the microcosm of an army division
that had been assigned the task, under Major-General Cummings, of
seizing a Pacific island from the Japanese. Thus the military organiza-
tion was the only social structure on the island, tightly organized and
efficiently ruled, but inhibiting any idea of individual fulfillment.
Individuals are alienated and threatened with pain, fear, and moral
destruction. The instrument of this organization was, of course, the
totalitarian officer or the enlisted men and its analogue was the

literal totalitarian in Germany and Japan which the apparatus was

72

created to fight. It is a specific example that the existentialist
philOSOpher, Karl Jaspers, feared. Jaspers regarded the social
structure of this kind as a sinister “apparatus," characterized by
"mass-life," and threatening the "real self" of every human being.5
Mailer specifically identifies it as fascist in that it enforces
obedience and submission through fear and violence, minimizing indi-
vidual contrasts and possibilities in order to strengthen its own
structure. The two main victims of the fascist apparatus are the
democratic American society which is seen as the provider of both
order and freedom, and the individual soldier who is put into the
impossible position of having to either surrender his humanity to the

system or lose his physical life in resisting it.

In The Naked and the Dead, by combining the fascist structure of

 

the army with the civilian society as it was described in the "Time
Machine“ flashbacks and the memories and actions of the soldiers, we
may find that not one character in the novel is free of circuits laid
out in him by the structures of his past and present. The "Time
Machine" flashbacks are used, as Norman Podhoretz put it, "to demonstrate
Mailer's contention that American society is essentially a disguised
and inchoate form of the army."6 Thus Mailer uses various backgrounds
of his characters to build a broad condemnation of American society and
politics. He is also advancing a perception of the human condition
darker and more hOpeless than that of any of his literary mentors, such
as, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Steinbeck: a total lack of any ennobling
or tragic qualities in his main characters.

For Mailer, war as a "social institution" in America has reduced

man to an animal existence. Animal imagery abounds in Mailer's "war

73

novel," particularly as a metaphor for the appearance and behavior of
the enlisted men. Dog eats dog, and a dogtag is hung around a man's
neck. Mailer's own fictional analogy (nap, p. 18)7 to Pavlov's ex- .
periments with dogs points out another fact of war--instead of man
fearing to become an animal, he is more fearful of becoming a man and
surviving. When the exhausted men dully drag their bodies up a swift
stream, it is "with the motions of salmon laboring upstream for the
spawning season (nap, p. 364)." Under enemy fire, the men are seen
"retreating pell-mell, sobbing like animals in anger and fear (nan, p.
398)." As Donald L. Kaufman has observed, "Above the enlisted man,
higher in the hierarchy of bestiality, the officers' style of atavism
is more refined."8 On reviewing his relationship with General Cummings,
Lieutenant Hearn can analyze what those ranked lower can only feel:

He had been the pet, the dog, to the master, coddled and

curried, thrown sweetmeats until he had had the presump-

tion to bite the master once. And since then he had been

tormented with the particular sadism that most men could

generate only toward an animal. (NEE; p. 247.)
Regardless of army rank or social position, all the characters in the
novel are little more than human equivalents of animals in a condition-
ing box.

When the purely narrative material--the sections devoted to ac-

counts of battle and descriptions of the jungle--is set aside, it

becomes clear that at the core The Naked and the Dead is primarily a

 

novel of character. It is around character that the entire action
revolves, and it is through character that Mailer finds his central
thematic meanings expressed on various levels. The "Time Machine"
sections are used to "explain" ten major characters as products of

their environments. Martinez, the Mexican-American in the novel,

74
dreaming of revenging himself upon white Protestant women, is the most
pathetic. Prejudice and its social and economic effects have closed
off the normal avenues of social mobility to him. Brought up on the .
same American fables as the HWhite Protestants," he wants to be like
them, "heroes, aviators, lovers, financiers," and to possess their
blond women. When his adolescence passes away with his dreams,
Martinez joins the army to be a hero. He is Sergeant Croft's only
friend, gaining his esteem by acts of daring. But his efforts to prove
to Croft that he is a better soldier than any other man in the platoon
has all dehumanized himself.

At the beginning of the novel he is already described as a human
equivalent of one of Pavlov's dogs; the sound of a shell fills him
with terror, and "now any sudden sound would cause him panic." Fear
of losing Croft's approval is the only force preventing him from col-
lapsing. He comes upon a Japanese soldier sitting behind a machine gun,
and for a brief instant: I

Martinez had a sense of unreality. What was to keep him from

touching him, from greeting him? They were men. The entire'

structure of the war wavered in his brain for a moment, almost
tottered, and then was restored by a returning wash of fear.

If he touched him he would be killed. But it seemed unbeliev-

able. (NQQ, p. 462.)

Paralyzed by fear, he remembers a conversation he had overheard between
two Texans, "Never trust a Mex when he's got a knife (nap, p. 463)."
And it is with a bayonet that he kills the Japanese sentry. Mailer has
rendered the incident significantly for two reasons. First, the human
reason is a feeble bastion and has no place in war. "Insofar as
Martinez and the guard ang men, they are men irrevocably isolated by

the hostility and distrust inherent in the human condition."9 They are

conceived more as animals than human beings. Second, Martinez is what

75

prejudice makes of himself; and indeed his personality is formed by
prejudice. He cannot overcome his sense of inferiority. Croft exempli-
fies in his self-assurance and aloofness the kind of man he would like
to be and Croft is that standard against which he measures all the
others:

His loyalty, his friendship, and his courage were all involved.

And as he looked into Croft's cold blue eyes he felt the same

inadequacy and Shabbiness, the same inferiority he always knew

when he talked to. . . to White Protestant. (Néfl, p. 538.)

Martinez's diametric opposite is Roth. Roth is the most ineffec-
tual man in the platoon and the most dishonest to himself. A Jew and
scapegoat, he is portrayed by Mailer as a contemptible character. A
college graduate, a declared agnOStic, a weakling and coward, he neither
says nor does anything except whine and indulge in self-pity. He prides
himself on being a "modern Jew," educated, "far above all the men here,“
superior to Goldstein who "was like an old grandfather full of mutter-
ing and curses, certain he would die a violent death (N§Q, p. 44)."
Because he has ad0pted the American middle class ethic and has for-
saken his religious identity, Roth has lost all ennobling qualities, but
been "torn, in fact, between the temptation to absolve himself of cer-
tain failures by crying anti-Semite, and the desire to play the agnostic

1."10 In short, he is another character who has lost "the

intellectua
courage to be."

Actually, Goldstein, the Jew who has retained a traditional Jewish
identity, is the stronger and better man. Goldstein, an orthodox
Jewish proletarian from Brooklyn, is good-natured and naive, but is

continually ridiculed by his comrades. His earliest ambition was to

be an engineer or a scientist. Trapped in poverty and fatherless, he

76
lives with his mother and grandfather in the filth of Brooklyn.
Marrying after graduating from a welding school, he discovers his
wife is frigid. Taught by his grandfather that the Jew's role in life
is to "suffer," he allows himself to be inducted, abandoning the
secure old habits and surroundings. In "turning his face to the wind,"
Goldstein is taking the first step in liberating himself from the
belief that "a Jew is a Jew because he suffers. Olla Juden suffers
(nap, 376)." His naivete and good-naturedness in one way adapt him
ideally to the victim's role. Whenever he suffers insults from the
others, he retreats into his grandfather's fatalism. But his suffering
from insults and ridicule is much relieved by the respect and friend-
ship he achieves with an illiterate Southerner, Ridges.

Ridges, son of a Mississippi sharecropper, is an unimaginative,
ignorant farm boy, characterized by a sustaining capacity to endure,
labor and suffer. He is also a Jew who believes in the Old Testament
conception of God and the world. He is the only soldier who is
genuinely religious. He does not question the inexorable working of
life's mysteries because they are to him insoluble, part of God's
indecipherable design. Ridges and Goldstein share one important trait:
they are both resigned to a life of modest ambition and an unresisting,
uncomplaining acceptance of a will external to their own. They both
build up their true friendship by the continuing effort to carry the
wounded and dying Wilson from the platoon's bivouac to the beach.

At first, after Wilson is wounded, Ridges, Goldstein, and two
others, Brown and Stanley, are selected to carry him back. The work
is painfully exhausting, and eventually the other two drop out. Both

Ridges and Goldstein, however, feel for a variety of reasons that they

77

must succeed in getting Wilson to the beach. They know no other pur-
pose in life for the two days they carry him; their lives have their
only meaning in their task. Even when Wilson finally dies, they con-'
tinue to carry his litter, as though their own lives are attached to
it. Mailer puts it this way:

Wilson was a burden they could not leave. Goldstein felt as

if he would be carrying him forever; he could not think of

anything else. The limits of his senses were confined to his

own body, the litter, and Ridges' back. He did not look at the

yellow hills or wonder how far they had to go. Infrequently,

Goldstein would think of his wife and child with a sense of

disbelief. They were so far away. If he had been told at that

moment that they had died, he would have shrugged. Wilson was

more real. Wilson was the only reality. (NéQp P. 520.)

Each man relates to Wilson and his job in terms of his own deepest
perceptions of reality. For Ridges, the Southern fundamentalist, the
salvation of his own soul depends upon getting Wilson to the beach. He
feels that if he were in any way responsible for Wilson's death his own
soul would be ineradicably blackened and he would go to hell. For
Goldstein, Wilson represents the heart of Israel, and his task recalls
to him his grandfather's words that Jews must suffer for all people,
thus making Israel "the heart of all nations." Thus both men come to
feel the basic truths of their religions. As James Scott has written,
Mailer

has selected as stretcher bearers two men of deep fundamental-

ist conviction--one a Christian and the other a Jew. Together

they represent whatever is most stable and most enduring in

Western culture. This almost primitive idealism, precisely

because it was designed to sustain a defeated people, a polit-

ical nonentity and a social minority, does succeed in that it
keeps them harnessed to their burden where Stanley and Brown,
nominal Christians, are incapable of real sacrifice.11

But Wilson dies of his stomach wound when Ridges unknowingly gives
him water and his body is lost in the rapids of a stream they have to

cross. "One moment they had been carrying Wilson, and now he had

78

disappeared. Their hands were empty (nap, p. 530)." As Robert
Solotaroff has pointed out, "Whatever Mailer had in mind, the rush of
the water that carries Wilson's body away generates the novel's most .
explicit statements about the contemporary spiritual dryness--the col-
lapse of those beliefs and values which have traditionally brought
significance to human activity. . . ."12

However, against the collapse of the traditional beliefs and values,
man should assert his own value by recognizing his own freedom and
considering himself as a free creator and the founded foundation of
all values. But both Ridges and Goldstein deny their own freedom,
hiding it from themselves with all kinds of deterministic excuses.
Like Goldstein assuming his fatalism, Ridges assumes his own by declar-
ing "The Lord giveth and He taketh away," and "God's ways were God's
ways. . . and a man did not try to brook them." It is through accepting
this kind of socially stable and inherited religious values as their
true and fixed identity that Ridges and Goldstein feel that all their
work they have ever done is meaningless. Ridges reflects:

All his life he had labored without repayment; his grand-

father and his father and he had struggled with bleak crops

and unending poverty. What had their work come to? "What

profit hath man of all his labor wherein he laboureth under

the sun?" The line came back to him. It was a part of the

Bible he had always hated. Ridges felt the beginning of a

deep and unending bitterness. It was not fair. . . . God's

way. . . . What kind of God could there be who always tricked

you in the end? (nap, pp. 530-31.)

Goldstein's reaction is equivalent:

And Goldstein stood beside him, holding onto Ridge's shoulder
to steady himself in the current. From time to time he would
move his lips, scratch feebly at his face. "Israel is the
heart of all nations. . . . All the suffering of the Jews
came to nothing. No sacrifices were paid, no lessons were
learned. It was all thrown away, all statistics.in the cruel
wastes of history," .'. . There was nothing in h1m at the

79

moment, nothing but a vague anger, a deep resentment, and
the origins of a vast hopelessness. (nan, p. 531.)

Both Ridges' "deep and unending bitterness" and Goldstein's "deep
resentment? indicate obviously that they have been deceived by what
they have believed in. That is the reason for their ultimate failure
to bring meaning to life. However, Mailer had had them fail to be
heroic through Bad Faith. For both Mailer and Sartre, conventional
values create for us a make-believe world, a world in which fears are
transformed into certainties and pretenses. In Sartrean terms, God,
as being-in-itself, is outside the range of human anguish. He provides
no example and less wisdom because, whatever intelligence he might
have to offer is established, as is all wisdom, through men.13 Sartre
described that contemporary man, deprived of God, is not easily
deprived of a desire to have the benefits provided by God. Bad Faith,
then, is the generic label for all such attitudes. Bad Faith, as
stated in the preceding chapter, also consists in pretending that we
are not free, that we are somehow determined, that we cannot help doing
what we do, having the role that we have. Acting upon their ancestors'
convictions, Ridges and Goldstein pretend to play the roles they are
required to. Acting in Bad Faith, they are both the deceivers and the
deceived at the same time.

Unable to unceasinly recreate his own values or even to quicken
within himself, sincerely and authentically, values that already exist,
taking refuge in false values and using them as a mask is, too, a kind
of Bad Faith. Both General Cummings and Lieutenant Hearn are examples
of Bad Faith in this sense. Intelligent and effective as Cummings is
in military affairs, he takes refuge in the false values of fascism.

On the other hand, under the mask of liberalism, Hearn is intellectually

80

crippled, only to be victimized by Sergeant Croft in the end. Mailer
has purposely chosen Cummings and Hearn to represent the clash between
the Fascist andliberal philosophies. The chief irony underlying the '
conflict between "the fascist" Cumnings and the "progressive-liberal"
Hearn is that "they are both officers involved in fighting a war against
fascism with a military instrument which is itself fascistic in organi-
zation, structure, and ideology."14

Instead of a real hero Mailer is seeking, Cummings is the special
object of both his satire and fascination. 0n the one hand, Cummings
embOdies many of the things that Mailer furiously protests against in
the American experience. But on the other hand, he also possesses some
qualities, such as strength and the stamina to resist the limitations
inherent in anyinen situation as final, that fascinate Mailer and he
wishes to develop them into his later existentialist hero. But in this
novel, Cummings is flatly disqualified as a Mailer hero because of his
Bad Faith, mistaking Nietzsche's "the will to power" for ”the drive for
power" and acting as a reactionary, instead of a radical individual, to
strengthen the American totalitarian system.

Son of a small-town robber-baron-banker, Cummings has repressed
his homosexuallbngingsby enormous exercise of self-discipline and
restraint received in the military schools. Suffering from paranoia, he
envisions that all men are envious of his social and intellectual super-
iority and wish to humiliate him. Therefore, he is the person most
preoccupied with power, who wishes to "control everything" on the island.
As Jean Radford has stated, "Cummings believes that beyond the desire to
survive and the sexual urge, instincts which men share with other ani-

mals, man's primary drive (gua man) is toward the achievement of power

81
over other men and the natural world."15

Cummingsi fascism directly stems from this view of man. He main-
tains that the best armies are those with a superior material force and
a poor standard of living (NAB; p. 138). Since America has the high
standard of living, its soldiers "have an exaggerated idea of the rights
due to others. It's the reverse of the peasant, and I'll tell you
right now it's the peasant who makes the soldier (nap, p. 139).” Con-
sequently, "to make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted
into a fear ladder." "The Army functions best," continues Cummings,
"when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your
subordinates (191g,)." The hate produced by such an arrangement can be
directed outward against the enemy. The fear ladder concentrates power
in the hands of the few, which fits the "realities" of modern life:

"The machine techniques of this century demand consolidation, with

that you've got to have fear, because the majority of men must be
subservient to the machine, and it's not a business they instinctively
enjoy (nap, p. 140)." By nature, that is, men lean toward their own
individual spontaneity, a tendency which authority must check. There-
fore, the general--or any officer--who possesses power cannot think of
his men as individuals. "In the Army the idea of individual personality
is just a hindrance. . . . I work with grosser techniques, common
denominator techniques (nap, 143)."

Such a doctrine is fascist in every way, and Cummings minces no
words in making the connection: "The concept of a fascism, far sounder
than communism if you consider it, for it's grounded firmly in men's
actual natures, merely started in the wrong country, in a country which

did not have enough intrinsic potential power to develop completely. In

82
Germany with that basic frustration of limited physical means there
were bound to be excesses. But the dream, the concept was sound enough
(nan, p. 253)." And then, as though to give validity to the fears of ‘
the liberals of the thirties, Cummings declares confidently: "America
is going to absorb that dream, it's in the business of doing it now
(nan, p. 254)." The "morality of future" is a "power morality," which
will give postwar American society the same form as the army. Here
Cummings sees the army as a metaphor of society.

According to Cummings, "power morality" is not merely a historical
event of one era, but has its psychological foundation in human nature.
In a conversation with Hearn, Cummings asserts that "man's deepest
urge" is not, as Hearn thinks, "the sexual urge" but "omnipotence":

To achieve God. When we come kicking into the world, we ang_

God, the universe is the limit of our sense. And when we

get older, when we discover the universe is not us, it's the

deepest trauma of our existence. (nap, p. 255.)

It sounds Nietzschean; it reminds one of Nietzsche's theory of "the will
to power." But in the context, Mailer obviously has the power-crazed
general mistaking Nietzsche's "the will to power" for "the drive for
power," and his Superman, for the supreme egotist, whose sole delight
is the exercise of power over the masses of people.

According to Psychoanalyst Arnold A. Hutschnecker, once Richard

Nixon's doctor, "The Drive for power can be neurotic, unrealistic and

so turbulent that it strives for a ruthless, godlife omnipotence. Born

 

out of man's weakness, it can serve to elevate him--though only for a

moment--to a position above all others. It is for this reason that some
people kill (Italic, mine)."16 Dr. Hutschnecker has not only precisely
described Cummings' symptoms but anticipated Croft's as well. Nietzsche

does have the idea that "The only thing that all men want is power, and

83

whatever is wanted for the sake of power." But, for Nietzsche, "The
acme of power is embodied in the perfectly self-possessed man who has
no fear of other men, of himself, or of death and whose simple per- .
sonality, unaided by any prOps, changes the lieves of those who meet
him only at second hand, in literature."17 Nevertheless, the power
that Cummings constantly talks about is the power which "can flow only
from the top down. When there are little surges of resistance at the
middle levels, it merely calls for more power to be directed downward,
to burn it out (N§Q, p. 255)." He dedicates himself both personally
and politically to the "power morality."

In the end, however, the power morality is rendered entirely inef-
fective. Mailer makes the men the victors over the danger of fascism.
Even though they have no systematic purpose, as a group they possess a
will over which no general or dictator has total control. Like Sartre,

describing the life of the French Resistance in The Republic of Silence,

 

Mailer makes Cummings understand:

The men resisted him, resisted change, with maddening inertia.
No matter how you pushed them, they always gave round sullen-
ly, regrouped once the pressure was off. You could work on
them, you could trick them, but there were times now when he
doubted basically whether he could change them, really mold
them. (nap, p. 556.)

Cummings also realizes that all his planning and all his brilliant tactics
meant nothing in winning the campaign, because it was during the period
when he was off asking for support from the navy, that the division,
commanded by his servile, inept aid, Major Dalleson, broke through the
Japanese lines and captured the island.

For a moment he almost admitted that he had very little or

perhaps nothing at all to do with this victory, or indeed any

victory--it had been accomplished by a random play of vulgar

good luck larded into a causal net of factors too large, too
vague, for him to comprehend. (nap, p. 555.)

84
At the same time he sees that all his theories about running an army
and all his theories about the evolution of history toward a period of
fear dominated by fascists and reactionaries no longer held together.

Time was going by, and with it Opportunity. 'It would be the

hacks who would occupy history's seat after the war, the same

blunderers, uncoordinated, at cross impulses. . . . There

would be few Americans who would understand the contradictions

of the period to come. The route to control could best mas-

querade under a conservative liberalism. The reactionaries

and isolationists would miss the bell, cause almost as much

annoyance as they were worth. Cummings shrugged. If he had

another opportunity he would make better use of it. What

frustration! To know so much and be hog-tied. (flég) P. 556.)

To shrug off the idea that history would be led by liberal hacks is
the ultimate irony for Cummings since he had spent his entire life build-
ing his conviction that the future of the world lay in the hands of the
reactionaries.

A typical example of the liberal, Hearn serves as the bridge con-
necting the two separate worlds of the officer and enlisted men. Through
his eyes and the conversations he has with Cummings, Mailer issues his
warning for the political shape of the post-war future. He has said,

" . . you can see something of the turn my later writing would take

in the scenes between Cummings and Hearn."18 For Mailer, Hearn is a
convenient vehicle for exposing the subconscious motives of the intel-
lectual liberal. Like Cummings, Hearn is the son of a dominant, wealthy,
boorish father, whom he rebels against. But his life is a series of
disillusionments--with parents, with prep school, with medicine, with
radicalism, with literary criticism, with his jobs as a literary edi-
tor, union organizer, and radio c0pywriter, and with one woman after
another. Hearn's own dilemma is typical of the modern liberal and

humanist: he is unable to commit himself to any kind of ideology

85

for solutions. Mailer calls him a "shell," a "hypocrite," a "hollow
man," a "bourgeois idealist." Drifting from one intellectual position
to another, he spends his life in each just long enough to discover .
the "shoddy motive" which will allow him to abandon it. As John
Aldridge has said, "His (Hearn's) class reservations prevent him from
becoming a good Communist; his Communist reservations prevent him from
becoming a useful member of his class. In the Army he is torn between
his obligations to the military hierarchy to which, as an officer, he
automatically belongs and his obligations to the men under him."19

The liberals of Hearn's generation are, however, no different in
intention than theoretical fascists like Cummings for whom power over
men is a source of pleasure. Although he rejects his theories as sim-
plistic and subhuman, Hearn acknowledges the intellectual power and the
personal magnetism of Cummings. His political liberalism fails to
oppose Cummings' "peculiarly American" fascism in their discussions. As
a man who "liked very few people and most men sensed it uneasily after
talking to him for a few minutes (nap, p. 258)," Hearn also fails at
the practical level in his relations with other men. Believing in the
necessity of revolution, he shrinks instinctively from those who would
have social control, knowing they will be no different from the reaction-
aries Cummings predicts will inherit the century. Hearn realizes the
truth in Cummings' assessment of liberals and radicals and the extent
to which it applies to him:

There are the ones who are afraid of the world and want to

change it to benefit themselves, the Jew liberalism sort of

thing. And then there are the young peOple who don't under-

stand their own desires. They want to remake the world, but

they never admit they want to remake it in their own image.
(11.811. p- 451.)

86

As Jean Radford has put it, "Hearn's weakness is twofold: he neither
challenges the terms of Cummings' argument. . . nor offers a consistent
humanist view of human nature."20 .

Therefore, Hearn's rebellion against the system is sterile and
ineffective, for it involves nothing more than a determination to pre-
serve their "inviolate freedom," as Hearn himself puts it, from “all the
wants and sores that caught up everybody about him (nap, p. 64)." In a
key passage, Mailer tells us that Hearn tries to "get by on style":

"The only thing to do is to get by on style." He had said

that once, lived by it in the absence of anything else, and

it had been a working guide, . . . The only thing that had

been important was to let no one in any ultimate issue ever

violate your integrity, and this had been an ultimate issue.

(NQD, p. 258.)
But as Norman Podhoretz has commented, "Style without content, a vague
ideal of personal integrity, a fear of attachment, and a surly nihilis-
tic view of the world are not enough to save a man in the long run from
the likes of Cummings, and certainly not enough to endow him with heroic
stature."21

Shortly before his death, Hearn recognizes something of his predica-
ment; "Beyond Cummings, deeper now, was his own desire to lead the
platoon. It had grown, ignited Suddenly, become one of the most satis-
fying things he had ever done (nap, p. 451)." Hearn sees in himself and
in all the liberals he had known, not frustrated do-gooders suffering
from "paranoia," but Fausts, as power-mad as Cummings and Croft. He is
appalled by his own discovery. He decides to resign his commission, but
his decision has never been carried out. When Cummings' strategy

requires a reconnoitering of the Japanese rear, Hearn is assigned to

the leadership of the reconnaissance patrol. This mission commences

87

action which mirrors the conflict between Cummings, Hearn, and the
trOOps, and further examines the fascist mentality. The platoon chosen
for the patrol has up to now been headed by Sergeant Croft. Croft sees
Hearn, as the official commander of the group, to be a threat to his
position. Deceived and out-maneuvered, Hearn is killed in an ambush
which the platoon blunders into because Croft had kept from him the real
results of Martinez' scouting mission the night before. Hearn had
tentatively decided to end the patrol after an ambush the day before,
but had been reluctant to face Cummings "with empty hands, excuses,

and failure (nap, p. 451)." Hearn's indecision and lack of faith in
his own judgment, which by now are habitual responses to very complex
situations, are partly responsible for his death.

Hearn's death is obviously symbolic, a preview of the fate of all
like-minded liberals in the new age of massive concentrations of power
in the super state of mass man. For Mailer he is a convenient vehicle
for exposing the subconscious motives of the intellectual liberal, the
true meaning behind the facade of upper-class equalitarianism. Norman
Podhoretz argues that what Mailer learns from the first novel is

That American liberalism is bankrupt because it cannot pro-

vide an answer to the challenge with which history has

presented it. Not only does liberalism confine itself to

the terms of the given at a time when there can be hope of

working within these terms, but it is animated by a vision

of the world that neither calls forth heroic activity nor

values the qualities of courage, daring and will that make

for the expansion of the human spirit. 2
He is of course referring here to the failure of a liberal like Hearn to
maintain any convictions about his life and his future, and his inability

to live an authentic life of any kind.

However, it is a character like Hearn in the novel "whose thought

88
most resembles that of the author at the time of writing. The fascina-
tion which Cummings holds for Hearn interestingly anticipates Mailer's
. telling James Baldwin in the late 19505. 'I want to know how
power works. . . how it really works, in detail':'
. . he couldn't escape the peculiar magnetism of the General,

a magnetism derived from all the connotations of the General's

power. . . . The General might even have been silly if it

were not for the fact that here on this island he controlled

everything. It gave a base to whatever he said. And as long

as Hearn remained with him, he could see the whole process

from the inception of the thought to the tangible and immediate

results the next day, the next month. That kind of knowledge

was the hardest to obtain, the most concealed in everything

Hearn had done in the past, aag it intrigued him, it fas-

cinated him (nan, pp. 68-69).

If Mailer, like his own creation, Hearn, is intellectually attrac-
ted to Cummings by his theory of power and his courage, he is emotionally
more attracted to Croft by his practice of power and his ruthless daring
to assure his power. After the death of Hearn, it is Croft who leads
the platoon on its doomed assault upon the mountain, "dominating his men
by the sheer intensity of his undefined 'hunger' for the mastery of

life."24 As Mailer later commented in The Presidential Papers, "Beneath

 

the ideology in The Naked and the Dead was an obsession with violence.

 

The characters for whom I had the most secret admiration, like Croft,
were violent people (PE, p. 136)."25 Although both intellectually and
ideologically, Mailer could not accept violence as one characteristic
of his existentialist hero in the making at the time of his first novel,
he did show his preference for Croft as an early embodiment of his
hipster in the sense that Croft is a character of will and passion,
instinctively and unflinchingly seeking a new self.

Unlike Cummings or Hearn, Sam Croft, revealed in his Time Machine,

is by nature a "mean" character. Why? Mailer answers:

89

He is that way because of the corruption-of-the-society. He

is that way because the devil has claimed him for one of his

own. It is because he is a Texan, it is because he had

renounced God.

He is that kind of man because the only woman he ever loved

cheated on him, or he was born that way, or he was having

problems of adjustment. (nan, p. 124.)
He is a man who "hated weakness" and "loved practically nothing." Like
Cummings, Croft is a latent homosexual in the sense that he cannot stand
to be touched by a man. Mailer also traces Croft's urge to omnipotence
to his psychic origins, "I hate everything which is not in myself (nap,
p. 130)." He shoots a Japanese prisoner for the thrill it gives him,
he uses other men's wives as a means of revenging himself on them. And
he threatens to kill Red Valsen, counterpart of Hearn in the enlisted
men, who possesses insight and sympathy to an extent, when he refuses to
continue up the mountain. Croft is incapable of establishing a rela-
tionship with any one; men are merely given to be hunted and shot. When
Hennessey becomes the platoon's first casualty, because of his own
frenetic attempts to move from a relatively secure position to one he
feels will be safer, the reactions of Croft and Red are dramatically
different. While Red fearfully senses the presence of some malignant
force, for Croft, "Hennessey's death had opened to Croft vistas of such
omnipotence that he was afraid to consider it directly. All day the
fact hovered about his head, tantalizing him with odd dreams and por-
tents of power (nap, p. 35)."

Croft's “crude unformed yigipn_in his soul (nap, p. 124) is, how-
ever, different from both Hearn's ineffectual liberalism and Cummings'
theoretical authoritarianism. It is something like "an energy with

fierce tendencies but no form."26 Croft knows no theories of power,

but "a man of practical activity, expressing a fearless, unself-conscious

9O
desire for poweri':27

Leading the men was a responsibility he craved; he felt power-
ful and certain at such moments. He longed to be in the
battle that was taking place inland from the beach. . . (nap,
pp. 26-27.)

No one can match Croft for effective leadership and active courage.
Even Hearn admits: "Croft they would obey, for Croft satisfied their
desire for hatred, encouraged it, was superior to it, and in turn
exacted obedience (nan, p. 349)." Croft enjoys his leadership over the
platoon and takes their fear and hatred as the inevitable consequence
of his command. Morally and emotionally estranged as he apparently is,
Croft finds compensation in his instinctive closeness with nature,
searching for a new unity of being.

Croft felt the nature of rock and earth, knew as well as he
knew the flexing of his muscles how in an age of tempest

the builders had strainted and surged until the earth had
shaped itself. He had always a feeling of that birth-storm
when he looked at land; he always knew how a hill would look

on the other side. It was the variety of knowledge that

felt intuitively the nearness of water no matter how foreign

the swatch of earth over which he was traveling. (Néfl; p. 494.)

Croft's love for nature is "felt intuitively," and he also takes
nature "as an index of self-fulfillment,"28 to satisfy his transcendent
ego. Accordingly, scaling Mount Anaka becomes an inevitable action,
psychologically and militarily. The imposing peak lies between the
American and Japanese positions on the island. At the sight of the
mountain, “Croft was moved as deeply, as fundamentally as caissions
resettling in the river mud.

The mountain attracted him, taunted and inflamed him with its

size. He had never seen it so clearly before. . . He stared

at it now, examined its ridges, feeling an instinctive desire

to climb the mountain and stand on its peak, to know that all

its mighty weight was beneath his feet. His emotions were
intense; he knew awe and hunger and the peculiar unique

 

91

ecstasy he had felt after Hennessey was dead, or when he had

killed the Japanese prisoner. He gazed at, almost hating the

mountains, unconscious at first of the men about him. "That

mountain's mighty old," he said at last. (nap, pp. 348-49.) .
By attempting to "conquer the elements," Croft intends to prove through
willpower his omnipotent new self, a self which has a complete mastery
of life and "which can free itself enough from the restrictions which
external circumstances have inflicted upon it to be open to the bles-
sings of the irrational."29

However, having dragged the exhausted soldiers almost to the sum-
mit, Croft blunders into a nest of hornets, and the men maddened by the
stings and completely beyond Croft's control, run pell-mell into a
wild tumble down the jungle-covered wall they have just painfully
scaled. The patrol's mission and climbing the mountain end almost
'farcically. Mailer flatly describes Croft's weary acceptance of defeat,
the platoon's return to the beach where they had landed, and Croft's
half-conscious relief "that he had found a limit to his hunger (NQQ,
p. 546)." Croft can only sense how close he came to uniting the forces
of nature with the irrational in his being:

Croft kep looking at the mountain. He had lost it, had

missed some tantalizing revelation of himself.

Of himself and much more. Of life.

Everything. (nap, p. 552.)
Mailer's humiliation of Croft is necessary to preserve the continuity of
failure under the totalitarian system. Just as nothing comes of
Cummings' elaborate calculations of strategy, so nothing comes of the
suffering enforced upon Croft's platoon by his efficient leadership.

Mailer's secret admiration for Croft and his redeeming effort

toward the end of the novel might have saved him from acting as another

example of Bad Faith, but Mailer's intolerance of the totalitarian

92

system of fascism for the future American society simply makes Croft
incapable of meeting his own criteria for heroism. Throughout the
novel, no one is allowed success, false hopes, or privilege of cer-
tainty. At the end of the book a foolish major is planning to lay a
co-ordinate grid system over a picture of Betty Grable to "jazz up“
his map-reading class. It is a last farcical reminder of the futility
of imposing any authoritarian patterns on the mysterious undulations
of life. Most men cannot, collectively, be made to do what they do
not want to do regardless of how skillfully they have been conditioned
to respond. Power used to control others tends to diffuse; only the
Croft's holding guns can force men to act against their instincts. And
even they can never master fortune, but must succumb to it as everyone
must. Undermining Cummings' certainty that the future of America will
be totalitarian is the complexity and diversity mirrored in the enlisted
Hen. No two are alike, their needs psychologically and economically
different, their outward behavior a distortion of the inner man. There
is no way to anticipate nor manipulate their behavior. They are "a
bunch of dispossessed. . . from the raucous stricken bosom of America
(nan, p. 278)." From such a group no hero can emerge. As Richard
Foster has observed, "One notices not only that a true hero is lacking
from the novel's epic-like action, but that his opposite, a forceful
antagonist, is lacking too."30

On the existential level, Mailer's thought is expressed in his
recognition of the meaninglessness of human life. There is no signifi-
cance in the battle between different political ideologies; there is no
significance in elaborate plans of actions, there is no final signifi-

cance in the actions themselves. It is only in isolated moments that

93

the individual can find any truth to his being, any meaning to his
life. But Mailer shows us that the individual of Bad Faith is incap-
able of grasping the truth in the existential moment; he is either .
incapable of understanding it intellectually or he rejects what his
subconscious mind tells him. Mailer says, in other words, that the
body, when placed in an existential situation, usually a confrontation
with death, will become naked and reveal its deepest urges to the in-
dividual. But the individual must be sufficiently alert either
intellectually or psychologically to capture the significance of the
moment. The novel shows us that the individual is capable of neither.
But the novel was absolutely necessary for Mailer to write, because
it raises the fundamental existential problem for him. If life is
meaningless, then how can man live a meaningful life in the present
era of America? What Mailer does in his work, from this point on

through to the present, is develop an existentialist hero who creates

his own values for his own life. But it is not until The Deer Park

 

and "The White Negro" does his American existentialist hero fully

emerge. In Barbary.Shore, he makes a further exploration into the

 

struggle between Capitalism and Communism in American society where
both systems have become so massive and so bureaucratized that they
are really two sides of the same coin, annihilating any idea of an

authentic individual existence.

Barbary Shore

 

Continuing his assessment of a situation in America in which one
must create his own values and assert his meaning of existence, Mailer

shifts his focus from the microcosmic island in The Naked and the Dead

 

94

to an insignificant Brooklyn boardinghouse in Barbary Shore (1951). It

 

has an air, as Mailer has put it, "of our time, authority and nihilism
stalking one another in the orgiastic hollow of this century (59!, p..
87)." And he further emphasizes that "much of my later writing cannot
be understood without a glimpse of the odd shadow and theme-maddened

light Barbary Shore casts before it (Ibid.)."

 

Along with the shift of the locale, the center of Barbary Shore has

 

also altered from the emphasis upon characterization to the stress of
ideology. The half dozen roomers in the boardinghouse are, instead of
being realistically presented, simply personified ideas. Like The Naked

and the Dead, Barbary Shore is once again a novel of non-heroes. Besides

 

Willie Dinsmore, who "served as a handle (§§, p. 7),"31 and is quickly
forgotten, all the other five major characters intended to reflect the
enduring reality of the sick American society, are either pathological,
or debased, or sexually perverted. As Diana Trilling has observed,

"Barbary Shore is a web of fine-spun phantasies, as obscure as they

 

are frightening, allowing us no connection with any recognizable world
of feeling. . . . Greed, cupidity, sloth, a sporadic and wildly mis-
directed energy, spiritless lust, stupidity, and mean ambition--these,
Mailer is telling us, are what today define democratic man, or woman;
_ .u32

Mickey Lovett, narrator of the story, is an amnesia victim with a
surgically reconstructed face and nothing but vague memories from the
past. He cannot recall anything but dream-like images of incidents, nor
even how his face was destroyed in the war. With no past to burden him
and no commitment to the future, Lovett lives in an existential situa-

tion of "the enormous present (ADV, p. 86)." Sensitive and intellectual,

95
he is seeking something to commit himself as the story begins during
the cold-war period in America. ‘To this end, he is led by Dinsmore to
the shabby boardinghouse in Brooklyn Heights, where he becomes involved
in a surrealistic atmosphere with the five other inhabitants of the
building. To Lovett's great surprise, living in the "cubicles" in the
anonymous house are a bunch of the transitory and the facless who like
him claim no identity and whose present has somehow disconnected from
their past. The gaunt, middle-aged McLeod is not merely a mild-mannered
department store worker, but a former Communist, once high up in the
party, who is now fleeing both from the Party and the FBI. McLeod
destroyed his identity ten years earlier and has been "obliged to take
up a wholly new existence (§§, p. 160)." Lannie Madison is a mental
patient who has lost the “record of [her] self (BS, p. 109)" during a
series of shock treatments. LeRoy Hollingsworth is not "a simple small-
town boy (§§, p. 29)," but a government agent, sent to interrogate
McLeod and get from him a "little object" of great importance. Even the
voluptuous, red-haired landlady, Beverly Guinevere, has some mystery
about her. Guinevere, it turns out, is McLeod's wife and her daughter
Monina is his, too.

As in The Naked and the Dead, Mailer's language throughout Barbary

 

§npng performs on two levels, the political-social and the psychological-
existential--one literal and the other usually ironic. As one
juxtoposed with the other, the language accordingly reaches the level

of symbolic significance. The little world of the boardinghouse func-
tions as a metaphor of the human mind. Just as each of the tenants

is partitioned in his or her separate room, so alienated in each mind

which reveals nothing but the rootlessness inherent in the structure

96

surrounding the thought. Rooms, like values and attitudes, are rented
for brief occupancy because people "Drifted in and out, drifted in and
out. . . as driftwood (§§, p. 18).'I And so do ideas shift with the
boarder. Lovett's first impression of the place is presented on his
arrival:

It was a big house and gave the impression of being an empty

house. Downstairs there were ten names arranged in ten

brackets next to as many bells which did not ring, but a

week could o by and I would pass no one upon the stairs.

(Bi. 9. 16.1J
Of the ten roomers, Lovett the narrator introduces his readers only to

four. In Barbary Shore, the human nature seems unable to form a com-

 

plete and satisfying design for its courage. The American bureaucracy

which has succeeded in stifling the human personality assumes the same

.~

kind of totalitarianism seen in The Naked and the Dead which makes

 

individual existence impossible.

In order to explain how the novel deals simultaneously with the
themes on various levels, it might be best to describe briefly the
characters and their symbolic significance in the novel. The struggle
between Capitalism and Communism is presented through the struggle
between McLeod and Hollingsworth. At the beginning of the novel, they
serve to represent adequately the two Opposing forces.

Hollingsworth (whose name reminds one of the Hollingsworth of

Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance) is the stereotyped citizen of the

 

American capitalistic society. Mailer deliberately makes him a mass
of incongruities. His personal appearance and manner are falsely
assumed:

He was obviously from a small town; the talk about the weather,

the accent, the politeness were unmistakable signs. The simple
small-town boy come to the big city.

97

The features were in character. He had straight corncolored

hair with a part to the side, and a cowlick over one temple.

His eyes were small and intensely blue and were remarkable
immediately, for his nose and mouth were without distinction. .
He was still freckled. . . .

I had a picture of the places in which he had slept through

his boyhood: a bed, a Bible, and in the corner a baseball

bat perhaps. As though in confirmation, the only decoration

upon his wall was a phosphorescent cross printed on card-

board. (§§, p. 29.)
In contrast to his personal appearance his room is in terrific disarray,
but the floors and windows and woodwork are clean. It is as if he
searches his own room after cleaning it, for it "seemed to be visited
more by violence than by sloth (Ibid.).“ To complete the portrait,
Mailer gives Hollingsworth a small-town background, parents who own a
store, and as a cover story, a job in New York on Wall Street. Mailer's
choice of Hollingsworth, whose features are "without distinction,” seems
to suggest that "secret policemen do not spring full blown from the
ground, bearing fangs and truncheons, but appear naturally from the
ranks of the populace when governmental policy requires them."33

HollingSworth proves to be a cunning and relentless detective, who
displays no real understanding of political or moral issues. He is
interested only in facts, and is contemptuous of theory and feeling. He
may befit the representative of the fascistic force that is to execute
the political dreams of a Cummings, but he has none of the general's
intellectual distinction to understand the issues of a Capitalistic
society like America.

We ain't equipped to deal with big things. If this fellow

came to me and asked my advice, I would take him aside and

let him know that if he gives up the pursuits of vanity,

and like everybody else, he'd get along better. . . . I

don't give two cents for all your papers. A good-time

Charley, that's myself, and that's why I'm smarter than the
lot of you. (§§, p. 31).

98
A self-styled realist, Hollingsworth is, ironically, totally blind to
the reality in which he acts. Through the novel he moves machine-like,
directed by a power remote from the scene of his activities. There- .
fore, he is a creature of conditions be neither controls nor compre-
hends. His only ethic appears to be one of self-advantage. Toward
the book's end he is ready to desert his country for personal gain,
for he decides to appropriate the "little object" from McLeod, he
still must flee to repeat the pattern of hiding from the secret police.
The hunter becomes the hunted. Instead of a hero in any sense, he is a
debased character who embodies all the qualities that Mailer despises
in the "average" American. Thus under the control of the totalitarian
establishment, as McLeod analyzes the forces that made the Third World
War inevitable, "the aim of society is no longer to keep its members
alive, but quite the contrary, the question is how to dispose of them."
Far from being strong and purposeful, Hollingsworth is one of those
bureaucrats who come to power "at the very moment they are in the act
of destroying themselVes."
McLeod's own answer to totalitarianism is "revolutionary socialism."
According to McLeod, revolutionary socialism postulates an Open system
which will be created when enough individuals choose to be free in

themselves, and act on their own motives to break out of the rigid

classifications of the conformist society. But Barbary Shore gives no

 

reason to hope that such a new era will ever be ushered in. McLeod
becomes an impotent, betrayed, and self-betraying idealist of the
old revolutionary left.

McLeod is a revolutionary socialist who worked for the Communist

Party for nineteen years, mainly in EurOpe, and became known during this

99
period as "the Hangman of the Left." After what he calls "nineteen
years with the wrong woman (BS, p. 87)" and the signing of the Nazi-
Soviet pact, he leaves and returns to the US to work for the State
Department. After a year of this he leaves and works at various jobs
under the name of William McLeod. Traced by the FBI who wish to recover
the mysterious “little object," he agrees to undergo interrogation
sessions to reconstruct his past actions. It is through him that
Mailer is able to introduce long passages of Marxist theory. In one
of his many speeches during the "interrogation" which Hollingsworth
puts him through, McLeod tries to explain his analysis of the forces
of history and particularly the compulsion of Capitalist monopoly to
expand. He predicts the future as a series of wars which will result
from the inability of such an economy to fulfill itself--the classic
Marxist position. The result of these wars will be the artificial
stimulation of the economy leading eventually to artificial competition
within the growing bureaucracy of government. Such competition will
become so fierce that failure to succeed will lead to the expulsion or
even death of bureaucrats. This then introduces the stage of cannibal-
ism where the bureaucracy starts to destroy its own members in order to
survive. McLeod's prophecy has already partially materialized.

The psychological implications of this are ironic, for as a result
of the extraordinary pressures bureaucrats will live under, they will be
torn between saving themselves as individuals and devoting themselves
totally to the establishment. He puts his prediction of such a psycho-
logical tension this way:

There is a conflict between their [the bureaucrats'] desire

for a private life and their public and party obligations.

They function for the collectivity and the most terrible
greeds for personal enrichment begin to torment them.

100

Psychologically, the check must at last be paid. The bureau-
crat becomes driven to express his personality through anti-
social action. (BB, p. 201.)

It would appear that McLeod is describing the evolution of the false .
Hipster in this portrayal of the evolution of the bureaucrat. Mailer
sees a relationship between the reactionary and the Hipster, especially
in their conviction that it is man's tendency toward collectivity that
is destroying his basic biological nature. The irony, of course, is
that the reactionary, believing as he does that Communism is his great-
est enemy, moves even further into the very bureaucracy he detests,
feeling to his dismay that this is a temporary but necessary step to
survival. The ultimate result of such a step, however, as McLeod points
out, is a manifestation that intensifies the bureaucracy and distorts
the desire from a return to a basic biological orientation in life into
the barbaric. Thus instead of the bureaucrat turning inward to free
himself, to liberate his flesh and discover his soul, as the Hipster
would do, he becomes masochistic, feeding on himself in order to achieve
some sustenance for survival. And, finally, this masochism turns out-
ward into sadism.

Hollingsworth is obviously the epitome of such a bureaucrat. His
relationship with women reflects his obsession to have them do his will.
But his relationship with Guinevere is the example par excellence.
Lovett reports a scene between Guinevere and Hollingsworth as follows:

I was to hear another Hollingsworth. "Yes, I love you," he

said, his delivery pitched in novel tones for me. As though

language with a catapult he proceeded to tell her how he loved

her, his speech containing more obscenity than I had ever

heard in so short a space, and in rapid succession, with a

gusto which could have matched Guinevere's description of the

doctor (one of Guinevere's fantasies), he named various parts

of her body and described what he would do to them, how he
would tear this and squeeze that, eat here and spit there,

lOl

butcher rough and slice fine, slash, macerate, pillage, all

in an unrecognizable voice which must have issued between

clenched teeth, until his appetite satisfied, I could see

him squatting beside the carcass, his mouth wiped carefully .

with the back of his hand. With that, he sighed, as much as

to say, "A good piece of ass, by God." (BB, p. 146.)

Thus after Hollingsworth concludes telling Guinevere of his "love" he
insists that she tell him what it is like to sleep with her husband.
She replies, "Don't think of that character as my husband."

But she would deprive Hollingsworth of something very essential.

"Oh, yes, he is your husband, and there's no getting away from

that I would say." He must have been holding her now. "And

you know, he's an unusual fellow. I can see how a girl would

get a crush on him." His voice throbbed suddenly. "He's been

a big fellow in his time." (BB, p. 147.)

What Hollingsworth doesn't recognize, but McLeod is beginning to realize
is that such bureaucrats move the world toward a giant concentration
camp, a reduction to a condition of cannibalism. Both men are the
guards of such a camp..

Following the Troskyist interpretation, Mailer believes that the
Russian Revolution was betrayed by the bureaucratism of the Stalinists
in dealing with the economic crisis after the revolution. However, a
man of acute intelligence and analytic mind as McLeod is, in the early
stage of his life he deserts his position of the theorist and revolu-
tionary but becomes an instrument of the Stalinist state and is active
throughout the purges and work camps of the thirties. For the Party,
he even commits such acts as the murder of deviationists. To Lannie,
McLeod is more cannibal than Hollingsworth. She explains this to
Lovett:

He destroyed the world, do you understand? (She is speaking

of McLeodl) He's a murderer of the best (She is referring to

McLeod the Stalinist who is connected in her mind with the

murder of Trotsky) and thus he gives an impression of being
one of the best, just as my friend is a murderer of the

102

worst, and so you do not like him. One after another, through

the years, he picked them off, all of the best, and each

night he would come home and prostrate himself before the

picture of the man with the pipe, and say, "Oh, My Lord, in

my thoughts L have transgressed against Thee," and then he

would spit at the picture with all the force of his puny

. neck and say, "What crimes have I committed in Thy Name,"

and spit again, spit, spit, until he could only weep, and

the picture of the man with the pipe never taking his eyes

off him because he is waiting and it comes; "Forgive me, my

Lord," he cries, "for I know not what I do." (BB, pp. 151-152.)
McLeod is a bureaucrat like Hollingsworth. Lannie is apparently dis-
gusted by his hypocritical Christianity. Even McLeod himself recognizes
the parallel when the bureaucrat of the monOpoly Capitalism faces the
former bureaucrat of "State capitalism": "The truth is that there are
deep compacts between LeRoy and myself, you might almost say we are
sympathetic to each other (BB, p. l72).'I

Mailer condemns both kinds of capitalism as totalitarian. They
do not take people as human beings, but as tools to be manipulated in
the development of the bureaucratic system. But what makes McLeod in
his later stage a character not as despicable as Hollingsworth is the
contrast between the self-recognition of the former and the self-
assurance of the latter. As Barry Leeds has observed, "He [Hollingsworth]
is, finally, despicable because he is so unquestioning in his assurance
that what he does is right,"34 But on the other hand, McLeod is dis-
illusioned by the betrayal of the Revolution and ashamed of his own part
in that betrayal. Furthermore, McLeod comes to understand himself that
the meaning in life is not found in the facts of one's existence but
rather in the form that one's existence takes. In other words, the
form of one's life reveals the battles that one's soul had undergone

and when one sees one's whole life spread out before him, as in a pic-

ture or a novel, then one has an existential vision of what he really is.

103
McLeod comes to this understanding not by the things which Hollingsworth

has accused of him, for it turns out that they are not really true, but

as the result of the metaphoric truth in what Hollingsworth has said.
Thus McLeod says to Lovett about Hollingsworth's interrogation:

I can assure you that all through it, all through the fiction
and fancy of all the things I was alleged to have done in
Mediterranean waters, there was not a word of legal truth

and all the parallel truth in the world because if it were
not one act I committed it was another, and you must notice
his devilish cleverness, unconscious I am certain, for his
instincts are perfect. He knew how I would react if the
specifics were given. I've covered that over for myself
these years, oh, aware what I did, but none the less there's
a certain crutch to the name of a thing, it all seems more
reasonable and possible until you put it figuratively, muzzle
if you come down to it, blasts you in the face. (BB, p. 172.)

McLeod's new understanding does enable him to re-modify his vision
to the existential position for the future of man. In many ways it is
similar to Mailer's. McLeod sees human life as a drama in which the
individual man witnesses the struggles between Opposing forces going on
within himself and in the universe at large. And he is led to this
vision through his realization 0f the significance of the metaphorical
way of looking at human and historical events. His vision of the
future is delivered in his last meeting with Hollingsworth. He says:

But how may it come about? Here we arrive at what is the
knot of history. We assumed far too long that socialism

was inevitable and the error has reduced us to impotence.
Socialism is inevitable only if there will be a civilization.
What we have never considered is the condition that there
would not be. For socialism as I have remarked is not a
positive rag to be cut to shape by the politician's scissor.
It depends upon the potentiality of the human, and that is an
open guestion, impossible to determine philosophically. Well
may it be that men in sufficient numbers and with sufficient
passion and consciousness to create such a world will never
exist. If they do not, however, then the human condition is
incapable of alleviation, and we can only witness for a century
at least and perhaps forever the disappearance of all we

have created. (BB, p. 203.)

104

But, if we succeed, what a period will follow! I am not a

prophet dreaming of heaven, I do not assume that we leap at a

bound from hell to Arcady. At last there will be, however, a

soil in which man may play out his dream. It will be a time of .

the most extraordinary contrasts, a time of despair as well as

of hope, a moment when each injustice which is ended may birth

another, one we cannot conceive yet. There is so little we

know about ourselves, our historical life has been spent in

battling nature and each other. This will be the Opportunity

to discover of what we are capable and what we shall never

achieve. We may even learn if we can attain a rational life

or if we are condemned to remain forever the most tragic of

the animals. It will be the first time in history that man

freed of hostile environment shall be able to discover his

real dilemmas and real fulfillment if there is any. How I wish

I could see that day. It would be so much more interesting

than our own. (BB, p. 205.)

What McLeod is expressing in his vision is the existential fulfillment
of a man's life to his essential Being. In this sense, what McLeod is
expressing could be the real substance of the "little object" that he
has stolen from the State Department, which is never identified. But
"we can be fairly confident in thinking of it as Hope or Dedication or
Vision or a 'coagulation' of all three."35 Foreseeing his own doom
and his incapacity of protecting the "little object" any longer,
McLeod passes it on to the narrator Lovett before he is finally killed
by Hollingsworth.

For all his acute intelligence, repentent conscience and existential
vision, McLeod, however, has been killed as a victim instead of a Mailer
hero. He has not succeeded in achieving a heroic stature of heroism.
McLeod suffers from exhaustion and inertia. "All he has left is heroic
verbosity and his overdeveloped conscience."36 At one point, Hollings-
worth's criticism is certainly correct when he says, "Youfre just like
an old thing. . . . Bable, bable, bable about how sweet-it used to be.
Only you make it the future (BB, p. 206.)." All McLeod's action has

yielded to memories of a prior commitment to the revolution. Therefore,

105

McLeod is a character who shows no likelihood of growth, no sign of
vitality, but all the evidence of emotional cripple. The fact that he
is murdered by Hollingsworth of course indicateS‘that'he is a victim .
of both kinds of Capitalistic systems. He has never been, though a

Communist, a free agent, like Sartre's Hugo of Dirty Hands; nor has he

 

ever had the chance to affirm his individual freedom and turn himself
into a Sartrean tragic hero.
A Mailer hero McLeod has not been, but his importance in the novel

cannot be overlooked either. McLeod's function in Barbary Shore is

 

threefold: (1) serving as the vehicle to express Mailer's prescient
warnings about the American economy's growing dependence on war produc-
tion, (2) by understanding his personal history we are presented that
"The historical function of La Sovietica is to destroy the intellectual
content of Marxism (BB, p. 174)," (3) whatever hope revolutionary
socialism may still offer, it must be communicated to the younger
generation. Thus it is Lovett who finally inherits the "little object"
and becomes the agent of what good can be taken from the book: the
"remnants of (McLeod's) socialist culture (BB, p. 223)" to be protected
in troubled times until it can be restored to its rightful place of
power.

In creating a character like Lovett without an identity, Mailer
liberates him from all determining influences; family, environment,
education, and most important, a political past. He can see the his-
torical trend better than the others because he is outside of it, has
no stake in it, no burden of guilt from the past to impair his vision.
Under McLeod's tutelage his early reading in Marx and Trotsky are revived.

For instance, after his first discussion with McLeod, Lovett begins to

106

recall his days as a member of a Trotskyite study group, and he
describes them in a remarkably evocative passage:

1 was young then, and no dedication could match mine. The
revolution was tomorrow, and the inevitable crises of capi-
talism ticked away in my mind with the certainty of a time
bomb, and even then could never begin to match the ticking
of my pulse. . . . For a winter and a spring I lived more
intensely in the past than I could ever in the present, until
the sight of a policeman on his mount became the Petrograd
proletariat crawling to fame between the legs of a Cossack's
horse. . . . There was never a revolution to equal it, and
never a city more glorious than Petrograd. (BB, pp. 90-91.)

As we can see, his awakening is strictly theoretical. There is no
memory of bloody hands and betrayals, merely a recollection of a youth-

ful enthusiasm for Trotsky's epic Russian Revolution and the promise of

 

a new world created in the Soviet model of a socialist culture. Upon his
reviewing the present world situation, he finds that the Russian Revo-'
lution and the Communist movement have changed nothing for mankind:

The proletariat which crawled to glory beneath the belly of

a Cossack's horse, the summer flies of Vyborg, I could see

it all again, and know with the despair which follows fervor

that nothing had changed, and social relations, economic

relations were still independent of man's will. (BB, p. 117.)
Mailer felt that the Russian Revolution, as noted earlier, had failed
because it had not abolished the totalitarian system and so had not made
a revolution in the consciousness of the Russian people. Several years

after the appearance of Barbapy Shore Mailer declared that Marxism had

 

failed in application because it was "an expression of the scientific
narcissism we inherited from the nineteenth century" and motivated by
"the rational mania that consciousness could stifle instinct (BBB, p.
336)."

In Lovett, therefore, Mailer seems to have presented a muted hope.

The last paragraphs of the book summarize Lovett's final point of view:

107

So the heritage passed on to me, poor hope, and the little

object as well, and I went out into the world, If I fled

.down the alley which led from that rooming house, it was

only to enter another, and then another. I am obliged to .
live waiting for the signs again.

Thus, time passes, and I work and I study, and I keep
my eye on the door.

Meanwhile, vast armies mount themselves, the world re-

volves, the traveller clutches his breast. From out the

unyielding contradictions of labor stolen from men, the

march to the endless war forces its pace. Perhaps, as the

millions will be lost, others will be created, and I shall

discover brothers where I thought none existed.

But for the present the storm approaches its thunderhead,

and it is apparent that the boat drifts ever closer to shore.

So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings

to one another until their voices are lost. (BB, p. 223.)
The image of the drifting voyager recurs throughout the book. In the
first chapter Lovett describes a frequently recurring dream in which a
traveller returning home in a taxi through the streets of his native
city suddenly finds everything unfamiliar. The traveller, horrified and
afraid that he is dreaming, allows the cab to go on and on, while Lovett
shouts to him that "this city is the real city, the material city, and
your vehicle is history (BB, p. 7)." But the traveller cannot hear him.
And the final sentence of the book: "So the blind lead the blind and
the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost."

The frail vessel of civilization is drifting helplessly down upon
the Barbary shore. Why Barbary? The answer is given by Guinevere, who
has asked Hollingsworth to take her away with him. When he asks her
where she wants to go, she replies "Anywhere. To the ends of the earth.
To Barbary--I like the sound of that (BB, p. 148)." Anywhere. The

sickness of American society, Mailer seems to be saying, is mindless and

cannot be treated rationally. Under the totalitarian system, American

108
society lacks interest in any ideas at all. It has become a great
Guinevere--materialistic, faithless, obsessed with its own sensual

gratification. In Barbary Shore Mailer goes much deeper into the

 

psychic origins of behavior than in The Naked and the Dead. Although
his characters are not presented primarily in sexual terms as they
are in much of his later work, their sexual natures begin to take on
significance as the story develops to the latter part. As John Stark
has noted, "This Marxism-Capitalism dichotomy becomes less important
as the book progresses, not because Mailer chooses Marxism but because
he begins to believe that politics are less important than psychological
problems."37

The psychological problems are largely caused by the Hollywood
culture which includes the frustrating sexual pressure that the charac-
ters feel. 0n the political level, McLeod seems to have received most
of our attention; but on the cultural level, Guinevere is obviously the
center about which the other characters sexually revolve. This does not
mean that she is in control of any of them, but it means that she repre-
sents a pivotal point which all get in touch with at some time. While
Hollingsworth is the epitome of the bureaucrat of the Capitalistic
government, Guinevere is the epitome of a sick body of the Capitalistic
culture. All her values are the values of Hollywood, where she claims
to have slept around and where she dreams of sending her daughter
Monina. With a background in burlesque, she is a sex advertiser whose
motives are materialistic and vulgar. The brief summaryof her "story
that's worth a million bucks (B§, p. 46)" is a perfect example of bar-
baric art or her own sexual fantasies. In the boardinghouse, she makes

her bedroom available to first one and then another of her lodgers and

109

seems always to have been prepared to accept anyone who shows interest
in her, for she freely relates to Lovett, "I tell you I've had all
kinds of men, and there hasn't been one of them who didn't fall in
love with me (B§, p. 4l)."

Guinevere is in fact McLeod's wife. They dwell under the same
roof but no longer occupy common quarters or maintain any semblance of
keeping their marriage intact. On the contrary, it is Hollingsworth who
boasts of his "interesting experiences with the lady downstairs."
Furthermore, after discovering the nature of Hollingsworth's mission,
Guinevere is ready to sell out her husband and proposes that they get
hold for themselves of the "thingamajig (B§, p. 182)" which McLeod has
and run away to sell it to some foreign power. It seems that she lives
a life completely outside politics, just to live by and for the grasping,
mindless self. As a matter of fact, McLeod's love for Guinevere is
greater than he consciously admits, but it fails because his attempts at
reconciliation with her are intellectual and verbal, in a language
foreign to the sensual "queen." And McLeod does not understand her
language either; he does not realize until too late that existence must
be sensual as well as intellectual. Here is McLeod's last attempt to
reconcile and his final breakup with Guinevere:

"I've realized something. You loved me when we married, and

I could love you now. I would devote the energy I possess,

for you and for the child. Do you understand? You could

blossom in the admiration I would furnish, and there's a part

of you never given up the idea." So he (McLeod) would woo .

her (Guinevere). . . .

"You got a crust," she shrieked suddenly. "Anybody else offers

. offers me lots of things," she finished lamely, "and you
won't give me anything, not even when you can." (B§, p. l82.)

What Guinevere wants from McLeod is of course devoted love and material

possessions. ,

110

Politically speaking, Guinevere is the American masses, who are
fascinated by materialistic and lascivious desires but ignorant of po-
litical doctrine. As she once expressed, "I don't know anything about.
politics (BS, p. 24)." McLeod married Guinevere for purely rational
reasons at the beginning: both the Party and the FBI were looking for
a single man, so he tried to confuse them by marrying. Their failed
marriage seems to suggest on the political level the broken relationship
of Marxism with the American masses. While one lacks the prOper emo-
tional involvement, the other has no comprehension of the historical
forces struggling in her times. But on the psychological level,
Guinevere is unable to be intellectual partner to McLeod while he in
turn cannot give what she needs. Both are narcissistic and can only
find pleasure in seeing the reflection of themselves in others but not
the compassionate love for each other.

A mindless hedonist and masochist, Guinevere uses sex not only to.
play upon Hollingsworth and Lovett, but she also employs it to discover
new forms of ecstasy with Lannie. Lannie, like McLeod in this sense,
is haunted by her feelings of guilt for the death of Trotsky. She has
a perverse need for martyrdom. She seeks sex as a form of punishment
and gets a strange pleasure from her sexual degradation. Her sexual
relations with Lovett, Hollingsworth, and Guinevere all reflect this
psychic need for pain and punishment. In Lannie, we get an image of
pathological alienation.

Lannie is an ex-Trotskyite who was literally driven mad by the
murder of Trotsky, and has spent the time since l939 in various institu-
tions, receiving a series of shock treatments. She escaped her last

clinic, only to be involved in the boardinghouse. Lovett tries to save

111

her with sex, yet the best response he can elicit from her is at first
a "fathomless desperation." "If it were love, it was also fear, and
we might have huddled behind a rock while the night-wind devoured the
plain." "Save me," "I heard her cry (BB, p. lOD)." When he tried
again, remembering a girl he had once taught "to love her flesh,"

Lannie reacts like "sweet suffering Jesus upon the Cross (BB, p. llO)."
Working with Hollingsworth, she, however, enjoys his brutality, "the
peace of being with a man who looks at you as if you do not exist, so
that slowly you're beaten beneath him. . . and love has finally come the
only way I want ever to see it is when it is smoke and I am in the

opium den and thugs beset me, I do not care for I feel nothing any

more (BB, p. ll3)."

Driven by a hostile world into psychosis, Lannie tells Lovett,
"There is neither guilt nor innocence, but there is vigor in what we do
or the lack of it." By her version of reality, she sees.vigor in both
Hollingsworth and Guinevere. She believes that Hollingsworth is strong
and purposeful:

"You see he's consecrated, and we just wander, and every day

is new to us and ends by being silly, but he has a purpose

and so he's fortunate." (BB, pp. 108-l09.)

To her he is the embodiment of those who now rule the earth. What she
finds in Guinevere is good and beautiful. We may understand this from
a plea that Lannie makes to Guinevere for her love.

You are different. There is no one else like you, and you

are beautiful. . . . To think of you years ago. . . and how

everyone passed through you and over you. . . . You were

too beautiful, and what did they know of you, what does a

boat know of the ground it soils? You gave yourself to

them, and yet you were always free, for you wanted more than

they did, you agreed to them and followed their ways, but

you were miserable because that could never be for you.
How could you love them when it was only yourself that you

 

112

loved, and you were so right in that because we are born to

love ourselves and that is the secret of everything. All

your life you searched for a mirror to find your skin glows

and your body swells in rapture and the hymn that is in you .
may be sung to yourself. . . . And that is why you love me,

for I would be a mirror to you, and we escape only when we
follow our mirror and let it lead us out of the forest. I

can let you see your beauty, and so you will love me for I

adore you and unlike the others want nothing but to lie in

your arms, the mirror." (BB, p. l86.)

 

Distorted as Lannie's vision of reality is, what she speaks about
Guinevere is more truly than she knows. Without doubt, Guinevere is the
most obvious narcissistic and sexually-obsessed character in the novel.
To a certain extent, Lannie j§_the mirror to everyone in the novel,
especially Guinevere and Hollingsworth at the beginning. As has been
pointed out earlier, both are products of the historical forces and
the culture. Both lust for power but fulfill themselves only in their
fantasies. Hollingsworth lives a world circumscribed by the bureau-
cracy, and Guinevere lives in a world circumscribed by Hollywood. Both
see reality as that which is presented to them by the mass media, and
it is this reality which cuts them off from the psychic levels of their
being which flow beneath their public minds. Their attitude toward
reality can be summed up through a dialogue between McLeod and
Hollingsworth.

"Would you call yourself a realist?" McLeod asked almost

dreamily.

"That's the word a fellow would employ for me.“

"Then,philosophically speaking, you believe in a real world."

“More words," Hollingsworth sighed. "I'll say yes.“

"A world which exists separately from ourselves."

"Oh, yes, that was what I wanted to say."

"You didn't," McLeod told him. "I want to point out to you

that no one may be disqualified from coming close to a

knowledge of the relations of such a world. One's psycho-

logical warp, upon Wthh you harp so greedily, may be precisely

the peculiar lens necessary to see those relations most clearly."
"You're trying to confuse me," Hollingsworth said. (BB, p. l94.)

113

The irony of Hollingsworth's disclaimer that McLeod is trying to con-
fuse him is obviously that McLeod is trying to enlighten him and show
him that the world he would like to see and his relations with that
visionary world are within. But neither he nor Guinevere can see this,
so it is signficantly paired that they run off together at the end of
the novel in bewilderment and fear, Guinevere shouting, "I'm doomed,
I'm doomed," and Hollingsworth whimpering, “It's off we go. . . and
no time to lose, and now nobody will ever have it (the "little object"),
and what have I done (BB, p. 22l)?"

As the mirror to McLeod, Lannie sees McLeod as the virtual assassin
of Trotsky. It is under Lannie's tirade that McLeod loses control of
- himself, not really under Hollingsworth. When Lannie shouts at him,
"Have you. . . ever opened the door to the assassin outside (BB, p.
l36)?" McLeod loses control of himself for one and only time during
the interrogation. Through her reminding him of his past crimes, McLeod
quickly comes to realize that he has lived so completely with his own
intellectual fantasies that he has destroyed whatever good there was
in himself and thus whatever good he could have brought into the world.
And McLeod, in his vision of the future, has demonstrated that he under-
stands that man, if he is to survive, must be committed to his potential,
not his potential in an abstract scientific sense, but his emotional
potential. Thus McLeod, moments before his death, can discover the ego
that he can extend into the world, and he literally transfers himself to
Lovett, to whom he writes in his will:

To Michael Lovett. to whom, at the end of my life and for the

first time within it, I find myself capable of the rudiments

of selfless friendship, I bequeath the remnants of my socialist
culture. (BB, p. 223.)

114

However, it is only at the very end of his life that becomes capable
of the "selfless friendship" which he discovers to be the only truly
worthwhile human relationship. But by then it is too late.

As the mirror to Lovett, Lannie directly calls him "Narcissus."
In the course of the novel, Lovett, as has been shown, is teased but
rejected by Guinevere. His brief sexual involvement with Lannie causes
her "fathomless despair" and reflects his own incompletion. At one
point, when Lannie rejects him and says:

"You can't love anybody, Mickey, for you're Narcissus, and

the closer you come to water the more you adore yourself until

your nose touches, and then you're alone again." (BB, p. lll)
To this Lovett responds:

I did not want to believe this. "It's true," I said, "but

it's. . . it's not true. It's not all true." I caught her

by the shoulder with enough force to hurt her. "Dont' you

understand? I want to live." I caught myself on the point

of weeping. "It's not all true," I heard myself repeating.

This made her furious. "You want to live?" she asked,

flinging my arm away. "You can't, you don't know how to.

You can't,". . . "You came to me because I was easy, and you

thought it would not cost you anything. . . . But we never

buy anybody without paying the price." (BB, pp. lll-llZ.)
What Lannie has accused of Lovett is both true and not entirely true.
He is preoccupied with himself because he doesn't know who or what he
is. He is indeed continually looking at himself in a mirror in order
to catch some glimpse of himself, some notion of what he once was. The
narcissism which Lovett exhibits at the beginning of the novel is pri-
marily inward. To the outside world he is detached and observing. But
after he finds his image reflected in McLeod he comes alive and a new
conception of self is born in him. He can both see his past in perspec-
tive and the present with commitment.

Aided by McLeod's proddings, Lovett is able to recollect the past

events in a sort of auto-psychoanalysis. From one point to another,

115
his mind moves progressively to the human commitment. Lovett's clear-
est memory of the past, the only thing which he feels really happened,
a memory which keeps recurring to him, is that of a brief love affair.
he had with a girl who came to love herself and him as the agent of her
self-love. He recalls the experience this way first:

Across the blur of the past, I have a memory which returns
over and over again, and I am almost certain it happened

. . I know a girl then who was in love with me and I very
much in love with her. . . . For the girl love had always
been difficult and clothed in a hundred restrictions of false
delicacy. She had been ashamed of her body and almost indif-
ferent to men. What combination of circumstance and mystery
could bring it about I no longer know, but I adored her, so
completely, so confidently, that my admiration seemed to
accomplish everything. The room we shared burgeoned for her.
She came to love her flesh, and from there it was but a step
to loving mine. We lay beside each other for hours on end,
brilliant with new knowledge. I had discovered magic to her
and reaped the benefit; I could shine in the reflection of
her face. Never, as she would assume me, had a man been more
ardent, more thoughtful, and more desirable. She blossomed
in that week, and I was so proud of myself. (BB, p. 34.)

As Lovett's memory gradually comes back, his neurotic narcissism is
replaced by a free expression of his self love and his love for others.
As a result, he can no more just stare at himself and cut himself off
from the world.. Furthermore, he recognizes the limitations of the past,
and for the first time becomes truly committed to the present as he has
claimed to be from the outset:

Where was that girl and what did she look like? . . . Frustra-
tion put me on the rack, and with the frustration came something
worse. For I wOuld never meet that girl, and if I did I would
not remember her and she would not recognize me. And if all
these impossibilities one by one were to be solved and the
wheel presented a double miracle for the same chip, then un-
doubtedly the girl and I, having changed, would be magical no
more to each other. So that was done and that was dead. There
could be no solutions from the past nor duplicates found in the
present. . . . I . . knew in all hopelessness that whatever

I was to find could not come from the past. (BS, p. ll5. )

116

When Lovett's mind is no longer fettered by the past, not by his
own “Narcissus," he steadily moves forward. Ultimately he thinks of the
future and finally he is prepared to take on McLeod's burden. Lovett's
commitment even includes much more than revolutionary socialism. It
also takes on what McLeod may vaguely visualize but can not be fulfilled:
the individual's existential need to fulfill himself. As Lovett himself
reflects:

Thus the actions of people and not their sentiments make

history. There was a sentence for it, . . . 'Men enter

into social and economic relations independent of their

wills,‘ and did it not mean more than all the drums of

the medicine men? (BB, p. ll7.)
To counteract the fact that "men enter into social and economic relations
independent of their wills," the individual must take bold and direct
action against the social determinants of his situation. The only
problem for Lovett is that his amnesia has confined him to his "enormous
present" for so long that he still has difficulty in taking any actual
action. With McLeod dead, Lannie carried off by the FBI, and Hollinsworth
gone with Guinevere and Monina, he retires almost into seclusion: "I'm
not a brave man. . . . I have no future anyway (BB, p. 2l8)." As stated
earlier, it is a muted hope when the novel finally ends. And Lovett
ends another non-hero like McLeod.

In the process of creating the existentialist hero, what progress

Mailer has shown in Barbary Shore is: while The Naked and the Dead left

 

 

the future in the hands of the Major Dallesons, Barbary Shore left the

 

future in the hands of a potentially hOpeful. He is still able to
"919Ct to have a future (B§, p. 2l8)." As Barry Leeds wrote, ". . . if
this is a flimsy vision of hope, it is better than none."38 It is with

Barbary Shore that Mailer's existentialism takes noticeable form; "this

117
first of the existentialist novels in America (BBB, p. 96)," Mailer
calls it. Instead of actions manipulated by almost invisible forces,
we have the fate of the world (supposedly in the "little object?) .
hinging on the choices made by individuals. As Podhoretz has put it,

"Everything in Barbary Shore seems to hang on the will of the people

 

involved, and in this sense, Mailer is right to describe the book as -
'existential' in spirit."39 Such existential spirit is apparently
derived from Mailer's recognition that political ideology has come to
an end and political solutions are of no help in the dehumanizing
situation of America. This is another step Mailer has made in his
second novel. If it is a flawed novel in characterization, it is, as
John Stark has argued, the basis for Mailer's best work "because this

prepares the way for future, greater works."40

10.
ll.
l2.
13.

Notes to Chapter Three

Radical Innocence, p. l4l.

 

That The Naked and the Dead sounds like “a pastiche of the novels
about World War I" and echoes Dos Passos, Farrell and Steinbeck

has been repeatedly pointed out by many critics. See, for example,
Maxwell Geismar, American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity_
(New York: Hill and Wang, l958), p. l7l; Walter B. Rideout, Iflg_
Radical Novel in the United States, l900-l954 (New York: Hill and
Wang, l956), p. 27l; Nathan A. Scott, Jr., Three American Moral-
ists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling (South Bend, Ind}: University of
Notre Dame Press, l973), p. 23; Solotaroff's Down Mailer's Way,

p. 5, and many others.

 

 

 

Richard Foster, Norman Mailer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, l968), p. 9.

 

Norman Mailer, Current Biography_(l948).

 

See Jerry H. Bryant, The Open Decision: The Contemporary American
Novel and Its IntellectualBackground(New York: The Free Press,
l970), p. 76.

 

 

Norman Podhoretz, "Norman Mailer: The Embattled Vision," in Norman
Mailer: The Man and His Work, ed. Robert F. Lucid (Boston: Little,

 

 

Brown & Company, l97l), p. 63.

Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: A Signet Book,
l948, l970). Hereafter all references are to this edition and
will be cited in the text.

 

Donald L. Kaufmann, Norman Mailer: The Countdown (The First
TwentyYears) (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univeristy

 

 

Press, l96§), p. 4.

Barry H. Leeds, The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer (New York:
New York University Press, l969), p. 42.

 

Ibid., p. 29.

Quoted by Solotaroff, Down Mailer's Way, p. 31.

 

Ibid., p. 32.

Cf. Being and Nothingness: ". . . it is the For-itself which
118

 

14.

15.
16.

17.

18.

19.

20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.

32.

33.

119

established this co-existence (of things in the world) by making
itself co-present to all. But in the case of the presence of the
For—itself to being-in-itself, there cannot be a third term.

No witness--not even God--could establish that presence; even the
For-itself can know it only if the presence already is." (p. l22.)

Jean Radford, Norman Mailer: A Critical Stugy_(London: The
Macmillan Press, l975), p. 44.

 

Ibid., p. 8.

Arnold A. Hutschnecker, The Drive for Powg[_(New York: Bantam
Books, l976), p. 275.

Walter Kaufman, "Friedrich Nietzsche" in The Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, V (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., l972), p. 5ll.

 

 

George Plimpton, ed., Writers at Work: The Paris Review Inter-
views, The Third Series (New York: l967), p. 257.

 

John W. Aldridge, After the Lost Generation (New York: Noonday
Press, l958), p. l37.

 

Norman Mailer: A Critical Stugy, p. ll.

 

Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work, p. 65.

 

Ibid., p. 67.

.Down Mailer's Way, p. l9.

 

Richard Foster, p. ll.
The Presidential Papers, p. l36.

 

Richard Foster, p. l2.
Norman Mailer: A Critical Study, p. 47.

 

Mailer: The Countdown, p. ll4.

 

Down Mailer's Way, p. 28.

 

Richard Foster, p. ll.

Norman Mailer, Barbary Shore (New York: Signet Book, l95l), p. 7.
Hereafter all references are to this edition.

 

Diana Trilling, "The Radical Moralism of Norman Mailer,“ in
Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Leo Braudy
(Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, l972), p. l5.

The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer, pp. 62-63.

34.
35.
36.
37.

38.
39.
40.

Ibid., p. 63.
Norman Mailer:

Norman Mailer:

120

The Man and His Work, p. 75.

The Countdown, p. ll5.

John Stark, "Barbary Shore: The Basis of Mailer's Best Work,"

 

Modern Fiction Studies, 3 (Autumn, l97l), 405.

 

The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer, p. l00.

 

Norman Mailer:

The Man and His Work, p. 69.

 

John Stark, 408.

CHAPTER FOUR

The American Existentialist Hero Emerged:

The Deer Park and Advertisements for Myself

 

 

The Deer Park

 

After finishing his first two novels and examining the political
and social situations of America, Mailer in the mid-fifties was fully
convinced that "One could not have a hero today. . . a man of action
and contemplation, capable of sin, large enough for good, a man immense
(BBB, p. 172)." But he insists that

it was a hero America needed, a hero central to his time, a

man whose personality might suggest contradictions and mys-
teries which would reach into the alienated circuits of the
underground, because only a hero can capture the seCret imag-
ination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his
nation; a hero embodies the fantasy and so allows each pri-

vate mind the liberty to consider its fantasy and find a way

to grow. Each mind can become more conscious of its desire

and waste less strength in hiding from itself. (BB, pp. 41-42.)

And in the fictional world of his third novel, The Deer Park (1955), a

 

Mailer hero does finally emerge. He is one version of an American exis-
tentialist who anticipates Mailer's later American existentialist heroes,

such as White Negro, Stephen Rojack, D. J., and others. The Deer Park

 

is a crucial book in the process of Mailer's search for a hero who must
honestly face the existence of evil in a repressive and totalitarian
society and who must also have the potentiality not just to cope with
the evil, but to demonstrate creativity, compassion, and a vision for

the future. In Deer Park, Mailer reveals that his existentialist vision

121

122
has found a fairly complete fictional form to be presented. The reason

Mailer finds an ideal fictional form to express his vision is that he
wants to explore and define resources and possibilities for his exis- .
tentialist heroism.

In Deer Park, Mailer has actually created three types of hero: a
traditional liberal hero, Charles Eitel; an American existentialist,
Marion Faye; a hero-in-training, Sergius O'Shaugnessy. By creating
these three heroes, Mailer intends to show: how the traditional liberal
hero as a social "snob" cannot transcend the evil of the society but is
defeated as he falls back into his old habits, how the existentialist
hero asserts his authentic existence by using evil to fight evil, and
how the hero-in-training is influenced by both Eitel's existentialist
theory and Faye's existentialist action and tries to search for a life
style of his own. Jean Radford has made similar observations in her
reading of the novel:

There are in fact three heroes to the novel: Eitel the

"potential artist" and professional director, Marion Faye

the nihilistic pimp and pusher to the film world, and Sergius

O'Shaugnessy, the would-be writer and narrator of the novel. . .

Faye emerges as the novel's ultimate hero. . .1

In Deer Park the American society of the fifties is reflected in the
Hollywood world and Mailer wants to expose the roots of the illusion, the

degrading influence movies have had on sexuality, and the political power

that determines the content of films. Even Barbary Shore, Mailer claims,

 

”is really a Hollywood novel. I think it reflected the impact of Holly-
wood on me in some subterranean fashion."2 The impact is most clearly

seen in the effect movies and the image of Hollywood have on Guinevere's
sexual imagination. There is no way of distinguishing reality from fic-
tion in her stories of her sexual adventures and of the graphic account

she gives of the superior physical endowments and bedroom virtuosity of

123
the men in Hollywood: ". . . the fellows out there really got whangs on

them cause they use it so much." In the movie script she is writing
there is a doctor who "got the biggest whang on him in the whole town .
(BB, p. 46)." Her vulgarity and her sick sexual fantasies mirror a
national imagination conceived in the image of Hollywood.

Deer Park is a pleasure garden in the desert, the sexual playground
for the matinee idols. After shifting focus again from politics and
larger historical currents to sex and the flow of individual psychic his-
tory, Mailer finds that the place is an excellent environment in which
the contemporary American life is mirrored in the reality of the emo-
tional and sexual perversity of the Hollywood supersexual athletes. The

title The Deer Park is explained in an excerpt from Vie Privee Louis XI

 

 

quoted at the beginning of the novel. Hollywood is the twentieth-cen-
tury counterpart of the eighteenth-century pleasure palace; and the
studio owner, producers, gossip columnists, and hangers-on are the equal
of the pimps and madames of Louis XV's France. The evil Louis XV's Deer
Park did to the "morals of the people" is matched by the influence Holly-
wood has on the morals of modern man.

In the Paris Review Interviews Mailer also explains the original

 

inspiration from which The Deer Park grew:

 

The original title of The Deer Park was The Idol and the Octo-
us. The book was going to be about Charles Frances EiteT,fifhe
irector, and Herman Teppis, the Producer, and the underlying

theme was the war between those wished to make an idol out of

art, the artists, and the patron who used art for power, the
octopus.3

 

In both the original and the final title there is a hint of Mailer's
favorite imagery, animal. Like its two predecessors, The Deer Park
teems with bestial images; Teppis's son-in-law is named Collie; and

Teppis, of course, derives from Octopus. The intent is also similar.

124
Men, Mailer alleges, have been reduced to a set of conditioned reflexes,

dogs made to salivate in response to certain stimuli. In all of Mailer's
first three novels the conditioning is a consequence of the pressures .

society brings to bear upon the individual to conform. The Deer Park is

 

an exploration of the Hollywood Dream-Machine that in Mailer's mind is a
key element in the process. The artist, if allowed to follow his in-
stincts, represents some hope of salvation, the restoration through art
of human awareness to the pain and anguish of reality. And again, as in
the earlier novels, the weight of too many forces, internal and external,
turn the artist into a false idol. Aesthetic integrity is compromised
by vanity, the need for recognition, venality, and the wish for personal
contentment.

The movies are, in Mailer's mind, indisputably the major influence
on the modern consciousness, the cultural phenomena more real to the
Guineveres than the world they actually inhabit. If art can alter con-
sciousness, then films are the medium for a psychic revolution. However,
the cooperation of government and myth makers is so powerful and corrupt
that the possibility of the movies becoming an instrument of liberation
is non-existent. To be an artist one must be a revolutionary. Mailer
demands an either-or: either the artist is a knight of truth in the
legions of the rebellious, or he compromises his revolutionary zeal and
becomes a lackey, a court jester in a society that will eventually come
to despise him. And, ironically, he will come to despise himself as well.

Like Barbary Shore, Deer Park is also an existentialist novel, al-

 

though hardly the existentialist novel that Barbary Shore is. Mikey

 

Lovett is reincarnated as the narrator Sergius O'Shaugnessy. Mikey was
an amnesiac, Sergius is an orphan. But the shift of emphasis is more

than biographical. As we first meet Mikey he is estranged from his past

125
and he subsequently seeks a political identity. As we first meet Ser-
gius he has not enjoyed sexual fulfillment in over a year, and thus in
Mailer's terms is estranged from the bodily rhythms; he seeks a quite .
unpolitical identity, specifically a sexual one., The theme of the search
for identity is not the single element Deer Park shares with existen-
tialist fiction. The characters, as Mailer conceives them, are not char-
acters at all, but "beings"--"a being is someone whose nature keeps

shifting." According to Mailer, "Everybody in The Deer Park is a being
4

 

except the minor characters like Herman Teppis." Into the arid land-
scape of Desert D'Or, populated by alienated "beings," is introduced the
theme of Hip and regeneration through sex, the search for the good

orgasm. This latter theme is not neceSSarily the "Sartrean" existential-
ism, but it does indicate one peculiar quality of Mailer's American exis-
tentialist hero.

The action of Deer Park takes place mostly in Desert D'Or, a fic-
tional Palm Springs, California, where the veterans of the Hollywood wars
come for rest and rehabilitation. It is a "much more believable metaphor
for America than the boarding house in Brooklyn."5 It is a place built
since the Second World War, where "everything is in the present tense
(BB, p. 7)"6 and where everything is other than what it appears to be.
The stores, for example, look "like anything but stores":

In those places which sold clothing, no clothing was laid

out, and you waited in a modern living room while salesmen

opened panels in the wall to exhibit summer suits. . . .

There was a jewelry store built like a cabin cruiser; from

the street one peeped through a porthole to see a thirty-

thousand-dollar necklace hung on the silver antlers of a

piece of driftwood. (BB, pp. 7-8.)

And the hotels-~the Yacht Club and the Debonair and the Desert D'Or Arms--
are not hotels but arrangements (hidden behind elaborately sculpted

shrubberies) of carports and swimming pools shaped like free-form coffee

126
tables and pastel bungalows, all lit up at night by Japanese lanterns
strung to the tropical trees. Everything is parched by the searing sun,
so that all human activity takes place within the air-conditioned bars
and cocktail lounges and nightclubs which are "made to look like a jungle,
an underwater grotto, or the lounge of a modern movie theater (BB, p. 9),"
in which one never knows whether it is night or day.

It is to this place, wearing his flying wings and first lieutenant's
uniform, that Sergius O'Shaugnessy, a young veteran of the Korean War,
comes. Sergius is like Lovett in that, lacking a home or family back-
ground, he finds himself suspended between past and future, biding his
time in Desert D'Or. He has little sense of family heritage: as an or-
phan, he was reared by Catholic sisters and the son of a would-be actor,
sailor, bum, drunk, and anarchist. Even his name, O'Shaugnessy is false,
"but something which sounded close to Slovene (BB, p. 22)." Driven by
"a desire to be like everybody else, at least everybody who had made it
(BB, p. 43)," he boxes his way into an Air Force enlisted man's tourna-
ment and on to flying school. The Air Force is his home until after a
napalm raid on a village during the Korean War when he sees a Japanese
boy in the officers' mess with a burned arm. Suddenly he became aware
that he "had busy setting fire to a dozen people, or ten dozen, or had
it been a hundred? (BB, p. 44)" He begins to feel alienated from the
fliers; his sudden awareness that they burn real people separates him
from their ranks: "They were one breed and I was another (BB, p. 45)."
He has a mental breakdown, and is consequently rendered sexually impotent
by the intensity of his self-disgust. After being discharged from the
service, he comes to Desert D'Or. He explains the reason he has come

here the following way:

127

But I was not ready to work; I needed time, and I needed the

heat of the sun. I do not know if I can explain that I did

not want to feel too much, and I did not want to think. I

had the idea that there were two worlds. There was a real

world as I called it, a world of wars and boxing clubs and .
children's homes on back streets, and this real world was

a world where orphans burned orphans. It was better not

even to think of this. I liked'the other world in which

almost everybody lived. The imaginary world. (Italics

mine.) (BB, p. 45.)

 

 

 

All one has to do to avoid the real world is to pretend it isn't
there, to manufacture another world by assuming one of the many roles
which are readily available--Air Force hero, movie star, bullfighter.
Of course, this also requires that one never face himself or ask about
the fit of the mask. Sergius has preferred the imaginary world since
childhood; he has always been a faker. As a child, he delighted in ad-
venture stories ("it all seemed very true to me"), wore many different
names, and felt "like a spy or a fake (BB, pp. 23 & 25)." He actually
enjoys giving a false impression: "I was understood to be an Air Force
pilot whose family was wealthy and lived in the East, and I even added
the detail that I had a broken marriage and drank to get over it (BB,
p. 10)." This is another reason that explains his attraction to Desert
D'Or and the people who inhabit it. Their business is the manufacture
of roles, and they are quite willing to involve Sergius in their ver-
sion of the imaginary world.

Of the various residents of the resort Sergius shortly meets, it is
to the film director Charles Eitel that he finds himself most drawn.
Like the pupil-tutor relationship between Lovett and McLeod, Sergius's
relation with Eitel is thus built. Eitel is an artist-technician of
considerable talent. He is now blacklisted for his refusal to name his
former leftist associations to a congressional investigating committee.

"He was the only son of an auto dealer in a big Eastern city," as Sergius

128

tells:

Eitel was the first of his family to go to college. It had

been expected he would be a lawyer, but while he was at

school he got interested in the theater and quarreled with :

his parents about his career. By the time he graduated, the

argument was settled; his father had lost his money in the

Depression. Eitel drifted around New York looking for work.

'(BB, p. 31.)

His movement to the Hollywood world is smooth and fast. Even "in the
worst of the Depression his own career grew. He was hired to put on a
play in a government-sponsored project, and it was a success. A lot of
people heard his name for the first time. He was a playwright, a dir-
ector, an actor; he was offered a career in the movies (BB, p. 31)."

As an ambitious young director outraged at social injustices, Eitel in-
tended to write the honest script that can really be regarded as art.
Telling himself that if he became successful enough he would wield enough
power at the studio to make the movies he really wanted to make, Eitel
makes a series of bad but successful pictures. But with the growth of
his success, his original goals disappear. '

Rather than fight for an opportunity to make an artistically uncom-
promised film, Eitel continues directing films from scripts chosen for
him by the studio heads, men with the single purpose of money-making.
Along the way he divorces his first wife, who had supported him early in
his career and who had introduced him to radical politics. In the course
of making Hollywood's sexual rounds he marries and is divorced twice more,
his third and most recent failed marriage being with Lulu Meyers, the
current Hollywood sex goddess. Having spent nearly twenty years making
films for Teppis's Supreme Pictures, and losing all the courage to chal-
lenge the static patterns of social expectations, Eitel did make his last

attempt to preserve his artistic integrity by refusing to testify to the

Subversive Committee. By so doing, he was blacklisted by the movie

129
industry and out of his job. His struggle to write the script he'd been
"saving for years" reminds one of McLeod's decision, after twenty years
as a Party bureaucrat, to return to theory. Sergius is attracted to him
‘by the display of talent and promise in his earliest movies and by his
agile performance as hostile witness in front of the investigating com-
mittee. He is also drawn to Eitel by his magnetic personality and iron-
ically elegant display of self knowledge, something in Eitel which is
both attractive and mystifying, for he cannot see how Eitel could "talk
about himself so clearly and be able to do nothing with it."

Now, exiled from the film capital, Eitel comes to Desert D'Or to
seek a diametrically opposed world to that of Sergius: the real world.
Sergius has seen the horrors of the real world and is withdrawing into
the fantasy world of Desert D'Or before returning to reality. Eitel's
initiation has been purely theoretical; he has not "burned orphans" and
is committed to nothing other than his sensual gratification. Refusing
to testify makes him an outcast but does not exclude the possibility of
his recanting and cooperating even though he knows it will mean again
becoming the pimp of Teppis and Supreme Pictures. But there is for both
men a series of revelations from which they are able to gain a new level
of consciousness, a fresh perception of their place in the real and imag-
inary worlds that Deer Park contrasts.

Through the affair with Elena Esposita, Eitel gains entrance into
the world of orphans. "Without family and without friends," she becomes
his mistress. Elena, who has been badly used by many men, is a generous,
honest, and sensitive character. She is without any gifts of intellect
or refinements of culture, but she has the rare ability to instinctively
and quite naturally give herself over completely to love, which is ex-

tremely important to Eitel. She has an intuitive understanding of his

130

every need and she is totally responsive to him. The result of their
success in bed gives Eitel new energy and new confidence. He begins to
feel that he will now be able to rediscover the talent he had when he
was young:

It had happened before. He had had women who gave him their

first honest pleasure, and he had taken all the bows for his

vanity, but he had never met so royal a flow of taste. It

was remarkable how they knew each other's nicety between love-

making and extravagance. . . . But Elena carried him to mark

above mark. Her face was alive, she was alive, he had never

been with anyone who understood him so well. . . . Sex was his

dream of bounty, and it nourished him enough to wake up with

the hope that this affair could return his energy, flesh his

courage, and make him the man he had once believed himself to

be. With Elena beside him he thought for the first time in

many years that the best thing in the world for him was to

make a great movie. (BB, p. 97.)

However, at this point, it should be noted that Eitel and Elena are
involved in a relationship which is full of contradictions and complexi-
ties, largely the result of the contradictions and complexities in each of
them. Eitel's love for Elena is very much based on self-love, for Elena
is to bring Eitel, he thinks, the capacity to go on to achieve his ambi-
tions and preserve his artistic integrity. 0n the other hand, through his
own vanity, he cannot tolerate Elena's lack ofssocial grace and vulgarity
of her manners. As one of the gossip columns describes their relationship,
Eitel is really Pygmalion to Elena. He is not content with her the way she
is--she is too inarticulate, she does not perform well with company; he
wants to make her his property, something that would be an asset to him.
By doing so, he might be destroying what is unique in Elena, her "buried
nature", but he is tormented by her "faults, her ignorance, her inability
to do anything but mate." As Eitel tells Sergius, he believes that
each person has two distinct natures, the "noble savage" and the "snob."

The noble savage represents the "buried nature of the individual

131

which was changed and whipped and trained by everything in

life until it was almost dead. Yet if people were lucky,

and if they were brave, and sometimes they could find a mate

with the same buried nature and that could make them happy

and strong. '(BB, pp. 106-107.) '
The snob, on the other hand, would fight the individual's effort to dis-
cover the buried nature and would do everything possible to kill it.
"The snob could be a tyrant to buried nature (BB, p. 107)." The rela-
tionship between Eitel and Elena is a search for their buried nature,
yet Eitel's snob keeps interfering.

And Eitel felt changes in his body race beyond the changes

in his mind, as though all those nerves and organs which he

had tired almost to death were coming back to life, carrying

his mind in their path, as if Elena were not only his woman

but his balm. He had the hope that he would keep this know-

ledge of her, that the old snob would not come back to tor-

ture him with her little faults. . . (BB, p. 107.)

It is at this point in his writing that Mailer is moving very close
to a clear statement of his existentialist theory. What Mailer is look-
ing for is a theory of individual's existence which will incorporate both
body and mind, a theory that will demonstrate how the individual can, by
becoming sensitive to his body and its needs, move the mind toward an
intuitive rapport with the essential nature of the body. In other words,
the human emotions can give shape and direction to the individual's
thoughts, can give the individual an intellectual understanding of him-
self that will be true to the mysterious core of his being. Furthermore,
this must be achieved not by any external theories, such as psychoanaly-
sis--and indeed Eitel is disturbed to discover that Elena is in analysis
because he sees it inconsistent with her character. Rather, this state
is achieved through the parallel growth of the body and the mind, for as
the former becomes more clearly defined, the latter moves to find the

necessary construct to give the individual an understanding of his being

and, perhaps, his fate.

132

Eitel's theory of art is consistent with Mailer's evolving existen-
tialism, too. His one true love, he realizes as he becomes more involved
with Elena, is his art. The problem for him has always been that he has
been torn between "his desire for power in the world and his desire for
power over his work (BB, p. 109)." What Eitel begins to feel is that
his desire for power over his work is now more important to him than the
other. He can feel this because as his sensitivity to himself develops,
he realizes that he must capture this new life and gain control over it.
And the way to do this is through his mind, through his art. He begins
a script that he hopes will transform his life into an "imperishable"
work of art and at the same time gain him re-entry into the inner circle
of influential directors. As we can see, even as he thinks this, he is
thinking that a success in his art will lead him back into some power
in the world.

However, the script Eitel begins to write goes stale on him as his
affair with Elena sours. She does not automatically transform herself
into a "wise mistress" and, to torment him more, begins to participate
in orgies. Elena chooses the opposite course he had selected for her.
When their relationship is from bad to worse, his sense of inadequacy is
growing and he feels that he may never regain the power over his work.
His failure mainly lies in his cowardice, not to delve deep into himself.
The financial and social pressures upon him are not the real reasons for
his surrender. His first appearance before the committee had been, in a
sense, an empty gesture, the futile assertion of an integrity which he
had already lost. He had already sold out too often in countless small
ways; now he finds that he cannot write the honest script he had always
wanted to. His years of shallow success have killed his ability to create

the art which he still believes in. His affair with Elena is too short

133

to eradicate the deep-rooted "snob" in him.

By now, Elena is no longer an asset to Eitel; but instead, she is
just in his way and he starts to work out a plan to get rid of her. When
she sees what is happening to him and makes it clear that she understands
and says that she will go when he wants her to go, Eitel, still admiring
the noble savage in her, is torn apart by the conflict between his cowar-
dice and cruelty and his continuing desire for her and even love for her.

Finally, she had gained his respect, and he could never explain
it to her. With numb fingers he touched her foot. The essence
of s irit, thought to himself, was to choose the thing which
did not Better one's position but made it more perilous. That
was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality
and caution were identical. He was so completely of that world,
and she was not. . . . For that minute and for another minute
he loved her as he had never loved anyone, loved her he knew
that he dare not love her. Young as she was, he had heard ex-
perience in her voice which was beyond his own experience, and
so if he stayed with her, he would be obliged to travel in her
directions, and he had been fleeing that for all of his live.
(BB, p. 220.)

 

 

 

At this point Eitel begins to realize that he is at best a commer-
cial artist doing formula work with cynical speed and that he would never
be the artist he always expected, "for the one quality above all others
in an artist" is a "sense of shame, or sickness, and of loathing for any
work which was not his best." His past erased, the present blunted, and
the future eroded, Eitel no longer masquerades as an artist and comes to
understand himself and the snob he actually is. He makes a deal with his
old studio, commercializes his script, recants before the Subversive Com-
mittee and returns to his old life. He has thus achieved power over the
world, but he has forsaken forever the chance to have power over his work.
He is moving back inexorably into the imaginary world of Hollywood and to
all his old familiar habits. As he tells Sergius, he also knows all the

while that his surrender to the world of Herman Teppis proves him to

134

have lost the final desire of the artist, the desire which

tells us that when all else is lost, when love is lost and

adventure, pride of self, and pity, there still remains that

world we may create, more real to us, more real to others‘

than the mummery of what happens passes, and is gone. ‘(BB, p. 235.)

For Mailer, Eitel is finally a traditional liberal hero who at last
still conforms to the social norms of his age. But he has failed to real-
ize his theory. He has also failed to renew the courage to live by the
imperatives of instinctive self. The only virtue Eitel has is that he
understands fully what he has done, and he has been honest with Sergius
who can learn his lesson from Eitel's failure.

If Sergius is looking toward Eitel as a possible heroic model, the
foil for the values he has intended to represent but has eventually sold
out is Marion Faye. Faye is the first introduction into Mailer's fiction
of a form of the American existentialist hero. First of all, Faye at-
tempts to reject both the imaginary world of success and comfort and the
real world of pain and compassion, but to explore the depth of feeling
and the relationship between the sensations and the mind much further
than any of the other characters dare in Deer Park. Faye's vision is
nihilistic and apocalyptic: nihilistic in the sense of repudiating, like
Nietzsche, his "civilized" or Christian self; apocalyptic in his predic-
tion of a great final cataclysm. Faye is a Hipster, a rebel artist, a
psychopathic philosopher. For him the whole world is "bullshit."

You take two people living together. Cut away all the prop-

aganda. It's dull. The end. So you go the other direction.

You find a hundred chicks, you find two hundred. It gets

worse than dull. It makes you sick. I swear you start think-

ing of using a razor. I mean, that's it. . . screwing the

one side, pain the other side. Killing. The whole world is

bullshit. That's why people want a dull life. (BB, p. 20.)

When Sergius asks him what all this leads him to, Faye is unable to an-

swer. Yet, with the Hipster's instinct, he makes his living as a pimp.

135

Begotten by an unknown, "passing European prince" but brought up
with the name of 0'Faye, a vaudeville hoofter, who "would never marry a
girl who carried his own child (BB, p. 16)," Marion Faye (as a boy he‘
had dropped the “0") never knows his real father. Between Faye and his
"nominal father, there was nothing at all (BB, p. 17)." His mother,
Dorothea 0'Faye, "had been a call girl, a gossip columnist, a celebrity,
a failure (BB, p. 11),“ who now presides over a big house which is called
The Hangover in Desert D'Or. When Sergius meets Faye the first time,
Faye is twenty-four and is someone "very special."

Slim, tight-knit, with light wavy hair and clear gray eyes,

he could have looked a choir boy, I suppose, if it had not

been for his expression. He had an arrogance which was made

up of staring at you, measuring your value, and deciding you

weren't there. At the present time he was living in Desert

D'Or, but not at his mother's house. They got along too

badly for that, and besides his occupation would have inter-

fered. He was a pimp. '(BB, p. 17.)

In Faye's eye, all these people--the old lecher and ruthless tycoon,
Herman Teppis; his clever, grasping huckster of a son-in-law, Collie
Munshin; the sexual goddess Lulu Meyers; even, one suspects, his own
mother--are a whole gang of "snobs,“ in the debased and villainous soc-
iety. As Nathan Scott, Jr. noted, "For it is this young pimp who sees,
with a burning clarity, the essential decadence not just of Desert D'Or
and the 'capital' in the background but, more significantly, of the lar-
ger American reality of‘Which he considers the Hollywood scene to be the
most revealing symbol."7

In his efforts to find meaning to existence in such a society, Faye
pursues any situation that aids him in killing his compassion for men
and even his fear for his own life. He lives perilously but not to grow

better as Eitel insists, but rather to purge himself of all pity for the

great mass of "snobs. . . who always think what they have to think (BB,

136

p. 128)." Everything he does is done precisely because it is repugnant
to him, and he believes that "there is no pleasure greater than that
obtained from a conquered repugnance (BB, p. 127)." When he is talking
about his cruelty to Teddy Pope, a leading star in the movies but a noto-
rious homosexual, he explains to Sergius:

Cruelty, yes. That's where I dig being homo. You see, cruelty

is repugnant to me. When I tell Pope he's disgusting and re-

pulsive, and all he wants is for me to give him the time of

day because he's willing to do all the loving, deep down he's

nothing but a sweet little flower waiting to be stomped, well

at times like that I have to force myself to be cruel, but

afterward I feel fine. Almost, that is. I've never made it

all the way, not in anything in life. '(BB, pp. 127-28.)

In response to Faye's explanation, Sergius appraises, "'you're just
a religious man turned inside out.'" Faye reluctantly accepts the label
and several nights later returns with a dictum of nihilistic extremes:

Nobility and vice-~they're the same thing. It just depends

on the direction you're going. You see, if ever make it, then

I turn around and go the other way. Toward nobility. That's

all right. Just so you carry it to the end. ‘(BB, p. 128.)
In this sense, Faye is saint turned upside down whose strategy for hero-
ism in a rotten world is to defend himself against evil by converting him-
self into a creature of evil. He is not naturally cruel but forces him-
self to be repugnantly vicious by cultivating "the arts of sadism and

debauchery,"8

By so doing, he may assert his existentialism; and he may
also pursue the absolute experience. It does not matter what the exper-
ience is so long as it is a total and extreme confrontation, something
that will call forth all his courage and all his will power. He prepares
himself for the right moment by challenging Eitel to take one of his girls,

(In the grounds that Eitel has lost his courage. Then he mistreats the
girl Eitel has spent an evening with by forcing her to give up her illu—

sion that Eitel loves her. In the end he is sorry that he did not really

ch‘ive the lesson home by sleeping with her himself. Thinking about his

137

reluctance to sleep with her, he recognizes that people are vain and
thus incapable of being honest:

Suddenly he decides to be without pride. He could do it. He '

could be impregnable if sex was of disinterest to him and that

was how to be superior to everybody else.- That was the secret

to life. It was all upside down, and you had to turn life on

its head to see it straight. '(BB, p. 135.)

Faye is in every way possible to fight all compassionate impulses,
because he wants to see the world cleansed of all sentimentality and
himself purged all his own feeling of pity and guilt for others. Immed-
iately after what Faye has expressed in the foregoing quotation, the
heroin addict Paco comes to him for a fix. He refuses him, and then

reflects:

There was no pressure in all the world like the effort to beat
off compassion. Faye knew all about compassion. It was the
worst of the vices. . . . It was fear, it was guilt; once you
knew that guilt was the cement of the world, there was nothing
to it; you could own the world or spit at it. But first you
had to get rid of your own guilt, and to do that you had to
kill compassion. (BB, p. 138.)

After this episode Faye drives out into the desert. However, he discovers
that he has not killed his compassion for he "burned for that sad pimply
slob" of an addict. If he cannot wipe away his pity, then he cannot iso-
late himself from the rest of mankind who are plagued by guilt. He can
only hope for the destruction of the world and of all the snobs and the
words with which they hide the real world. Standing in the desert, fac-
ing the sun rising over the atomic bomb testing site, Faye begs God for
the apocalypse:

So let it come, Faye thought, let this explosing come, and then

another, and all the others, until the Sun God burned the earth.

Let it come, he thought, looking into the east at Mecca where

the bombs ticked while he stood on a tiny rise of ground trying

to see one hundred, two hundred, three hundred miles across the

desert. Let it come, Faye begged, like a man praying for rain,

let it come and clear the rot and the stench and the stink, let

it come for all of everywhere, just so it comes and the world
stands clear in the white dead dawn. (BB, p. 139.)

138

The test of Faye's effort at purging himself of compassion and guilt
reaches the climax when he takes advantage of Eitel and Elena's separa-
tion to induce her into living with him. The relationship extends the.
idea implicit in the relationship between Elena and Eitel, because Elena
is so sensitive at this point that she is on the verge of a breakdown or
even suicide and Faye is determined to push himself all the way into vice
by which he means a complete conquest of all compassion. Unlike Eitel,
Faye is the artist who has the courage to find power over his work,
largely because he realizes that if he achieves power over his work then
he has achieved power over the world. He thinks of himself as a priest
and Elena as his nun whom he will convert into a witch; in other words
he will be a black priest.

He made up stories in his mind, novels, volumes, drawing on

himself the anguish of the priest who begs God to let the

devils enter him in order that he alone be burned in Hell so

that the others, the nuns, the parish, the castle, the coun-

try, indeed the world be spared. Father Marion has been pray-

ing for this, he would think, and all the while he prays, what

’does he do? It is so little and yet he is so damned, . . .

and stealing from the most devoted Sister, the purest, the most

spiritual, her devotion itself, so that she loves not God but

Father Marion, carnally, insanely, and even this is good, he

will tell her, for the body and the soul are separate, and to

be pure one must seek out sin itself, mire the body in offal

so the soul may be elevated. ‘(BB, p. 280.)

What Faye feels he must do is compel Elena to despise her body and her
emotions, to separate her feelings from her intellectual understanding

of herself. He would, in other words, do the opposite of what they both
believe. He would play the classical Christian who believes the body and
the soul are separate and thus try to destroy the body, rather than help-
ing her fulfill her own noble savage. He sets out to drive her to suicide

by destroying her sense for herself, by destroying her only means of under-

standing her life. To do this, he inverts the traditional roles of God

139

and the Devil, replacing it with the heresy of God as the Devil in ban-
ishment, "and God who was the Devil had conquered except for the few who
saw the cheat, that God was not God at all. So he prayed, 'Make me cold,
Devil, and I will run the world in your name,‘ (BB, p. 281)"

Nevertheless, while he is praying for the strength to do this and
hoping that when Elena dies she will ask God to forgive Faye because "he
is a saint in Hell," he is afraid that God will desert him in Hell as the
ultimate punishment, for he has fallen from Grace and wished damnation
upon God. And partially moved by the new warmth Elena gives him, in his
preparation for his task, a refrain runs through his head:

"It's bullshit, it's all bullshit. Cut the bullshit. Cut it

dead," as if indeed his thought had become needles to probe

the Sorcerer in him, and when the dot of his brain was found

where the needle entered without pain, then he was damned, he

was discovered. Or was he freed? '(BB, p. 281.)
Obviously he is not freed. Moving in directions he had not anticipated,
"to his horror and to his pride he came to understand himself at a moment
his body curled next to hers, seeking warmth on the chill of his limbs
(BB, p. 281)." In his last effort to achieve an "experience beyond ex-
perience," he sets out to force her to kill herself by, first exhausting
"her energy, her pleasure itself, and she would be left with nothing (BB,
p. 284)." But finally he has failed, because even though he drove Elena
to begin to commit suicide (he put the pills in her hand and challenged
her), she could not bring herself to do it, and so life conquers death.

Ironically, it is Marion Faye who is ultimately converted by Elena.
Against his will, compassion for her springs to life from some hidden
corner of his mind, "alive but not alive." During her abortive suicide
Faye feels remorse at having instigated her into taking poison. He is

relieved when he finds she has not taken the pills and knows that "he was

defeated. He could not help it--he had his drop of mercy after all (BB,

140

p. 290)." He is defeated because his choice is primarily an overly ration-
alistic one that belies his own existentialist vision: he is forcing him-
self to a direction opposite to the one he knows is true. The final emer-
gence of Faye's compassion for Elena and for all the helpless "orphans"
like her demonstrates that he is not just a pure thinking but a feeling
creature who is able, unlike Croft, to balance his emotions and mind. His
hatreds, fears, and sadistic acts are measures employed to let him descend
to the very heart of darkness; and in this way one may "push to the end. .
and come out--he did not know where, but there was experience beyond exper-
ience, there was something. Of that, he was certain (BB, p. 286).“ Thus
it is Faye, the American existentialist, not Eitel, the traditional lib-
eral, who teaches Sergius by example that

Finally one must do, simply do, for we act in total ignorance

and yet in honest ignorance we must act, or we can never learn

for we can hardly believe what we are told, we can only meas-

ure what has happened inside ourselves. (BB, p. 277.)

ISergius has come to a realization of this kind only after his obver-
\ation of Eitel's loss of nerve for the existential demands of love and
art and his falling back on tricks and compromises of the sake of security.
But Faye, man of ever-present rebelliousness and defiant action, shows
quite a contrast. Even Elena, by instinct, can tell (in her letter to
Eitel): "But this I do know, at least there's something doing with Marion,
he's not a coward and a snob like you (BB, p. 269)." At Desert D'Or,
Sergius's experiences parallel those of Eitel's. While Eitel intends to
regain his artistic integrity by writing an honest script, Sergius wishes
to be a writer of creative originality by living at first in the imaginary
world of the Hollywood resort.

Like the Eitel-Elena relationship, Sergius has an affair with Lulu

Meyers, Supreme Pictures' great siren, vacationing in Desert D'Or at the

141

time of Sergius's arrival. This is particularly significant because his
early thoughts about Lulu concern her legs which he remembers seeing in
pin-up pictures at every base he had ever visited. Thus, his affair With
her is really an affair with himself. In a different context, describing
his love-making with Elena, Eitel describes himself similarly: "'The
onanist at heart,‘ he had thought (of himself) and made love to a woman
with care enough to have made love to himself (BB, p. 97)." As though

to confirm this similarity Sergius reports his enthusiasm after he has
made love to Lulu the first time. He compares the experience to taking
off on a mission in the pre-dawn hours.

When the morning came to meet us five miles high in the air with

the night clouds warmed by a gold and silver light, I used to

believe I could control the changes of the sky by a sway of my

body as it was swelled by the power of the plane, and I had

played with magic. (BB, p. 85.)

In other words, Sergius is regaining his sense of power from making
love to Lulu. He feels his pride returning; he feels that he is overcom-
ing his isolation and is playing a role in the world. 1

Then I could feel her as something I had conquered, could lis-

ten to her wounded breathing, and believing that no matter how

she acted other times, these moments were Lulu, as if her flesh

murmured words more real than her lips. To the bigger pride of

knowing that I took her with the cheers of millions behind me.

Poor millions with their low roar! They would never have what

I had now. They could shiver outside, making a shine in their

office desk or on the shelf of their olive-drab lockers, they

could look at the pin-up picture of Lulu Meyers. I knew I was

good when I carried a million men on my shoulder. ‘(BB, p. 85.)

But, Lulu is a woman who loves movies; and stardom sustains her.
Leaving a party at four in the morning, she is besieged by autograph
seekers. Their adulation feeds her ego: "Isn't this a wonderful life?"
she remarks. Her career comes first, before any human considerations,
such as her love for Sergius. Therefore, even though it is with her that

Sergius recovers his sexual potency, she is, as Nathan Scott, Jr. has

142

observed, not to be thought of as exemplifying any redemptive principle.

For she is the quintessential embodiment in the novel of the
spangled speciousness distinguishing the society which is here
being analyzed, this dimpled blonde with her throaty voice and
little turned-up nose who is, in eyery aspect of her personal-
ity, a creature of the mass media. ‘

In this sense, Lulu is another Guinevere, but not another Elena. Sergius
further tells us, when they were together in a restaurant,
It always seemed to her as if the conversation at another table
was more interesting than what she heard at her own. She had
the worry that she was missing a word of gossip, a tip, a role
in a picture, a financial transaction, a. . . it did not matter;
something was happening somewhere else, something of importance,
something she could not afford to miss. Therefore, eating with
her was like sleeping with her; if one was cut by the telephone,

the other was rubbed by her itch to visit from table to table. . .
(BB, p. 121.)

She is also convinced that her breasts will droop as she grows older, and
so she insists that Sergius be careful when he touches them. In HEEL
BBBB, she is the consummate narcissist and the perfected sex-object, whose
entire existence is a ceremony performed before mirrors. Lulu is thus
preSented ”as a symbol for how the film world uses women, as both bait and
victim."10

After recognizing how hypocritical and self-deceptive Lulu and the
others are, how inept the wavering Eitel is, Sergius experiences the sex-
ual wasteland without deluding himself and decides to turn down the oppor-
tunity, offered by Collie Munshin, to star in a movie about his life in
Air Force. He finally opts for the real world that Eitel advises him to
enter but the director himself is unable to:

"So, do try Sergius,” . . . "try for the other world, the real

world, where orphans burn orphans and nothing is more difficult

to discover than a simple fact. And with the pride of the art-

ist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists,

the small trumpet of your defiance. '(BB, p. 318.)

It is a hard decision for Sergius: the depth of his fear of the real

143

world is made clear by the impotence which plagues him after his release
from the Air Force. But after going through all sorts of traumas, temp-
tations, sexual gratifications, and psychic twists, he does come through
to freedom and now sounds more like Faye than-Eitel:

For I touched the bottom myself, there was a bottom that time.

I returned to it, I wallowed in it, I looked at myself, and the
longer I looked the less terrifying it became and the more under-
standable. I began then to make those first painful efforts to
acquire the most elusive habit of all, the mind of the writer,
and though I could hardly judge from my early pages whether I
were a talent or a fool, I continued, I went on for a while,
until I ended with an idea that. . . finally one must do, simply
do. . . (BB, p. 277.)

Sergius now also understands what Eitel once said that the “law of
life so cruel and so just which demanded that one must grow or pay more
for remaining the same (BB, p. 294)." To remain the same is to accept
the world of "morality and caution," or the world of false values, com-
placency, snobbery, and the imaginary world in which Eitel has ironically
always remained. Yet, the true artist must be, like Faye, anti-social
without denying himself the inspiration a "good time" gives his creative
powers:

For do we not gamble our way to the heart of the mystery against

all the power of good manners, good morals, the fear of germs,

and the sense of sin? Not to mention the prison of pain, the

wading pools of pleasure, and the public and professional voices

of our sentimental land. If there is a God, and sometimes I

believe there is one, I'm sure He says, "Go on, my boy, I don't

know that I can help you, but we wouldn't want all these people

to tell you what to do. (BB, p. 318.)

The novel ends with Sergius asking God:

"Would you agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God,

who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in His weary

cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the con-

nection of new circuits." ‘(BB, p. 318.)

Although the answer is enigmatic, it opens up directions Mailer will
follow in his later writing. Time is the embodiment and a necessary

cause of being, of active, vital being in both an historical and a

144

personal sense. And the basic, truest instincts of a being are those of
the flesh. In denying sex man alienates himself from himself. To be
reborn into authenticity, man begins with the mysteries of sex and the ‘
natural compassions that spring from the most elemental of all relation-
ships, sensual love. Time thus takes a human, existential meaning, in
which a person chooses significantly between new experiences and the
stultifying habits of his past.

The imaginary dialogue between Sergius and God is revealing in indi-
cating where he should direct his positive commitment. As a hero-in-
training, Sergius is one who is much stronger, more courageous and dedi-

cated than Lovett was at the end of Barbary_Bhore. The hope Sergius pos-

 

sesses is not muted but promising and realizable. By assimilating Eitel's
existentialist theory and following the example set by Faye, Sergius will
eventually become another examplar of new values in action, that is, an-
other American existentialist hero of a kind. In Deer Park, Mailer's
version of American existentialism is presented in a compelling form with-
in a fully developed fictional context. Sex-~"good orgasm"--is existen-
tially related to the creative powers of a being. A considerable critical
emphasis has been focused on the essay "The White Negro" that has neglected
to examine the circumstances that prompted Mailer to write it, even though
"The White Negro" does theoretically mark a turning poing for Mailer's
thinking. The generative sources for many of the controlling ideas and
metaphors in Mailer's later work are from both "The White Negro" and Ihg_

Deer Park.

145

Advertisements for Myself

 

By the time of the publication of The Deer Park (1955), Mailer has

 

finally found the right character to embody his version of American exis—
tentialism and his unyielding search for a hero has ultimately resulted
in the creation of Marion Faye as his incipient American existentialist
hero. As Robert Solotaroff has recently noted, "Though the book ends
with Sergius's supposed regeneration, Faye unmistakably emerges as the
novel's ultimate adventurer and actual hero." "Perhaps the most import-

ant way," he continues, "that The Deer Park marks a watershed in Mailer's

 

career is . . . at pressing onward with a character who is best or driven
to test the extremes of experience, with an adventurer who would be con-
sidered psychopathic in his disregard for conventional morality,"11 As
a matter of fact, Faye is not only "psychopathic in his disregard for
conventional morality,” he also "has settled the new direction of purpose-
ful, as opposed to purposeless, death."12 And it is Faye, too, "who
closely conforms to Mailer's anatomy of the white Negro several years
later."13 Therefore, it is Faye who "pinpoints the link between The Deer
BgrB_and 'The White Negro.”14

Most Mailer critics agree that "The White Negro" is indisputably the

heart of Advertisements for Myself (1959). For instance, while Nathan

 

Scott, Jr. considers the essay "one of the most crucial statements of

15

Mailer's career," Richard Foster regards it as "a paradigm of the vision,

the ideas, the motifs and symbols that will shape all of Mailer's future

16

work in whatever form." Even Laura Adams thinks that the whole book of

Advertisements is Mailer's "literary manifesto," which "is a dramatic

 

account of the manner in which the man and the style come together, and

of the potential released by the synthesis," she still believes that the

146

"essay is certainly the ideological core of Advertisements. . ."17 In

 

discussing Mailer's heroism and heroes, “The White Negro" takes on a fur-
ther special significance. With the appearance of "The White Negro" ih
1957, not only has Mailer formulated his existentialist position and laid
the theoretical foundation for it, but also has set the white Negro as
the model of his American existentialist hero, to be imitated to make "a
revolution in the consciousness of our time.“ In my examination of BB:

vertisements I shall concentrate on the essay and the short story "The

 

Time of Her Time," one of Mailer's best short stories, with the re-emer-
gence of Sergius O'Shaugnessy as the regenerated existentialist hero both
in thought and life style.

In order to distinguish his version of American existentialism from
the European existentialism, Mailer calls his own the philosophy of Hip,
or Hipsterism. Before the forthcoming "The White Negro," in one of the

Village Voice columns, "The Hip and the Square," Mailer divides American

 

society into two classes: the Hip and the Square. The Square's distin-
guishing trait is his anality. In the unending war between the two fac-
tions, the Square is preeminent for he is mass man in mass society; his
ethos is preached by the media, government, the technologist and the cor-
poration. Driven by anxieties formed by his anti-eroticism, he is a neu-
rotic becoming more neurotic as he constantly must suppress and sublimate
his sensuality to the demands of civilization. The Square drives the
Hipster underground, is jealous of him and his liberated sexual life
style, and to justify himself, pursues the Hipster, censores him, and
whenever possible, eliminates his threat by assimilating him into the
Square world. Dominated by people of this kind, the society, Mailer

warns, is running away from its true nature, its biological reality:

147

. . . the shits are killing us, even as they kill themselves--
each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are
born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers,
the shock wave of television, as the sentimental cheats of the
movie screen. Little lies, but they pipe us toward insanity
as they starve out the senses of the real. We have grown up
in a world more in decay than the worst of the Roman Empire,

a cowardly world chasing after a good time (of which last one
can approve) but chasing it without the courage to pay the
hard price of full consciousness, and so losing pleasure in
pips and squeaks of anxiety. We want the heat of the orgy

and not its murder, the warmth of pleasure without the grip

of pain, and therefore the future threatens a nightmare, and
we continue to waste ourselves. ‘(BBB, p. 21.)

The Republic, Mailer insists, is in genuine danger, in peril of becoming
a nation of "drug addicts, homosexuals, hoodlums," and juvenile delin-
quents led by effiminate politicians and all rushing into cancer.

It is against the Square and his society that Mailer began to form-
ulate his theory on the Hipster and his life style, thereby he was pro-
vided the concrete image to embody his existentialist anti-social con-
victions and rebellious impulses. Norman Podhoretz's observation is cer-
tainly valid when he states:

The Hipster is the product of a culture (exemplified beautifully

in the Hollywood of The Deer Park) whose official values no

longer carry any moral authority, and he reacts to the hypocrisy,

the lying, and the self-deception that have contaminated the

American air during the cold-war period by withdrawing into a

private world of his own where everything, including language,18
is stripped down to what he considers the reliable essentials.

 

Mailer identifies Hipsterism as an American existentialism "based on a
mysticism of the flesh,“ its origins

traced back into all the undercurrents and underworlds of Amer-
ican life, back into the instinctive apprehension and appreci-
ation of existence which one finds in Negro and the soldier, in
the criminal psychopath and the dope addict and jazz musician,
in the prostitute, in the actor, in the--in the marriage of the
call—girl and the psychoanalyst. Unlike the rationality of
French existentialism in the work of Sartre, Hip is an American
phenomenon. . . (BBB, pp. 292-93.)

At this point, Mailer may identify the Hip as "an American phenomenon"

which has nothing to do with the French branch of existentialism. But

148

in another place, he also makes clear that in writing "The White Negro”
he is not discussing negritude p Effigy or even discussing Hip exclusively,
but mainly expressing his conceptualized model of the American existen1
tialist hero.

We might begin with one of Mailer's statements of commitment to the
existentialist philosophy in the American situation:

Death, despair, and dread, intimation of nothingness, the mys-
tery of mood, and the logic of commitment have been the central
preoccupations of the existentialists. In this country, there
has been a tendenoy to add our American obsession with courage
and sex. These concerns are the no-man's-land of philosophy.
Insubstantial, novelistic, too intimate for the coiled cosmo-
logical speculation of metaphysics, irrational and alien to
the classical niceties of ethics, utter anathema to the post-
Logical Positivists of Oxford, existentialism remains nonethe-
less the one non-sterile continuation open to modern philosophy,
for it is the last of the humanisms, it has not given its un-
conditional surrender to science. (BB, p. 197.)

In the essay itself, besides the ideas of courage and sex that have been
added as the qualities of the white Negro, the other main points are still
closely related, or, to put it more accurately, indebted, to the European
existentialism. The essay opens with an existentialist survey of the
human conditions of post World War II society, a series of images of the
crippled condition of the twentieth-century man whose only reality is
death and whose only response to it is no more than fear, anxiety, and
apathy.

Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc
of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious
mind of almost everyone alive in these years. For the first

time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of
history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed know-
ledge that the smallest facets of our personality of the most
minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas
and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we
might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statist-
ical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair
would be saved, but our death itself would_be unknown, unhonored,
and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as

a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but

149

rather a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radio-
active city; and so if in the midst of civilization founded

upon the Faustian urge to dominate nature by mastering time,
mastering the links of social cause and effect--in the middle .
of an economic civilization founded upon the confidence that

time could indeed be subjected to our will, our psyche was
subjected itself to the intolerable anxiety that death being
causeless, life was causeless as well, and time deprived of

cause and effect had come to a stop. '(BBB, pp. 311-12.)

 

It is especially interesting to read this paragraph together with the

first paragraph of William Barrett's Irrational Man: A Study in Existen-

 

tialism (1958), which appeared almost in the same year as Mailer's "The
White Negro." The first chapter, "The Advent of Existentialism," opens
as follows:

The story is told (by Kierkegaard) of the absent-minded man so
abstracted from his own life that he hardly knows he exists un-
til, one fine morning, he wakes up to find himself dead. It is
a story that has a special point today, since this civilization
of ours has at last got its hands on weapons with which it could
easily bring upon itself the fate of Kierkegaard's hero: we
could wake up tomorrow morning dead--and without ever having
touched the roots of our own existence. There is by this time
widespread anxiety and even panic over the dangers of the atomic
age; but the public soul-searching and stocktaking rarely, if
ever, go to the heart of the matter. We do not ask ourselves
what the ultimate ideas behind our civilization are that have
brought us into this danger; we do not search for the human face
behind the bewildering array of instruments that man has forged;
in a word, we do not dare to be philosophical. Uneasy as we are
over the atomic age, on the crucial question of existence itself
we choose 13 remain as absent-minded as the man in Kierkegarrd's
story. . .

Between these two opening paragraphs, the similarities are extremely
striking and the feelings behind are exactly the same; what most bothers
modern man, in the aftermath of the war, is the "intolerable anxiety that
death being causeless, life was causeless as well.‘I It is the mass vio—
lence and moral atrocities that have deprived the man of the meaning of
his existence but reduced him to nothingness. It is on such a bleak
scene that the American existentialist, the hipster, appears. Living

with the constant threat of death by atomic war or state, he chooses "to

150

live with death as immediate danger, to divorce [himself] from society,
to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the
rebellious imperatives of the self (BBB, p. 313)." We see here the fam-
iliar existentialist theme of courage and choice in the face of nothing-
ness by accepting the reality of death. Among the European existential-
ists, Karl Jaspers has said that "to philosophize is to learn how to die."20
Heidegger, as has been shown, insists that authentic existence is possible
for one only when one takes one's death into oneself. As written in
Chapter One:

Though terrifying, the taking of death into ourselves is also

liberating: It frees us from servitude to the petty cares that

threaten to engulf our daily life and thereby opens us to the

essential projects by which we can make our lives personally

and significantly our own. Heidegger calls this the condition

of "freedom-toward-death."

For Mailer, the American existentialist, white Negro, is also one
who lives in the "enormous present which is without past or future, mem-
ory or planned intention, the life where a man must go until he is beat
(BBB, p. 313)." He must encourage the psychopath in himself. In doing
so he calls upon all his energy and all his courage which, because he
exists outside the society, might enable him to increase his "power for
new kinds of perceptions (BBB, p. 313)." This liberty frees one from "the
prison air of other people's habits, other people's defeats, boredom, quiet
desperation, and muted icy self-destroying rage (BBB, p. 313).“ Mailer
thinks that there is no other avenue which will open the creative poten-
tial of the unconscious.

The American existentialist, like the European existentialist think-

ers, rejects a priori definitions of human nature. He differs from "the

passing verbal whimsies of the bohemian“ by having

151

no interest in viewing human nature, or better, in judging

human nature, from a set of standards conceived apriori to

the experience, standards inherited from the past. Since

.Hip sees every answer as posing immediately a new alterna-

tive, a new question, its emphasis is on complexity rather

than simplicity. '(BBB, p. 326.)
It follows, therefore, that "men are not seen as good or bad (that they
are good-and-bad is taken for granted) but rather each man is glimpsed
as a collection of possibilities (BBB, p. 327)." This recalls the dis-
tinction Mailer draws between "characters," and the "beings" who inhabit

in his The Deer Park. At this point, Mailer's formulation corresponds

 

to Sartre's theory, even though he does not accept Sartre's atheism, that
a man is a being-toward-the-future who creates himself through his own
acts. As Sartre has repeatedly emphasized, "Man is nothing else but that
which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existential-
ism."21

Again, like Sartre, Mailer, for all his insistence on individualism,
insists on seeing man in a situation. There is no constant self since
the self is constantly creating itself act by act. The self is no solid
identity, but a series of "intentions," as Sartre would have it, upon the
material around it. Nor is there a determinism controlling the individ-
ual. A man is best seen as the chemistry created between the intention
of the self and the dominating situation. Barrett, writing specifically
of Heidegger, calls this the "Field Theory of Man."22 Mailer describes
it this way:

Hip sees the context as generally dominating the man, dominat-

ing him because his character is less significant than the

context in which he must function. Since it is arbitrarily

five times more demanding of one's energy to accomplish even

an inconsequential action in an unfavorable context than a

favorable one, man is then not only his character but his con-

text, since the success or failure of an action in a given

context reacts upon the character and therefore affects what
the character will be in the next context. '(BBB, p. 327.)

152

Since the success of any individual will depend more upon the con-
text than upon his character, thus making the individual character depen-
dent to a large degree upon the various contexts in which he lives. What
results is "an absolute relativity where there are no truths other than
the isolated truths of what each observer feels at each instant of his
existence (BBB, p. 327)." Just as the nature of an individual to the
intention and the situation of the moment, so is the nature of truth
relative to the experience of the moment. Furthermore, truth is not
revealed by man, it is "a changing reality whose laws are remade at each
instant. . .

truth is not what one has felt yesterday or what one expects

to feel tomorrow but rather truth is no more nor less than

what one feels at each instant in the perpetual climax of the

present. (BBB, p. 327.)

What all this means is of course what Mailer has again and again stated:
the individual is encouraged to liberate himself "from the Super-Ego of
the society (BBB, p. 327)."

Given the absence of a transcendent Truth and left with the truth
of the "enormous present,” the American existentialist inherited from the
rhythms of Negro marginal life a "morality of the bottom (BBB, p. 322)"
in which "all situations are equally valid (BBB, p. 321)."

The only Hip morality (but of course it is an ever-present mor-

ality) is to do what one feels whenevefi and wherever it is pos-

sible, and--this is how the war of the Hip and the Square begins--
to be engaged in one primal battle: to open the limits of the
possible for oneself, for oneself alone, because that is one's

need. (BBB, p. 327.)

The morality of the bottom is mainly based on the experience of the Negro
in the cultural situation of America. As Mailer puts it:

Hated from the outside and therefore hating himself, the Negro

was forced into the position of exploring all those moral wild-

erness of civilized life which the Square automatically condemns

as delinquent or evil or immature or morbid or self-destructive
or corrupt. (BBB, p. 321.)

153

By developing such a moral principle, the American existentialist
protects himself against self-destruction and handles a language and art
based on the choices one makes about using energy. The choices are good
when one feels that he has moved closer to a knowledge of the unconscious
self; they are bad when one is further from that knowledge than before the
act. Each good act accumulates more energy (self-awareness) to achieve
a greater self-fulfillment the next time. When one is in total command
of a situation one will communicate the total self, one will be "with it."

To be with it is to have grace, is to be closer to the secrets

of that inner unconscious life which will nourish you if you

can hear it, for you are then nearer to that God which every

hipster believes is located in the senses of his body, that

trapped, mutilated and nonetheless megalomaniacal God who is

It, who is energy, life sex, force, the Yoga's prana, the

Reichians' orgone, Lawrence's "blood," Hemingway's "good," the

Shavian life force; It; God; not the God of the churches but

the unachievable whisper of mystery within the sex, the para-

dise of limitless energy and perception just beyond the next

wave of the next orgasm. (BBB, pp. 324-25.)

What is revealed in this quotation is not just one's communication with
the total self, it also identifies the sole source of one's energy from
which he may achieve such a communication. It has been labeled in various
ways; but actually it is nothing but "the unachievable whisper of mystery
within sex," which is to be brought out by the "apocalyptic orgasm."

So far, most of the qualities of Mailer's American existentialism,
as has been examined, are inherently part of European existentialism.

What might be claimed the peculiarly outstanding in his version is his
.strong advocaoy of sexuality and violence, violence on the individual
basis, to be assimilated in the life style of his American existentialist
hero. Since the hero, the hipster, is conceived in a time of war, the

war against all the pressures of a technocratic society that are calculated

to obliterate any sense of the sanctity of the private self, his instincts

154

are his means of survival and his chief weapon. As Jean Radford has
pointed out, "The orgasm is celebrated by the hipster because it is the
highest point, the epitome of the life of the instincts which the State
has not yet brought under its control. . ."23 So, when the hero seeks
love, he seeks it not
as the search for a mate, but love as the search for an orgasm
more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it. Orgasm is his
therapy~-he knows at the seed of his being that good orgasm
opens his possibilities and bad orgasm imprisons him. (BBB, p.
321.

For the particular part of orgasm, Mailer is directly influenced by

his reading Wilhelm Reich, expecially by the book The Function of Orgasm.

 

According to Reich, the "energy" which nourishes neurotic symptoms and
destructive attitudes can be adequately discharged only in fully satis-
factory sexual intercourse. A person with a genital character, unlike .
the neurotic, possesses "orgastic potency." This Reich defines as "the
capacity of surrender to the flow of energy in the orgasm without any
inhibitions; the capacity for complete discharge of all dammed-up sexual

excitation through involuntary pleasurable contractions. . . free of an-

xiety and unpleasure and unaccompanied by phantasies. . ."24

But for the treatment of sexuality in general, the existentialist
thinkers have their insights which Mailer could have taken into consider-
ation, too. For the existentialists, John Macquarrie wrote:

The ecstatic character of the sexual act points to the central
existential role of the body in sex, for ec$tasis is "ex-sistence,"
the going out of oneself. In the sexual relation the individual
goes out from himself to the other in a unity of being-with-the-
other. The sex act is not only ecstatic, it is also total. . . .
Sex is thus an attempt at a total sharing of being. If Berdyaev
is right (as I believe he is) in insisting that human sexuality
is not just a biological function but has its inescapable onto-
logical dimension, then even so-called "casual" acts of sex can-
not be regarded as merely peripheral to existence but are to
affect the persons concerned quite deeply; for in them too

155

something of the totality of being-with-the-other is expressed,

however badly.

It is in the sense of "a total sharing of being" through sex that Mailer's
hero is widening his own possibilities widens then "reciprocally for
others as well, so that the nihilistic fulfillment of each man's desire
contains its antithesis of human co-Operation (BBB, pp. 327-28)." Like
some European existentialists, Mailer moves from the social criticism

into a search for the psychic causes of social attitudes and begins to
concentrate his hopes on the psycho-sexual level to achieve "the paradise
of limitless energy and perception beyond the wave of the next orgasm"

for oneself, and subsequently, for others.

Before such a goal can be achieved, each social restraint and cate-
gory must be removed. And, in order to cope with the “authoritarian
philosophies" that "appeal to the conservative and liberal temper (BBB,
p. 328)," individual violence is preferred for such a task. Mailer
explains:

What haunts the middle of the twentieth century is that faith

in man has been lost, and the appeal of authority has been that

it would restrain us from ourselyes. Hip, which would return

us to ourselves, at no matter what price in individual vio-

lence, is the affirmation of the barbarian, for it requires a

primitive passion about human nature to believe that individual

acts of violence are always to be preferred to the collective

violence of the State; it takes liberal faith in the creative

possibilities of the human being to envisage acts of violence

as the catharsis which prepares growth. ‘(BBB, p. 328.)

Only through such actions can the individual protect himself against the
State and at the same time most significantly threaten the State. Mailer
further argues, for all "the destructive, the liberating, the creative

nihilism of the Hip," and for all "its violence, its confusion, its ugli-

ness and horror,

the violence is better without than within, better as individ-
ual actions than as the collective murders of society, and if

156

we have courage enough, there is beauty beneath, for the
only revolution which will be meaningful and natural for

the 20th century will be the sexual revolution one senses
everywhere. . . .

Man's nature, man's dignity, is that he acts, lives,
loves, and finally destroys himself seeking to penetrate
the mystery of existence, and unless we partake in some way,
as some part of this human exploration (and war) then we
are no more the pimps of society and the betrayers of our
Self. '(BBB, p. 303.)

To be properly understood, what appears to be an indiscriminate call for
violence and sexual revolution must be seen in the whole context of the
slaughters and concentration camps of World War Two, as Mailer has extra-
ordinarily well expressed at the beginning of the essay.

Since the American existentialist is concerned with both acting out
and understanding the demands of the self, and since the "apocalyptic
orgasm that Mailer envisions as the end of the hipster's search is a state
of being in which the mysteries of existence would be perpetually unfolded,"
the hero is thus conceived as an individual with a religious purpose and
this "concept of Revelations is not remote from the Christian one."26
Disagreeing strongly with Sartre, Mailer here asserts:

To be a real existentialist (Sartre admittedly to the contrary)

one must be religious, one must have one's sense of "purpose"--

whatever the purpose may be--but a life which is directed by

the notion that the substratum of existence is the search, the

end meaningful but mysterious; it is impossible to live such a

life unless one's emotions provide their profound conviction.

Only the French, alienated beyond alienation from their uncon-

scious could welcome an existential philosophy without ever

feeling it at all. (BBB, p. 315.)

Mailer rejects the French version of existentialism at this point because
of its total neglect of the unconscious and its concept of "death as
emptiness." Mailer prefers a vision of "the possibilities within death"
unclosed by an intensified consciousness. And the religious purpose is

fulfilled when the hero can convert "his unconscious experience into much

conscious knowledge" and thereby shift "the focus of his desire from

157

immediate gratification toward that wider passion for future power which
is the mark of civilized man (BBB, p. 317).“

The American existentialist's search for power makes him a potential
political force in the society, and indeed Mailer sees his characteristics
among politicians, soldiers, newspaper columnists, artists, and movie,
television, and advertising executives. But the hero's search for power
is also often deflected "because the fundamental decision of his nature
is to try to live the infantile fantasy (BBB, p. 319)." Such a decision
forces him to explore

backward along the road of the homosexual, the orgiast, the

drug addict, the rapist, the robber and the murderer. . . to

find those violent parallels to the violent and often hope-

less contradictions he knew as an infant and as a child.

(BBB, p. 320.)

The hero is urged to meet the parallel situations and give "expression to
the buried infant in him." By doing so, according to Mailer, he is able
to "free himself to remake a bit of his nervous system (BBB, P. 320)."
The American existentialist hero is thus in a sense the Synthesis of all
contradictions. All incompatibles become reconciled:

but the element which is exciting, disturbing, nightmarish

perhaps, is that incompatibles have come to bed, the inner

life and the violent life, the orgy and the dream of love,

the desire to murder and the desire to create, a dialecti-

cal conception of existence with a lust for power, a dark,

romantic, and yet undeniably dynamic view of existence for

it sees every man and woman as moving individually through

each moment of life forward into growth or backward into

death. (BBB, p. 316.)

By bringing the buries of self to consciousness, the hero is able to grow
toward wholeness. The essay concludes with a vision of the nature of
society having been acted upon by the American existentialist as a "gigan-
tic synthesis of human action" in which we come to understand what leads

to "our creation, and disasters, our growth, our attrition, and our

rebellion (591. p. 331.)"

158

In BThe White Negro," Mailer has presented a clear image of his Amer-
ican existentialist hero, who has embodied all his existentialist convic-
tions. These convictions are expressed with power and intensity. It.
might be difficult for one, who does not share his convictions, to take
any of his views seriously. When Paul Breslow first reviewed Advertise-

27 But

mgpis in 1960, he called the essay "a clever piece of nonsense."
recent serious critics of Mailer all take the essay seriously and read
it closely. For instance, Laura Adams thinks that ”it is that of a for-
mal essay, complete with epigraph, devision into sections, and quotations
from authoritative sources.

The careful progression from a statement with which all must

agree, that is, the concentration camps were the result of

the action of a totalitarian state, to the assumption that

death is the end of all actions by societies, has been over-

looked as has the presentation of opinion as fact, and the 28

loaded language calculated to produce a given response. . .
Nathan Scott, Jr. has found that "The White Negro" "has had an influence
on the radical young of our period so deep as to be well-nigh incalculable”
and the essay "can be recognized as Mailer's first systematic effort at
defining a pattern of life alternative to that which (in the language he
was regularly thereafter to employ) leads to 'cancer'."29

Followed after "The White Negro" in the collection are essays by
Jean Malaquais and Ned Polsky and Mailer's responses to them called "Re-
flections on Hip" in which Mailer further explores his philosophy of Hip.
In response to Malaquais's rejection of the Hipster as the "gorgeous flower
of Mailer's romantic idealism (BBB, p. 335)," Mailer points out that the
Hipster is first and foremost a sexual rebel who "attacks conventional
sexual morality, and to some degree succeeds in disturbing the balance

(BBB, p. 335)." The significance of the Hipster's sexual attack on civil-

ization is that Western civilization is built on property relations among

159

people and these relations denied the basic instinctual and psychic char-
acteristics of man:

A civilization from now, the vast chapter of Western expansion
which was built on property and such inhuman abstractions of
human energy as money, credit, and surplus value, may be seen
as an ice-age of cruel and brutally slow liberations of pro-
ductive, creative, and sexual energies which the contradictions
of inequity and exploitation congealed not only into the insti-
tutional hypocrisies of society, but indeed drove as cancerous
ambivalences and frustrations into the texture of being itself.
‘(BBB, p. 335.)

Therefore, the significance of a revolution in this century must come
first from a revolution in the consciousness of men which effectively
challenges these basic relationships among people. Here Mailer gives a
good account for his version of "liberation revolution," I quote him at
some length:

The growth of human consciousness in this century demanded--
for its expanding vitality--that a revolution be made, that a
mankind be liberated, and since the attempt failed in its
frontal revolutionary attack, failed precisely to change the
exploitative character of our productive relations, it may
well be that the rise of the hipster represents the_first

wind of a second revolution in this century, moving not for-
ward toward action and more rational equitable distribution,
but backward toward being and the secrets of human energy, not
forward to the collectivity which was totalitarian in the proof
but backward to the nihilism of creative adventures, a revolu-
tion admittedly impossible to conceive even in its outlines,
for unlike that first revolution which was conscious, Faustian,
and vain, enacted in name of the proletariat but more likely
an expression of the scientific narcissism we inherited from
the nineteenth century, a revolution motivated by the rational
mania that consciousness could stifle instinct and marshal it
into productive formation, and the second revolution, if it is
to come, would come indeed as antithesis to the "Great Experi-
ment:"--its desire would be to turn materialism on its head,
have consciousness subjugated to instinct. ‘(BBB, pp. 335-36.)

Thus the emphasis of the Hipster revolution is that man's instincts are
basically good and that if man could be freed from institutional violence,
which subjugates and destroys him, and finds outlets for his tensions,

then goodness will carry through the private violence of the release of

160

these tensions Band open the possibility of working with that human crea-
tivity which is violence's opposite (BBB, p. 336)."

Mailer's additional exploration of the implied meaning of his Amer;
ican existentialism is best seen in the short story "The Time of Her Time,"
in which the revolutionary ideas of sexuality are convincingly personi-
fied in the two major characters, Sergius O'Shaugnessy and Denise Gondel-
man. In this story, Mailer obviously intends to create personalities and
not simply stereotypes, people, not masks over the categories delineated
in “The White Negro." Sergius reemerges in this story as, like Marion

Faye in The Deer Park, the real existentialist hero that Mailer whole-

 

heartedly celebrates. Sergius here is roughly similar to the white Negro,

more substantially developed than he was in The Deer Park. When we saw

 

him at the end of the novel, he left Desert D'Or and first tried his luck
as a matador in Mexico. Although he failed at bullfighting there, he
learned how to dominate fear and open the possibilities for growth.

At the beginning of the story, Sergius intends to open his own bull-
fighting school "Escuela de Torear" in Greenwich Village of New York. The
atmosphere of the village qualifies as appropriate for the White-Negro-like
Sergius. His loft is in a rundown building on Monroe street, a garbage
and filth-covered block inhabited by Puerto Ricans, Negroes, poor Jews,
and Italians. The setting gives Sergius an opportunity to test his cour-
age, especially in the Negro hashhouse on the corner where he drinks coffee
with the Black who is painting his loft. Explaining how he intends to set
up a bullfighting school and knowing that the "barbarians would notice me"
anyway, he deliberately talks like Faye in the novel in a way that he knows
is a challenge to anyone listening:

I felt the clear bell-like adrenalins of clean anxiety, untainted
by weakness, self-interest, neurotic habit or the pure yellows of

161

the liver. For I had put my poker money on the table, I was

the new gun in a frontier saloon, and so I was asking for it,

not today, not tomorrow, but come sooner, come later, some-

thing was likely to follow from this. . . there would come

an hour so cold or so hot that someone, somebody, some sexed- '

up head, very strong and very weak, would be drawn to dis-

cover a new large truth about himself and the mysteries of his

own courage or the lack of it. (BBB, pp. 443-44.)

Sergius coolly lets it be known that he is a.bullfighten.that he regu-
larly and fearlessly faces death. These last lines explain the importance
of the confrontation. One gains manhood by testing it. The consequences
affect one's essence: to find oneself courageous means to become more so,
to have more courage for the next encounter. To find oneself less of a
man leaves one weaker for the next time, or at worst, it can destroy one.
Sergius himself recalls a crippling defeat which left him with an exis-
tential nausea.

The story is divided into two parts. In the first section, Mailer
demonstrates Sergius's desire to live existentially, to continually test
his courage in every small challenge that chances present. Confrontation
of danger is to be repeated to present the existential tension between
life and death inherent in every moment of significant Time. Section Two
records Sergius's affair with Denise. It is an entirely different chal-
lenge, infinitely more difficult than staring down the Negroes in a hash-
house. In the street manhood is defined by ability to fight; with women
it lies in sexuality. Sergius endeavors to initiate her into the mys-
teries of apocalytic orgasm. More importantly, Mailer here uses sex as
the arena for his existentialist hero's adventure and growth. The second
"Time" of the title refers to Denise's critical moment, her season of
"time fulfilled." That moment is charged with meaning, and causes her to

change dramatically as she comes to the end of an era of unfulfilled wait-

ing time in her life.

162

Denise is a Jewish girl, "one of those harsh alloys of a selfmade
Bohemian from a middle-class home (BBB, p. 449)." Mailer makes much of
Denise's being a Jew, a combination of "strength, complacency, and depre-
cation which I found in man Jewish women--a sort of 'Ech' of disgust at
the romantic and mysterious All (BBB, p. 449)." A college junior, she
admires T. S. Eliot, a preference Sergius finds amusing considering her
Brooklyn background. She possesses all the pseudo-intellectual trappings
of a totalitarian culture, the repressive mechanism that hinders men and
women from discovering "the buried nature." To the fact that Denise is
also being psychoanalyzed, Sergius responds,

she was in that stage where the jargon had the totalitarian

force of all vocabularies of mechanism, and she could only

speak of her infantile relations to men, and the fixations

and resistences of unassimilated penis-envy with all the

smug gusto of a female commissar. (BBB, p. 450.)

Her analyst is also Jewish ("they were working now on Jewish self-
hatred"), and is a type Sergius intensely dislikes, for the analyst is
like Eliot, one of "the doers and healers of life who built on the found-
ationless prevalence of the void those islands of proud endeavor (BBB,

p. 450)." Adopting Reich's sexual theories from her analyst who also
accepts Reich, Denise claims she is "vaginally. . . anaesthetized," and

can only find satisfaction with her lover, also Jewish, "via the oral
perversions." She explains her relationship with her lover as "an aggres-
sive female and a passive male--we complemented one another (BBB, p. 455)."
Her snobbery and her condescension inflame Sergius's desire. By taking

her to bed, he desires to humiliate her. He translates sex with her into

a bedroom class struggle with himself representing "a working-class phallus.

. . one of the millions on the bottom who had the muscles to move the sex

which kept the world alive (BBB, p. 450)." In fact, the whole basis for

163

their relationship is a struggle for mastery. The object of their brief
affair is like that of a fight: to see who will win. This is best seen
by the fact that the sustaining metaphor for sex in the story is that bf
battle. Sergius and Denise make love "like two clubfighters in an open
exchange (BBB, p. 451)." Later he "[throws] her a fuck the equivalent
of a fifteen round fight (BBB, p. 463)." Using a "tactician's cunning“
he waits "under sexual waters" to engage in what sounds like submarine
warfare. After "she was away, she was loose in the water for the first
time in her life (BBB, p. 464)," Sergius declares, ". . . finally, I had
won. At no matter what cost, and with what luck. . . I had won nonethe-
less. . . (BBB, p. 464)."

The affair between Denise and Sergius is a case study of the appli-
cation of Mailer's sexual theories and all of their social and ideological
implications. Early in the story Sergius claims that he is a stud, the
"messiah of the one-night stand (BBB, p. 447)," a touch-stone for women
who want to evaluate their lovers by a little comparison shopping. He
sets the standards for good love-making. Denise's failure to climax
challenges Sergius's "certified professionalism (BBB, p. 447)." Worse
yet, if she succeeds in denying him her orgasm, she threatens to destroy
some of his vital powers, because just as one victory strengthens one for
the next encounter, a defeat weakens one. Sergius's state of being be-
comes simply tied up with his ability to bring on an orgasm in Denise.
He imagines at first the consequences of his possible failure to produce
apocalytic change as a far-reaching spiritual defeat:

I was reminded of Kafka's £33112, that tale of the search of a

man for his apocalytic orgasm: in the easy optimism of a young

man, he almost captures the castle on the first day, and is

never to come so close again. Yes, that was the saga of the

nervous system of a man as it was bogged into the defeats, com-
plications, and frustrations of middle age. ‘(BBB, p. 456.)

164

The quotation demonstrates Mailer's belief that in the absence of apoc-
alytic adventure and growth (through the capture of castle or orgasm),
experience is reduced to absurd Sisyphian repetitions. In the story, Ser-
gius understands his task to be the successful rolling of Denise's Sisy-
phian "stone of no—orgasm up the cliff, all the way, over (BBB, p. 457)"
to fulfillment. Such an accomplishment is able to change the absurd,
repetitive time into the significant moments of living Time. Time and

sex are thus associated to make "the connection of new circuits," as God

revealed to Sergius at the end of The Deer Park. The connection can be

 

an existential and mystical experience, a change in one's essence, what
Mailer calls "remaking the nervous system."

Where Mailer limits himself in The Deer Park to distant descriptions

 

of sex, here he insists on presenting graphically the dynamics of sexual
interplays. He does this because he is convinced that the way people
literally make love is a good indication of their character and their
secret inner life. Sex in this story reveals crucial aspects of the char-
acters' inner natures. Denise makes love "as if she were running up an
inclined wall so steep that to stop for an instant would slide her back
to disaster (BBB, p. 451)." Her anger, her greed and her selfishness are
all made manifest in the way she assaults Sergius's mouth in her kisses,
makes love with no sensual play, and "hammers her rhythm" at him, using
him as the "dildoe of a private gallop (BBB, p. 451)." On the other hand,
Sergius displays in his love-making his sense of artistry and his need to
dominate. "Over and over in those days I used to compare the bed to the
bullfight, sometimes seeing myself as the matador and sometimes as the
bull (BBB, p. 457)." By exposing himself in primal situations, Sergius,
like Faye and the white Negro, has explored the uncharted ground of dan-

gerous experience for growth and the remaking of the nervous system.

165

As the story unfolds, their first sexual combat is a tie; Sergius
performs well but Denise manages to keep her will unbroken. Their second
meeting winds "itself up with nothing better in view than the memory of
the first night (BBB, p. 456)." It is only on the third night that Ser-
gius is determined to "beat new Time out of her, if beat her he must,"
because the stakes have risen alarmingly:

tonight this little victory or defeat would be full of lever-

age magnified beyond its emotional matter because I had decided

to bet on myself that I would win, and a defeat would bring me

closer to a general depression, a fog bank of dissatisfaction

with myself which I knew could last for months or more. '(BBB,

p. 458.)

The rewards of such a victory will be splendid; he contemplates the qual-
ities of character that he will absorb through physical contact in the
winning:

Whereas a victory would add to the panoplies of my ego some

peculiar (but for me, valid) ingestion of her arrogance, her

stubbornness, and her will-~those necessary ingredients of

which I could not yet have enough for my ambition. (BBB, p. 458.)

However, all his sexual project for the third night does not go off
without a hitch, for Sergius first suffers a premature ejaculation. The
climax becomes almost anti-climatic. Sergius finally brings Denise to
her first orgasm by sodomizing her, violating "the bridal ground of her
symbolic and therefore real vagina (BBB, p. 463)." And it is worth
noting that Sergius wants to "prong" Denise in their first meeting, and
later brings on her orgasm by doing exactly that, as she fights in ear--
nest, "fierce not to allow him this last of the liberties (BBB, p. 463)."

Denise's challenge to Sergius carries an important dimension in its
relationship to time. What bothers him most is her quality of indepen-

dence, the assurance that in a year she won't remember him. Denise

threatens a kind of sexual extinction, unless Sergius can insure his

166

continued existence in her mind. He must create a deathless memory of
himself as a mark of his victory. Then the lasting quality of the exper-
ience in Denise's memory will transcend time. His final triumph comes'
when he rubs into Denise's face the token of his mastery. And also, as
"the first big moment in her life" is to come, Sergius further humiliates
her physically by saying, "You dirty little Jew (BBB, p. 464)."

For Sergius, the final triumph and mastery helps him discover a
small new truth about his manhood and his ability to master this particu-
lar kind of threatening encounter:

I had won nonetheless, and since all real pay came from victory,

it was more likely that I would win the next time I gambled my

222k? on something more appropriate for my ambition. '(BBB, p.

But, on the other hand, for Denise, "with a satisfied body but a defeated
will, her only retaliation is to accuse Sergius of latent homosexuality
and flee before her conqueror, in his hipster's triumph, can tell her
that she was a hero fit for him."30 The sodomy and the insult serve to
break down Denise's defense and rigidity. As a product of twentieth cen-
tury--Eliot, psychoanalysis, college, a certain social snobber --she

represents all the elements of the Square world Mailer attacks outrageous-

ly in the whole book of Advertisements. Sergius is looking for apocalytic

 

orgasm, a search that means "full engagement of my will in some go-for-
broke I considered worthy of myself. . . (BBB, p. 457)." Denise is vagin-
ally frigid, has been made so by cultural conditioning. To cure her,
give her a regenerated sense of Being, Sergius instinctively attacks the
symbol of her false acculturation, the anus, the seat of all of society's
preliminary proscriptions on life-regenerating pleasure.

Whatever way we may read the story, Mailer's style, language, and

convictions are all wholly at the service of Sergius. In "The White

167

Negro" Mailer identifies the American existentialist hero in language
strikingly identical to the story's characterization of Sergius: "so,
too, for the existentialist. . . and the saint and the bullfighter and.
the lover. The common denominator for all of them is their burning con-
sciousness of the present, exactly that incandescent consciousness which
the possibilities with a death have opened for them (BBB, p. 316)."
However, up to this point, it should be immediately understood that Mailer
has not created the American existentialist hero as a static figure who
never grows but always behaves in the same manner in each story. If this
were the case, Mailer would contradict himself in advocating his American
existentialism. Yet, this is not the case.

It is true that by observing the same existential principles Bergius

in “The Time of Her Time" acts like Faye in The Deer Park in many respects.

 

But they are not identical twins. Sergius may like Faye engage in sexual
activities less for pleasure than as a spiritual exercise for growth.
But Faye seriously deludes himself with visions of his sainthood, and his
' mission to "burn honesty" into prostitutes, or make Elena commit suicide.
SergiUs speaks of the saint in himself with greater irony. His piety con-
sists in his unfailing generosity. He even renounces the glories of super-
ior performance when he knows that his partner is in love with another
man:

For the smell of Arthur (Denise's boyfriend) was the smell of

love, at least for me, and so from man to woman, it did not

matter. . . that voiceless message which passed from the sword

of the man into the cavern of the woman was carried along from

body to body, and if it was not the woman in Denise I was going

to find tonight, at least I would be warmed by the previous

trace of another. (BBB, pp. 460-61.)
While Faye's attitude toward sex was mainly construed as the pursuit of

religious purity, Sergius here still derives healthy pleasure from sex.

168

By the time we get to An American Dream, we will find that Mailer's

 

full-fledged existentialist hero, Stephen Rojack, grows in another direc-
tion. Whereas both Faye and the later Sergius sin to purify themselves

and the world from evil, Rojack comes to enjoy the commission of sin.

12.
13.
14.
15.
16.

17.
18.

19.

20.

Notes to Chapter Four

Norman Mailer: A Critical Study, p. 20.

 

Steven Marcus, "An Interview with Norman Mailer" in Norman Mailer:
A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 25, 33.

 

 

Ibid., p. 34.

Down Mailer's Way, p. 53.

 

The Deer Park (New York: A Signet Book, 1955, 1964). All later refer-
ences are to this edition and will be cited in the text.

 

Three American Moralists, p. 44.

 

Ibid.
Ibid., p. 43.

Norman Mailer: A Critical Study, p. 134.

 

Down Mailer's Way, p. 68.

 

Diana Trilling, "The Radical Moralism of Norman Mailer,'I in Norman
Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 56.

 

Ibid.

Norman Mailer: The Countdown, p. 73.

 

Three American Moralists, p. 46.

 

Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work, p. 41.

 

Laura Adams, Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer
(Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1976), pp. 3, 64, 53-54.

 

Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work, p. 83.

 

William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy
(New York: Anchor Books, 1962), p. 3.

 

Karl Jaspers, The Way_to Wisdom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1951), p. 53.

 

Irrational Man, p. 217.

 

169

21.
22.

23.

24.
25.

26.
27.
28.

170

Norman Mailer: A Critical Study, p. 144.

Wilhelm Reich, The Function of Orgasm (New York: A Bantam Book,
1942, 1967), p. 79.

 

John Macquarrie, Existentialism (New York: Pelican Books, 1973),
p. 87.

 

Existential Battles, p. 57.

 

Paul Breslow, "The Hipster and the Radical," Studies on the Left,
1 (Spring, 1960), 103.

 

Existential Battles, p. 54.

 

Three American Moralists, p. 46.

 

Down Mailer's Way, p. 81

 

CHAPTER FIVE

The American Existentialist Hero Found in Reality and Re-created

in Fiction: The Presidential Papers and An American Dream

 

 

The Presidential Papers

 

As proposed in the preceding chapter, the actual model of Mailer's
American existentialist hero, the white-Negro Hipster, was created under
such circumstances that Mailer in the mid-Fifties was psychologically
burdened by the deadening effects of the American society and by the im-
potence of the radical movement. The Hipster was supposedly the hero
who was able to transcend his society and create the values, the very
conditions of his existence as he moved through the psychic underworld
of that totalitarian universe which spawned him, but which could not con-
trol him. Such a hero might "finally break open the bleakly conformist

"1 The hero might not think of himself as

surface of Eisenhower America.
a political man, but to Mailer he was the authentic revolutionary of the
mid-century America. Mailer insisted, again and again, that at the time
of his creating the hero model, the Hipster was intended to fulfill cer-
tain political functions.

However, Mailer saw in the early Sixties that his hopes of the Hip-
ster as a hero had petered out in a culture where the hipsters abounded,
though they did not act in the Mailerian sense of heroes. Instead of

bearing out courage and energy in their character, these hipsters were

weak, both mentally and physically, and perverted the life of myth:

171

172

But today in America the generation which respected the code of

the myth was Beat, a horde of half-begotten Christs with scraggly

beards, heroes none, saints all, weak before the strong, empty

conformists of the authority. The sanction for finding one's

growth was no longer one's flag, one's career, one's sex, one's

adventure, not even one's booze. Among the best in this newest

of the generations, the myth had found its voice in marijuana,

and the joke of the underground was that when the Russians came

over they could never dare to occupy us for long because America

was too Hip. (BB, p. 41.)

The hipsters of this kind could never fulfill the desired political func-
tions, nor could they "dominate those mutually contradictory inhibitions
upon violence and love which civilization has exacted of us (BBB, p. 318)?
so as to create a new nervous system for growth. Having been disappointed
with these powerless psychic outlaws, Mailer continued his search for a
hero among the public figures: a writer like Hemingway, a boxer like
Patterson, or a politician like Kennedy.

In 1960, Mailer was greatly attracted by Kennedy, whose glamour and
magnetism gave him the potential of an "existential hero" in the arena of
politics, with the requisite "existential" political consciousness.
Mailer's White Negro may not exist at all as a man of flesh and bone in
reality. But according to Mailer, John F. Kennedy might be just the in-
carnation of White Negro who would possibly perform all his political
functions in the actual world of America. Kennedy, the bright young man
with style and the first national leader of heroic potential since Roose-
velt, almost converted Mailer to a more reflective appreciation of poli-
tics and brought him hope for change within the American political trad-
ition. With Kennedy's administration, there would have been a dynamism
that was going to be instilled in American life after fifteen years of
political stasis. At this point, Mailer certainly reflected the general

feeling about Kennedy throughout the nation. Even the New Leftists and

the black activists had much the same feeling at the beginning. As

173

Julius Lester, a New Leftist and black activist, wrote:

With John Kennedy in the White House and Jackie on the front
pages looking like the mistress of the hunt, the country
entered a period which was beyond an intellectual's wildest
dreams. Ideas were not only listened to, but sought out. . .
The Kennedy's gave the intellectual a place in the smog-
obscured sun and created an image with which the young could
identify. With their games of touch football, their ability
to laugh at themselves, their directness and honesty(?), they
created a feeling of hope in most sectors of the natign. . .
They represented hope to many who had ceased to hope.

The Presidential Papers (1963) is a collection of essays, interviews,

 

and magazine columns, which were published in the interval between the

publication of Advertisements and May, 1964, the majority during the

 

Kennedy administration. Apparently, the criterion for selection of these
diverse pieces is that "their subject matter is fit concern for a Presi-
dent (BB, p. 1)." Mailer's purpose was to catch the attention of Presi—
dent Kennedy, who he thought would be receptive to his ideas and capable
of carrying them out. As Mailer himself put it in his "Special Preface
to the Bantam Edition" written after Kennedy's assassination,

The Presidential Papers were written while Jack Kennedy was

alive, and so the book was put together with the idea that the

President might come to read it. . . . Thus, the book was in-
spired by.a desire to have its influence. (BB, p.v.)

 

The persona Mailer adopts in this book is that of "a court wit, an amateur
advisor (BB, p. 1)." Mailer as "advisor“ sticks to the ways of the Amer-
ican existentialist. He insists on the need for a radical break with
"political ritual and vocabulary (BB, p. 152),“ but centers on fresh ways
of looking at things so as to change politics from a science of probabil-
ity to "the art of the possible (BB, p. 4)." The result is of course
"existential politics":

This book has an existential grasp of the nature of reality, and

it is the unspoken thesis of these pages that no President can

save America from a descent into totalitarianism without shift-

ing the mind of the American politician to existential styles of
political thought. '(BB, p. 5.)

174

To a reader familiar with his earlier works, The Presidential Papers

 

offers only limited additional insight into Mailer's philosophy. It is
important, however, in substantiating and amplifying the existentialist
ideas and concepts expressed in his earlier fiction and essays. It illus-
trates the application of these ideas to the actual social situations, as,
for example, in his analysis of the existential heroism, the character of
President Kennedy, the motives of juvenile gangs, and the nature of Amer-
ican politics. In "A Prefatory Paper--Heroes and Leaders," Mailer says
that the central problem in America is that life is becoming "more econ-
omically prosperous, and more psychologically impoverished each year
(BB, p. 4).“ The President must be more than a leader; he must be a hero.
"Existential politics is rooted in the concept of the hero" and "the hero
is the one kind of man who 22! E develops by accident, that a hero is a
consecutive set of brave and witty self-creations (BB, p. 6)." “All
heroes are leaders. . . but not all leaders are heroes(BB, p. 6)."
Anonymity is an important criterion, for such is the mark of the
leader who is not heroic, a man who embodies the history of his time but
is not superior to it. To Mailer any power that is faceless is "insid-
ious, plague-like, and evil power (BB, p. 6)." The FBI then had a leader,
but not a hero. "So it is faceless in history. . . . Power without a face
is the disease of the state (BB, p. 6)." To clarify the nation's need for
an existential hero as President, Mailer compares the nation to a diseased
body. He explains that a body becomes diseased when "one or another or-
gan has become too weak or too powerful in its function (BB, p. 7)."
Then the body goes through a war "which initiates a restoration of balance
(BB, p. 7)." Unlike the body, a diseased nation needs clarification of
those large historical ideas which resemble the slack diseases, feature-

less, symptomless diseases like virus and colds and the ubiquitous cancer.

175

(BB, p. 7).? In such a situation the nation needs men to "personify" or
Bdramatizef the struggle. "Acute diseases are like potential forces per-
sonified by heroes."

Mailer saw that Kennedy is such a President with "the face of a po-
tential hero (BB, p. 7)" who would possible shift "the mind of the Amer-
ican politicians to existential styles of political thought (BB, p. 5)."
He has traits of a ”Sergius O'Shaugnessy born rich (BB, p. 44)"--youth,
courage, energy, intelligence, wartime heroism, sex appeal, and marriage
to a beautiful woman. Kennedy would, for example, become a positive hero
for those youth who have retreated from the society into juvenile delin-
quency. In ”The Second Presidential Paper: Juvenile Delinquency," Mailer
argues that juvenile delinquency is one of the prime symptoms of the na-
tional disease. Suffering from boredom, such youth seek drama in the
rumble, spending "the days and nights of their adolescent years waiting
for the apocalyptic test which almost never comes off (BB, p. 21).” Yet
they have much of the same imagination and drive that is typical of any
"artist, any salesman, any adventurer, any operator (BB, p. 21)." And
they have many virtues which Americans once prided themselves on: "cour-
age loyalty, honor and the urge for adventure. (BB, p. 21)."

However, they find that America is a place for everyone "who is will-
ing to live the way others want him to, and talk the way others want him
to, with our big, new, thick leaden vocabulary of political, psychological,
and sociological verbiage (BB, p. 21)." However, America is not a place
"for those who want to find the limits of their growth by a life which
is ready to welcome a little danger as part of the Divine cocktail (B,

p. 21)." "The best way," Mailer suggests, "to combat juvenile delinquency

was to give artistic outlet to the violence, creativity, and sense of

176

pagentry which drives the average wild adolescent into disaster (BB,

p. 22).? It is because existential politics has a basic argument: "if

there is a strong ineradicable strain in human nature, one must not try

to suppress it or anomaly, cancer, and plague will follow'(BB, p. 22)."

Therefore, the nation must find a place for such people to express them-
selves and grow, and not hide them in a wrap of psychological and socio-
logical jargon.

For such a role Kennedy would be aptly suited. He was unlike any
political personality on the American scene and thus promised to turn
politics into a true relationship with history by bringing forth the
repressed American dreams and myths. Describing the Democratic Conven-
tion of 1960, "The Existential Hero: Superman Comes to the Supermarket,"
Mailer sees Kennedy as the right man to rediscover those American roots
covered over by the "spirit of the supermarket, that homonogenous exten-
sion of stainless surfaces and psychoanalyzed people, packaged commodi-
ties and ranch homes, interchangeable, geographically unrecognizable (BB,
p. 32)" so well represented in the architecture and mood of Los Angeles.
For it was Kennedy, upon arriving at the Biltmore Hotel, ironically lo-
cated on Pershing Square, "one of the three or four places in America
famous to homosexuals," who "saluted Pershing Square.“ And "Pershing
Square saluted him back, the prince and the beggars of glamour staring at
one another across a city street, one of those very special moments in
the underground history of the world. . . (BB, p. 38)."

Furthermore, Kennedy was inexplicable to traditional politicians.

He understood the underground myth of America, while they moved only on
the visible river of American history.

Since the First World War Americans have been leading a double
life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the

177

other underground; there has been the history of politics which

is concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull if not for

the consequences of the actions of some of these men; and there

is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and

romantic desires, that, concentration of ecstasy and violence

which is the dream life of the nation. '(BB, p. 38.)
Kennedy could appeal to those uncounted numbers of Americans who had
internalized "the romantic possibilities of the old conquest of land"
and turned the movement westward "into a vertical myth, trapped within
the skull, of a new kind of heroic life, each choosing its archetype
of a neo-Renaissance man. . . (BB, p. 39.)." And also, in America, "the
life of politics and the life of myth had diverged too far. There was
nothing to return them to one another, no common danger, no cause, no
desire, and most essentially, no hero (BB, p. 41)." Kennedy could be
such a hero to unite politics and myth into one life and help America
return to a "psychological frontier." Such an achievement could end
"America's tortured psychoanalytic search for security. . . and we as a
nation would finally be loose again in the historic seas of a national
psyche which was willy-nilly and, at last, again, adventurous (BB, p. 27)."
It is based on such a hope for America that Mailer began to write "Super-
man Comes to the Supermarket" and other articles to support Kennedy's
candidacy. At the convention Mailer was struck by Kennedy's appearance
outside the convention. The reception accorded him was a repetition of
scenes from the movies; the Democrats, to Mailer's amazement, were about
to nominate a man who was "going to be seen as a great box-office actor
(313.. p. 31)."

According to Mailer's argument, Kennedy's nomination is the demon-
stration that the United States, though anchored in the factual and the

concrete, the antithesis of the frontier since World War 1, remains the

country where the myth of the Renaissance--"that every man was potentially

178

extraordinary (BB, p. 39)"-«is still alive. Americans continue to be-
lieve in heroes, for America was "a country which had grown by the leap
of one hero past another. . . (BB, p. 39)." The older generation of heroes,
once the West was settled, were replaced by the dreamworld of cinema, and
the Renaissance man became the Hollywood actor. They became the bearers
of the frontier, a new kind of heroic life in which there was no peace
"unless one could fight well, kill well, (if always with honor) love well,
and love many, be cool, be daring, be dashing, be wild, be lively, be
resourceful, be a brave gun (BB, p. 39)."

The frontier myth, romanticized in films, became the national ethos
dictating:

that each of us was born to be free, to wander, to have adven-

ture and to grow on the waves of violence, the perfumed, and

the unexpected, had a force which could not be tamed no matter

how hard the nation's regulators, politicians, medicos, police-

men, professors, priests, rabbis, ministers, ideologues, psycho-

analysts, builders, executives, and endless communicators--

would brick in the modern life with hygiene upon sanity, and

middle brow homily over platitude. . . it was as if a message

in the labrynth of the genes would insist that violence was

located with creativity and adventure was the secret of love.

(BB, pp. 39-40.)
During the Second World War and after, a few men emerged who were larger
than life, in whom everyone could see a part of himself, and who gener-
ated in their personalities the secret longings of the people. Mailer
cited Hitler as one in whom this mysticism was embodied but who was, as
the evil version of the Hipster, the "hero as monster." What Hitler may
have served for the German character, the American hero needs to serve in
order to revive the national psyche by being larger than life, capable of
giving direction to and thereby helping the people to discover their deep-
est and most repressed sense of communal identity. It was Mailer's hope

that Kennedy would accomplish this through his image; under him the coun-

try would either rediscover itself and grow, become more adventurous, or

179

sink deeper into the false security and the small town logic of caution,
religion, the family, committees, and sensibilities of the FBI and mass
men. Mailer found one unique characteristic which made Kennedy most like
the American existentialist hero and which would help him accomplish the
mission, that was his awareness of death:

Kennedy's most characteristic quality is the remote and private
air of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience,
of loss and gain, of nearness to death, which leaves him isolated
from the mass of others. . . . He has the wisdom of a man who
senses death within him and gambles that he can cure it by risk-
ing his life. It is the therapy of the instinct, and who is so
wise as to call it irrational? (BB, pp. 48-49.)

Irrational it can never be, because in Mailer's version of existen-
tial politics, our only true guide is "the instinctive logic our inner
voice tells us (BB, p. 269)." In his "Last Open Letter to John Fitz-
gerald Kennedy," Mailer summarizes all his ideas about existential poli-
tics. Besides repeating "the need for a hero" and "the meaning of poli-
tics as the art of the possible (BB, p. 269)," Mailer makes a sharp dis-
tinction between the "classical politics" and the "existential politics":

Classical politics begins with the notion that a great many facts
and a few phenomena are hard, measurable, and concrete, and thus
may be manipulated to produce corrective results. Existential
politics, however, derives not from politics as a prime phenom-
enon, but from existentialism. So it begins with the separate
notion that we live out our lives wandering among mysteries, and
can construct the few hypotheses by which we guide ourselves only
by drawing into ourselves the instinctive logic our inner voice
tells us is true to the relations between mysteries. The sepa-
rate mysteries we may never seize, but to appropriate a meaning
from their relationship is possible. The first preoccupation of
the existentialist is not then the fact itself (for the fact is
invariably a compression of nuances which alienate the reality),
but rather is the root from which the fact may have evolved.

(BB, pp. 269-70.)

 

The more the President, Mailer assumes, insulates himself from exis-
tential reality with facts, figures, and statistics, the less apt he is
to adopt the free-wheeling reliance on his instinct and imagination that

will save the nation from totalitarianism. Mailer further assumes that

180

the instincts are totally separate and uninfluenced by one's experiences.
They remain pure, their messages absolUte truisms. What is peculiarly
adventagious about being President is that the office makes available an
opportunity for the man, since he has in his grasp the fate of the nation,
to place complete faith in the infallibility of his instincts. The White
House is the testing grounds for American existentialism. All that is
necessary is to repudiate advisors and facts and rely on the dictates of
the inner voices. Armed with his faith and listening to his instincts,
the American existential hero will lead the people out Of the totalitar-
ian suppression, out of the captivity of reason and technology. In the
actual scene of the administration, Kennedy's liberal advisors were trying
desparately to prove that they were really tough guys and authentic lib-
erals. As Arnold S. Kaufman wrote, "They proclaim that their predominant

'"3 They also condemn as

concern is to achieve 'personal authenticity,
"finks" liberals who refuse to participate in their projects of protest
when those projects seem ineffective or counter-productive. Yet, however
conscientious they were in their efforts to be authentic, these advisors
virtually accomplished nothing, for they had no way to cope with what
Mailer usually calls the totalitarian establishment of the American demo-
cratic machine. Their privatevirtue, instead of producing any public

benefit, brings them "public vice." Here in The Radical Liberal--The New

Politics: Theory and Practice, Arnold S. Kaufman sounds very much like

 

Mailer in his criticism of the American democratic system:

Oppressed by the pervasive hypocrisy of American society;
smothered by the institutional acquisitiveness of established
interests; tyrannized by the benevolent paternalism of academic
administrators; dirtied by the philistinism and ugliness of the
prevailing American culture (how much better to be dirty on the
outside and clean on the inside, than the reverse); stultified
by the mindlessness of the realists who purvey what passes for
social wisdom; . . . they are propelled into a desparate pursuit

181

of authenticity that requires, for the younger radicals, genera-

tional mistrust.‘ The worst cut of all is that private virtue,

an exemplary life of absolute middlesclass integrity, is not

only conSistent with, but often the very vehicle of public vice.4

Mailer's support of Kennedy made him feel partially responsible for
the successes and failures of his administration. His first commitment
to politics, under the hope that a great conversion was coming, was the
stimulus which goaded Mailer to ”follow Kennedy's career with obsession
as if I were responsible and guilty for all which was bad, dangerous, or
totalitarian within it (BB, p. 61)." Mailer's first three "Presidential
Papers" explain why he supported Kennedy; the fourth through the sixth
admonish him for a number of inaccurate decisions Kennedy made as the
President, such as the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Before
his assassination, Kennedy in several respects failed to live up to Mail-
er's expectations.

First of all, dissatisfied with Kennedy's lack of imagination, Mai-
ler criticized him for his failure to incite the people to some unstated
heroic action modeled on the Frontier myth. No "adventurous" legislation
was ever proposed. Many of the Kennedy programs were just a renovation
of the New Deal Progressivism. Mailer was also disappointed in the way
Kennedy handled the Cuban Missile Crisis. Appalled at tne New Yorkers'
apathy to the Crisis, and seeing in such apathy an overwhelming fear of
death which leads to a loss of courage, Mailer suggested that Kennedy send
his wife to New York as a hostage, thereby demonstrating to the people
of the nation that he was willing to confront death, that he was willing
to meet the demands of life in the mid-twentieth century.

New York is the place where we have air raid drills every year

and no way at all to save a single body from a single Russian

bomb. Yes, let your wife's helicopter land on the Hotel Carlyle,
and we will know it is likely you are ready to suffer as we

182

suffer, and that the weakness we feel before war is not merely

our own pathetic inability to stare into the mountain passes of

Heaven, the stench of Hell, or the plastic of cancer, but is

the impotence of men who would be brave, and yet must look at .

the children they have become powerless to protect. ‘(BB, p. 113.)
Although such a proposal is far-fetched it illustrates Mailer's conviction
that the country is dying, morally and spiritually.

In connection with Jackie Kennedy, Mailer believes that existential
politics reveals itself to her. She is a "lady of beauty caught willy-
nilly in political life" and "reveals the insubstantial existential nature
of political acts (BB, p. 81)." Mailer condemns Jackie Kennedy's tele-
vised tour of the White House for her attempt to find the meaning of the
country's history in its artificats. This sort of thing, Mailer assumes,
"Eleanor Roosevelt could have done, and done well. She had grown up
among objects like this. . . no doubt they lived for her with some charm
of the past. But Jackie Kennedy was unconvincing. One did not feel she
particularly loved the past of America. . . (BB, p. 95)." What American
people needed and what she could offer them was "much more complex than
this public image of a pompadour, a tea-dance dress, and a Colonial win-
dow welded together in committee (BB, p. 95)." According to Mailer, Jackie
Kennedy should show herself to the American people as she really is. Mai-
ler gives the existentialist reasons for Jackie's assertion of her own
style:

Because what we suffer from in America, in that rootless moral

wilderness of our expanding life, is the unadmitted terror in

each of us that bit by bit, year by year, we are going mad.

Very few of us know really where we have come from and to where

we are going, why we do it, and if it is ever worthwhile. For

better or for worse we have lost our past, we live in that air-

less no-man's-land of the perpetual present, and so suffer doubly

as we strike into the future because we have no roots by which

to project ourselves forward or judge our trip.

And this tour of the White House gave up precisely no sense

of the past. To the contrary, it inflicted the past upon us,
pummeled us with it, depressed us with facts. ‘(BB, pp. 95-96.)

183
Mailer understood that Jackie Kennedy was trying to be a proper First
Lady; But it was not necessary at all "to copy the Ladies who had come
before her (BB, p. 97)." She must regain freedom to assert her own nature
as an existential heroine if she wanted to be of any use to the nation.

For Mailer, the nation has given up too much of its freedom and too
much of its nature. Freedom has been squandered in abortive revolutions.
People always find a way to avoid all acts of courage. They divorce them-
selves "from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore."
They have "no odor of the living or of what once had lived, their touch
was alien to nature (BB, p. 159)." Mailer believes that the nation's
rejection of nature is equivalent to a rejection of God. From now on,
Mailer's ideas about God and the Devil are more pronounced, and they even-
tually take on a new significance in his American existentialist system.
His new insight is that the logic of a belief in God is a belief that each
man has a mission--"one of us to create, another to be brave, a third to
love, a fourth to work, a fifth to be bold, a sixth to be all of these.
Was it not possible that we were sent out of eternity to become more than
we had been? ((BB, p. 159)." If we failed in our mission, then we failed
God. To fail God suggests that we have given ourselves over to a Devil,
that force which is opposed to God and nature.

Mailer further sees that God has been forced to an existential posi-
tion and is no longer all powerful. That is why Mailer postulates an
existential God:

If God is not all powerful but existential, discovering the

possibilities and limitations of His creative powers in the

form of history which is made by His creatures, then one must

postulate an existential equal to God, an antagonist, the Devil,

a principle of evil. . . whose joy is to waste substance, whose

intent is to prevent God's conception of Being from reaching
its mysterious goal. ‘(BB, p. 193.)

184

In the American society, God and the Devil represent the life—forces

and deathaforces in a bitter struggle. For instance, collectivism is the
mark of the legions of the Devil. For this reason Mailer is sympathetic
to the Right Wing in America which senses "that there seems to be some
almost palpable conspiracy to tear life away from its roots (BB, p. 167)."
In a debate with William Buckley, reprinted as the eighth "Presidential
Paper,§ Mailer analyzes the Right Wing movement as an attempt to get back
to biological roots. This attempt is appropriate for the present century:

The essence of biology seems to be challenge and response, risk

and survival, war and the lessons of war. It may be biologically

true that life cannot have beauty without its companion--

danger. Collectivism promised security. . . Collectivism may

well choke the pores of life. '(BB_p. 167.)

The Right Wing's mistake, however, is seeing Communism as the source of
collectivism and promoting the Cold War. The true war is not the Ameri-
can race with the Soviet Union, but a war between collectivism and self-
expression. The conservative, although he is opposed to collectivism,
does not recognize the meaning and the significance of the American exis-
tentialist hero for the society. The conservative, according to Mailer,
would be content to see the nation's life built on a materialistic sur-
vival of the fittest.

The ultimate danger of the Right Wing movement is that it moves Amer-
ica backward into totalitarianism, not forward into freedom, for any soc-
iety built on fear turns toward repression. As a matter of fact, Mailer
already perceives that the inroads of totalitarianism in the American
consciousness in the "body cells and psyche of each of us" has been long
pervasive. Every American has been Conditioned to accept totalitarianism

by the "popular arts, the social crafts, the political crafts, corporate

technique (BB, p. 184)," television, advertising, educational jargon, poor

185

industrial workmanship, tranquilizers, frozen foods, household appliances,
and the monotony of modern architecture. The purpose of totalitarianism

is to behead "individuality, variety, dissent, extreme possibility, and
romantic faith, it blinds vision, deadens instinct, it obliterates the

past (BB, p. 184)." The new architecture specifically is designed to make
modern Americans forget the preceding centuries and the sense of the lives
of the men who came before the present age. "80 we are less able to judge
the sheer psychotic values of the present. . . . Totalitarianism came to
birth at the moment man turned incapable of facing back into the accumu-
lated wrath and horror of his historic past (BB, p. 185)." Cancer is the
result of avoiding our natural destiny by taking medicines that disrupt

the organ's sense of what diseases it is supposed to combat. As the organ-
ization of society becomes separated from its historical destiny, the body
responds with an equivalent confusion. All of this Mailer alleges to be
the responsibility of those few who in pursuing their egotistical interests
disrupted nature.

One practical proposal Mailer has made for Kennedy to implement to
defend against totalitarianism and return America to the state of nature
is allow minority groups, such as the Black and the Jew, full access into
the culture. The administration must find a way ”to liberate the art
which is trapped in the thousand acts of perception which embody their
self-hatred, for self-hatred ignored must corrode the roots of one's past
and leave one marooned in an alien culture (BB, p. 189)." For Mailer, the
Jew and Negro represent the best chance for the Republic. The Black in
"The White Negro" is the new hero, the prophet of primitive existential-
ism who by his example will convert the nation's youth. The other min-

ority for whom Mailer has a shred of hope is the Jew. If they can avoid

186

becoming assimilated, they can attain equality by working "an art" upon
the manners of the socially superior, "the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant
and the Irish Catholic,“ "then America will be different'(BB,p. 188)."
Assimilation will only result in making America the same as it is now,
"only worse." "Nothing can be more conformist, more Square, more pro-
foundly depressing than the Jew-in-the-suburb, or the Negro as member of
the Black Bourgoisie (BB, p. 188)." Once they have lost their existential
authenticity and adopted the standards of the "superior,“ then they are
nothing more than a "mediocre ersatz Protestant."

In discussing both groups, Mailer is not preoccupied with the average
but rather the exceptional Jew and Negro, the Jew of the Hasidim and the
Negro as heavyweight champion and contender. At the root of the modern
Jew's problem is a theological dilemma:

The Jews have staggered along for centuries wondering to their

primitive horror whether they have betrayed God once in the

desert or again twice with Christ; so they are obsessed in their

unconscious nightmare with whether they belong to a God of

.righteousness or a Devil of treachery--their flight from this

confrontation has rushed to produce a large part of the mechanistic

jargon which now rules American life in philosophy, psychoanalysis,
social action, production process, and the arts themselves. (BB,

pp. 189-90.)

The Jews actually have contributed to the growth of totalitarianism in
their flight from the existential anxiety. The Negro, too, is obsessed
with doubts. Is he a child of God or the Devil? Magic, his secret fix-
ation, "that elixir of nature," prevents him from making "his peace with
Christianity, or mankind." Subconsciously the Negro

does not know if he is a part of mankind, or a special embodi-

ment of nature suspended between society and the gods. As the

Negro enters civilization, Faust may be his archetype, even as

the Jew)has fled Iago as the despised image of himself. '(BB,

p. 190.

The Negro and the Jew are suspended between their desire to imitate

their imagined superiors, the political and economic establishment, and

187

an inner commitment to spiritual values which will make their adjustment
to American civilization a process whereby they might lose their souls.
In both cases they are a product of history. For Mailer, the Negro is
the primitive innocent and his capacity to convert civilization is greater
than his capacity to conform. Unlike the Jew, the Negro does not have to
carry the staggering load of twenty centuries of accumulated doubt and
guilt. While the Negroes created whatever is vital in American culture,
the spontaneous and sensual, the Jews epitomize everything Mailer hates
about the nation: liberalism and the dependency on the analyst as the
means for rationalizing guilt. Furthermore, the Negro, untainted by the
original sin of Protestantism and the crimes against God that have been
committed in the name of scientific progress, is willing to search for
extreme situations, those situations which "burn out the filament of dull
habit and turn the conscious mind back upon its natural subservience to
the instinct.(BB, p. 198)."

The danger of civilization is that its leisure, its power, its

insulation from nature, so alienate us from instinct that our

consciousness and our habits take on an autonomy which may

censor even the most necessary communication between mind and

instinct. For consciousness, once it is alienated from.instinct,

begins to construct its intellectual formulations over a void.

The existential moment, by demanding the most extreme response

in the protagonist, tends to destroy psychotic autonomies in

the mind--since they are unreal they give way first--one is

returned closer to the reality of one's personal strength or

weakness. (BB, p. 198.)

After analyzing all the possibilities that the Negroes have been
endowed with for defending against totalitarianism and its corrosion of
American culture, Mailer again reminds Kennedy of his responsibility to
the minority: "So a responsible politician, a President, let us say,
professionally sensitive to minority groups, cannot begin to be of real

stature to that minority until he becomes aware of what is most pressing

and ubiquitous in their need (BB, p. 189)."

188

Mailer in most of his later "Presidential Papers" was apparently
critical of certain aspects of the Kennedy administration, but it was
always criticism infused with the hope of helping to stimulate a dynamic
quality in the personal style of President Kennedy and his wife. Even

"about twelve weeks before Jack Kennedy took his visit to Dallas," Mailer,

 

in "The Leading Man: A review of'J.F;Ki:'The Man'and'theBByth," criticized
Victor Lasky's book, as one "which will give pleasure to every Kennedy-
hater who reads it (BB, p. 165),"5 and Lasky himself was obviously "an
all-out Nixon man." Mailer's conclusion was that "with all his documen-
tation of Jack Kennedy's political life, the large disappointment in the
book is that Lasky has no intimation of the curious depts in the President's
nature (BB, p. 168)." Mailer firmly believes:

Jack Kennedy is a new kind of political leader, and study of

his past political sins will not help us to comprehend his

future. . . . He is not a father, nor a god, nor a god-figure,

nor an institution, nor a symbol. He is in fact--permit the

literary conceit--a metaphor. Which is to say that Jack

Kennedy is more like a hero of uncertain moral grandeur: is

his ultimate nature tragic or epic? Is he a leading man or

America's brother? (CC, p. 168.)

As a "metaphor" of America, Kennedy.is cast in a more existential
role--a leader who transcends the cultural norms of good and evil, of hero-
ism and villainy in the traditional sense, who becomes one without any
preconceived nature or "a Kierkegaardian hero": "Kierkegaard had divined
that there was probably no anguish on heaven or earth so awful as the
inability to create one's nature by daring, exceptional, forbidden, or
socially impossible acts (BB, p. 169).“ Mailer then explains the meta-
phorical relation between hero and culture:

We had become a Kierkegaardian nation. In the deep mills of

our crossed desires, in the darkening ambiguities of our his-

toric role, we could know no longer whether we should prosper'

or decline, whether we were the seed of freedom or the elabora-
tion of a new tyrany. We needed to discover ourselves by an

189

exploration through our ambiguity. And that precise ambiguity

is embodied in the man we chose for our President. 'His magneti-

cism is that he offers us a mirror of ourselves, he is an .

existential hero, his end is unknown, it is even unpredictable,

even as our end is unpredictable, so in this time of crisis he

is able to perform the indispensable psychic act of a leader,

he takes our national anxiety so long buried and releases it

to the surface--where it belongs. '(BB, p. 170.)

However, all the hope that Mailer has invested in Kennedy unexpectedly
and irreplaceably vanishes with the assassination of the hero. As Donald
Kaufmann has noted, "Kennedy's death in November of 1963--which transformed
him into a historical symbol rather than an existential metaphor--deadens
America so much that one of its noisiest spokesmen suddenly loses his
voice."6 Bitterly frustrated with the actual political scene of America
and further convinced of the impossibility of an existentialist hero in
reality, Mailer turned to fiction for hero-creation again. Whereas it is

unusually quiet in Cannibals and Christians (1966) for Mailer to voice any

 

of his feelings about the actual death of Kennedy, "everywhere in Rojack's
characterization there is a hint of Mailer's attempt to resurrect Kennedy

as a hero who belongs more in a novel than in America."7

An American Dream

 

Mailer's intention of creating a figure resembling Kennedy as the
full-fledged American existentialist hero in fiction is clearly shown even

by the very first sentence of An American Dream (1965): "I met Jack Ken-

 

nedy in November, 1946,(BB, p. 9)."8 In many respects, the hero-narrator

of An American Dream, Stephen Richards Rojack, reminds us of President

 

Kennedy. As Rojack recollects at the outset of the novel:

We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected
to Congress. We went out one night on a double date and it
turned out to be a fair evening for me. ‘(BB, p.9.)

190

On the surface, this piece of information seems to be the point of depart-
ure for Rojack's account Of the dramatic differences between the subse-
quent directions of his life, and those of other more successful politi-

cians like John Kennedy. But in An American Dream, Mailer has actually

 

used President Kennedy and his assassination as the basis for the growth
and develOpment of Rojack the ideal American existentialist hero. Rojack
failed to become the U. S. President, but for Mailer the reasons for this
failure are the very central part of his heroism. Unlike Kennedy, whose
fatal drawback, according to Mailer, is the lack of imagination, Rojack
is a hero of superhuman imagination. Rather than President Kennedy,
Rojack is just the hero I'whose personality might suggest contradictions
and mysteries which reach into the alienated circuits of the underground"
and who "embodies the fantasy and so allows each private mind the liberty
to consider its fantasy and find a way to grow (BB, pp. 41-42)."

Even the title of this novel suggests that Mailer this time has left
the surface river of American life and plunged into the subterranean cur-
rent to explore "that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the
dream life of the nation" although Kennedy's assassination has been used
as the basis in the story. The evidence for relating the events of the
novel and the historical event is slim. For Mailer intends to be con-
cerned primarily with plumbing the depths of the American psyche of the
Kennedy era, what he eventually wants to find is a medium that will give
him a close access to the psychic significance of the event and not be
misled by the "facts." Mailer believes that mass media and journalism
are totally inadequate to convey the truth of a situation to the public.
Instead, they cloud the truth by brow-beating the public with information.
This is why this time Mailer places his existentialist hero outside of

politics. As he earlier said in the essay "On Dread":

191

But then politics, like journalism, is interested to hide

from us the existential abyss of dread, the terror which lies
beneath our sedation. Today, a successful politician is not
a man who wrestles with the art of the possible. . . he is,

on the contrary, a doctor of mass communications who may meas-
ure his success by the practice of a political ritual and
vocabulary which diverts us temporarily from dread, from
anxiety, from the mirror of dream. '(BB, p. 52.)

In the political arena, the American Dream has turned into a night-
mare of material success and security. But Rojack's dream is that of
existential experience through magic and violence, and the display of
courage in a moment of crisis so as to come closer to that "unachievable
whisper of mystery (BBB, p. 325)" than any of his predecessors, such as,
the old Sergius, the new Sergius, Marion Faye, or the model hero, White
Negro. Therefore, if the book has any focus, it is on the existential
psychic mysteries of existentialism, rather than in any other philosophi-
cal or social theories, that Mailer is now searching for new directions
for the growth of his American existentialist hero. Unlike the narrators
of Mailer's earlier novels, Rojack himself is the central figure for the
exploration of the existential psychic mysteries. Unlike the earlier nar-
rators again, Rojack knows what he is looking for from the very beginning
of the story. His central thesis, also the thesis of the novel, is that
"magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation
(BB, p. 15)." At this point, my observation largely accords with what
Helen Weinberg said about Rojack and the novel:

Finally through the catalyst of the definition of the ideal

American existentialist, the hipster archetypally found in the

modern American Negro, [Mailer] fuses the old Sergius, the new

Sergius, and Marion into a single hero who is put into action

as Stephen Rojack in American Dream. . . . In An American

Dream, Mailer's ideology again triumphs over existential real-

ity. However, since An American Dream is a construct flexible

enough to include a personal vision as well as a preconceived

ideology, it has an artistry of its own. . . . Certainly the

personal visionary element in his philosophy, no matter how
much it had been described and predefined in his essays and

 

 

 

192

journalistic pieces (collected in Advertisements for Myself,
The Presidential Papers, and Cannibals and"Christians) gives
his dieology the intensity 06 dramatic poetry, metaphor, and
symbol in An American Dream.

 

 

 

 

However, upon its first appearance in 1964 in monthly installments

in Esguire and for some time afterwards, An AmeriCan'Dream.received very

 

little sympathetic and in-depth criticism like that which has been quoted
above. In fact, very few critics were sympathetic to this particular out-
growth of the evolution of Mailer's ideas. The early criticism reacted
severely to the elements of plot, character, and pace of the novel. Many
critics preferred to regard the book as unrealistic, irresponsible, even
hysterical. The most severe attack came from Elizabeth Hardwick. To her,

An American Dream was a "fantasy of vengeful murder, callous copulations

 

and an assortment of dull cruelties" which were unjustified literarily

because it was "poorly written, morally foolish and intellectually empty."10

Hardwick goes on to describe it as "dirty," "degrading," "smelly," "fat-
uous," "messy"; her final verdict is that it is ”just a pile of dust."11

Joseph Epstein had this to say of it in his review in The New Public:

 

“For any way and on any level one chooses to read it, An American Dream.

 

is confused and silly."12 He also says that it has fewer ideas than any
of Mailer's previous novels, "and fewer still which are convincingly
stitched into the novel, and fewer than that which are of any value."13

Philip Rahv, in his review in The New York Review of Books, said that

 

although the novel's title "implies a generalization about the national
life,“ it is "palpably unsupported either by the weird and sometimes ludi-
crous details of the story or by the low-level private mysticism informing

"14 This mysticism Rahv equates with Mailer's

its imaginative scheme.
ideas on "hip," which he says "is scarcely a report on something that

exists outside himself, but is basically a programatic statement of his

193

own desires, power drives, and daydreams."15

This is, however, not to say that there were no early reviews and
criticism that were positive; both Richard Poirier and Leo Bersani made
early and favorable responses to the novel.16 Both warned the detractors
not to take the novel's events literally, and that it is not a novel of
crime and punishment in the conventional sense. Furthermore, many irrele-

vant attacks upon An American Dream merely resulted from the fact that the

 

novel was so different from anything Mailer had done up to this point that
few readers could see the seriousness of intent of its particular details
and larger structures. If we try to understand the novel in a larger con-
text by seeing through the relationships between Rojack and President

Kennedy as Mailer perceived him in Presidential Papers, and Mailer's urgent

 

search for a hero who might take the place of his political Kierkegaardian
hero in fiction, we may not be so easily confused and thereby irritated

by Rojack's headlong rush into the mysteries of murder, suicide, the in-
sane edges of sex, and magic and demonism. There are also indications in
Mailer's work that provide sufficient transitions in the reader's mind for
such seemingly abrupt shifts, such as from Faye's playing the role of vil-
lain to descend to the very heart of darkness and from the new Sergius's
sodomizing'Denise by violating the "bridal ground of her symbolic and
therefore real vagina," to Rojack's existentialist forays into the Ameri-
can psychic underworld of sex and violence.

In fact, Rojack's adventures in the thirty-two hours of the novel are
not just an "assortment of dull cruelties and callous copulation,“ as
Hardwick's review called them, but the spiritual travails of one of the
"voyagers and explorers" in God's "embattled vision." But as Jean Radford

has recently noted, "To liberate himself from the violence and perversions

194

of what Mailer sees as the American way of life, Rojack decides that he
must, like Marion Faye, 'make it to the end'-—act out the dream fan-
tasies of his culture in order to reach a new state of consciousness."17
Rojack's journey through this psychic terrain towards the "heavenly city
(BB, p. 122)" is constantly described in religious imagery. Even such

an observation was clearly prepared by Mailer himself in Presidential

 

Papers. In a fictional fragment functioning as a preface to an imaginary
interview on the subjects of scatology and eschatology entitled "The
Metaphysics of Belly,“ the narrator defines himself as a philosopher of
sorts, now dying of cancer, and speculates from some future point in time
on his effect on the "internal history" of the second half of the twent-
ieth century. He sees his greatest achievement as his "sensitivity to
the dialectic" and the subsequent decline of his power as his most woeful
loss. His achievement, however, was not in the operation of the skill it-
self but in his use of it for a Manichean adventure--to divert the con-
sciousness of the time to considerations of the mysteries of God and the
Devil:

There were others who possessed the dialectic with greater

power; the Frenchman Jean Paul. . . Sartre I remember was his

last name had a dialectical mind good as a machine for oyber-

netics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an

onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and

the possible existence of Satan. That was left to me, to

return the rootless disordered mind of our Twentieth Century
to the Kiss sub cauda and the Weltanshauung of the Medieval

witch. (33.1". ”“2733

According to Mailer's system of American existentialism, the concept
of God and the Devil is interlinked with a series of opposites: the ra-
tional and the instinctive, the intellectual and the mystical, the con-
scious and the unconscious. At the start of the story Rojack introduces
himself as a man seeking alternatives to intellectuality and rational

explanations of experience:

195

There are times when I like to think I still have my card in

the intellectual's guild, but I seem to be joining company

with that horde of the mediocre and the mad who listen to

popular songs and act upon coincidence. (BB, p. 10.)

Prior to the beginning of his narrative, Rojack has already realized the
Horatio Alger's American Dream of success: Harvard graduate, war hero,
Congressman, husband of an heiress, TV celebrity, college professor.
Rojack's achievement of the American Dream, however, has brought him no
happiness. And at the very outset, he comes to the conclusion: "I had
come to decide I was finally a failure (BB, p. 15)."

Having had a very intense experience of the mystery of death during
the war when he killed some Germans in a desolate moonlit landscape, Ro-
jack finds that the political game and worldly fame come to seem like an
unreal distraction in which the real private authentic self is swallowed
up in a fabricated public appearance. Rojack tells us that the crucial
difference between him and President Kennedy stems from a predisposition
towards death that was forced on him one night in Italy in combat during
the war:

The real difference between the President and myself may be

that I ended with too large an appreciation of the moon, for

I looked down the abyss on the first night I killed: four men,

four very separate Germans, dead under a full moon--whereas

Jack, for all I know, never saw the abyss. (BB, p. 10.)

In other words, Kennedy is more in the tradition of the American Faustian
hero; his connection is closer to the Devil than to God because he has
never seen the abyss. Further, the moon image in this novel takes on a
special symbolic significance. It is associated with "magic," "dread,“
and the "perception of death.“ Throughout the novel, Rojack has not tried
to define "magic," but from the situations he described and the actions

he took, "it seems to mean the psychic power which the existentialist

achieves in his heroic confrontation with the absurd-~an instinctive sense

196

of what to do."18 The incident is described in Rojack's recollection.

He was then a young second lieutenant, and on that particular night he

had led his platoon up a hill only to be trapped by two German machine-
gun nests. Feeling the horror of his failure, he says,

"Death this night first appeared to me as a possibility

considerably more agreeable than my status in some further

disorder," [andf]"I was so ready to die in atonement I was

not even scared." (BB, pp. 10-11.)

Having come to accept his death, he felt danger withdraw from him "like
an angel, withdraw like a retreating wave over a quiet sea (BB, p. 11),"
and he was able to destroy both emplacements with hand-grenades tossed
simultaneously.

What takes on a different coloring when Rojack tells us that some
other agency was at work in that night when the moon was full--that be-
sides feeling danger withdraw from him, he in fact did not throw the gren-
ades, "it" did. Further, when he looks into the eyes of the fourth wound-
ed German, who comes for him, bayonet in hand, the agency of his invulner-
ability--"it, the grace"--suddenly disappears. He cannot charge the Ger-
man soldier now, and the shots he takes at him miss. The wounded German
dies before reaching him, however, and Rojack himself collapses. It was
the eyes of this soldier that he could not confront,

eyes of blue, so perfectly blue and mad they go all the way in

deep into celestial vaults of sky, eyes which go all the way

to God is the way I think I heard it said once in the South,

and I faltered before the stage, clear as ice in the moonlight,

and hung on one knee, not knowing if I could push my wound, and

suddenly it was all gone, the clear presence of it, the grace,

iB_had deserted me in the instant I hesitated, afid'now I had

no stomach to go, I could charge his bayonet no more. (BB,

pp. 12-13.)

Although he eventually won, he was then still bothered by "those blue eyes"

because they ”kept staring into the new flesh of my memory until I went

over with a thud (BB, p. 13)."

197

It is the memory of eyes that ruins Rojack's budding political car-
eer. Elected to Congress at the age of 26, he is not at home in this
role, and considers it to be as unreal and insane for him as the life of
"those particular movie stars who are not only profiles for a great lover,
but homosexual and private in their life. They must live with insanity
on their breath (BB, p. 14)." The one single reason for this division
within him is the memory of "those blue eyes“:

His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,

and they told me then that death was a creation more danger-

ous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only

I had been able to think that death was zero, death was every-

one's emptiness. But I knew it was not. I remained an actor.

My personality was built upon a void. (BB, p. 14.)

Rojack has seen in a moment of transcendence the meaning of life inextric-
ably woven into the meaning of death. For all his superficial success,

he is a man who instinctively knows that a political style ignoring death

is an ideological void. It is in this sense that he says to himself,

". . .you also know if still you are sane that politics is not for you and
you are not for politics (BB, p. 15)."

The importance to Mailer of the acknowledgement of the engagement
with death as a pre-requisite for existential growth has been noted in my
discussion of "The White Negro." It is most significantly enuciated in
the section in which he distinguishes atheistic European existentialism
from the mystic and romantic death-drawn existentialism implicit in the
life style of the American existentialist hero, the hipster. However,
the notion that death is not final in the usual sense, but may be a con-
tinuation of life in some way, is the real point of separation between
Mailer and atheistic European existentialists. This is a notion that he

returns to again and again in all of his writing after "The White Negro."

Indeed, many of his other existentialist ideas can be considered from now

198

on derivative from or dependent upon the acknowledgement of the possi-

bility that death may not be dimensionless. In Presidential Papers,

 

Mailer discussed the various existentialist positions on the meaning of
death and made his own position very clear:

. . . the reluctance of modern European existentialism to take
on the logical continuation of the existential vision (that
there is a life after death which can be as existential as life
itself) has brought French and German existentialism to a halt
on this uninhabitable terrain of the absurd-~to wit, man must
lead his life as death is meaningful even when man knows that
death is meaningless. This revealed knowledge which Heidegger
accepts as his working hypothesis and Sartre goes so far as to
assume is the certainty upon which he may build a philosophy,
ends the possibility that one can construct a base for the
existential ethic. The German philosopher runs aground trying
to demonstrate the necessity for man to discover an authentic
life. Heidegger can give no deeper explanation why man should
bother to be authentic than to state in effect that man should
be authentic in order to be free. Sartre's advocacy of the
existential commitment is always in danger of dwindling into
the minor aristocratic advocacy of leading one's life with style
for the sake of style. Existentialism is rootless unless one
dates the hypothesis that death is an existential continuation
of life, that the soul may either pass migrations, or cease to
exist in the continuum of nature. . . . But accepting this
hypothesis, authenticity and commitment return to the center of
ethics, for man then faces no peril so huge as alienation from
his own soul, a death which is other than death, a disappearance
into nothingness rather than into eternity. (BB, pp. 213-14.)

The conception that death may have dimension thus forces Rojack, if
he is determined to undergo existential growth, to step aside from the
collectivist drift of American life and proceed himself to assume the
burden of his own destiny. Rojack is thus from the beginning of the novel
established as an American existentialist. Even though he is married to
an heiress, and is a professor with tenure at a New York university, and
has his own talk show on a local TV network, the rift Rojack's obsession
causes between him and the contemporary psychic life of society is to be
seen as much more radical and profound than that which underlay the alien-

ations of Lovett, Sergius, or even Faye.

199

The actual events of the novel begin with a scene on a balcony in
New York where Rojack is contemplating suicide. He realizes that his
life has been a failure, thus leading him to the urge to put his life at
rest, to fulfill his love for himself and his realization that he cannot
be what he wants to be. After a cocktail party in a friend's apartment,
Rojack vomits violently over the edge of the balcony and finds that this
purge has even more rawly exposed the vacancies in himself and has made
him highly receptive to the pull to suicide that the magical power of the
full moon exerts on those who are already so inclined:

So I stood on the balcony by myself and stared at the moon which

was full and very low. I had a moment then. For the moon spoke

back to me. By which I do not mean that I heard voices, . . no,

truly it was worse than that. Something in the deep of full moon,

some tender and not so innocent radiance traveled fast as the

thought of lightning across our night sky, out from the depth of

the dead in those caverns of the moon, out a leap through space

to me. And suddenly I understood the moon. Believe it if you

will. The only true journey of knowledge is from the depth of

one being to the heart of another and I was nothing but open raw

depths at that instant alone on the balcony, looking down on

Sutton Place, the spirits of the food and drink I had ingested

wrenched out of my belly and upper gut, leaving me in raw Being,

there were clefts and rents which cut like geographical faults

right through all the lead and concrete and kapok and leather

of ego, that mutilated piece of insulation, I could feel my

Being, ridiculous enough, what! (BB, p. 18.)
Suffering from a Sartrean nausea, Rojack feels that if he jumps he will
fly. "My body would drop like a sack. . . but I would rise, the part of
me which spoke and thought and had its glimpses of the landscape of my
Being. . . would leap the miles of darkness to that moon (BB, p. 19)."
Responding to the call, he climbs over the balustrade and looks again at
the moon. Instinct tells him to drop, but an appropriate moment seems to
pass, and he then feels that "Now if I dropped, all of me passed down (BB,
p. 19).“ Further, the "formal part" of his brain presses him to stay

alive because he has not yet done his life's work; however the moon on

200

the other side seems to argue, "You've lived your life and you are dead
with it (BB, p. 19).? Yet he cries, BLet me be not all dead" and climbs
back over. Nevertheless, he has at this moment become ill in a more ser-
ious way than before, that his cowardice has moved-his body's chemistry

to the point of cancer:

This illness now, huddling to the deck chair, was an extinction.
I could feel what was good in me going away, going away perhaps
forever, rising after all to the moon, my courage, my wit,
ambition and hope. Nothing but sickness and dung remained in
the sack of my torso. And the moon looked back, baleful in her
radiance now. Will you understand me if I say that at that
moment I felt the other illness come to me, that I knew that if
it took twenty years or forty for any death, that if I died
from a revolt of the cells, a growth against the design of my
organism, that this was the moment it all began, this was the
hour when the cells took their leap? Never have I known such a
sickening--the retaliation of the moon was complete. What an
utter suffocation of my faculties, as if I had disappointed a
lady and now must eat the cold tapeworm of her displeasure.
Nothing noble seemed to remain of me. '(BB, pp. 19-20.)

The cancer which Rojack now believes has begun in him is, according
to Mailer, a signal of possible extinction of the soul-~either in life or
after death. But, on the other hand, cancer, as has been shown in other
contexts, can also be caused by psychic ills, ills that stem from compro-
mise and cowardice and result in loss of individuality. As Rojack himself
indicates, he suffers from illness of this kind as well. And it is to
the fact of marriage with Deborah that he attributes his illness. He '
tells us this in a digression in which he recounts his self-hatred and
cowardice for his dependence on her and his insufficient strength to leave
her. It is the same morbid need to keep returning to her that now drives
him to visit her, sick and weak, on this cold night of the full moon.
Deborah has the same meaning to him as the moon at a moment like this:

At moments like that I would feel as if I had committed hari-kari

and was walking about with my chest separated from my groin. It

was a moment which was physically insupportable, it was the re-
mains of my love for her, love draining from the wound, leaving

201

behind its sense of desolation as if all the love I possessed
were being lost and some doom whose dimensions I would hardly
glimpse was getting ready on the consequence. '(BB, pp. 21-22.)

His love for Deborah is based on his dependence upon her; "marriage to
her was the armature of my ego (BB,p. 23)." It is with his ego that he
loves her, and with the same ego that he derives satisfaction from having
been "the man whom Deborah Caughlin Mangravidi Kelley had lived with mar-
riage." Because of his dependence on her name and on her extensive social
and political connections, and the omnipresence of her father Barney
Oswald Kelley and his tremendous wealth and power, Rojack feels that his
faith in his "strength to stand alone" has been completely undermined.
This marriage Rojack calls "a devil's contract." Deborah has the magical
power of the wealthy and the Devil's access to the world.

Deborah is indeed in league with the Devil and she has the power of
destruction to exercise it on Rojack. He describes this of hers when
he goes to see her in her apartment:

They (her breasts) radiated a destestation so palpable that my
body began to race as if a foreign element, a poison altogether
suffocating, were beginning to seep through me. Did you ever
feel the malignity which rises from a swamp? It is real, I could
swear it, and some whisper of ominous calm, that heavy air one
breathes in the hours before a hurricane, now came to rest
between us. I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of
murdering me. There are killers one is ready to welcome, I
suppose. They offer a clean death and free passage to one's

soul. The moon had spoken to me as just such an assassin. But
Deborah promised bad burial. One would go down in one's wind.

She did not wish to tear the body, she was out to spoil the
light, and in an epidemic of fear, as if her face--that wide
mouth, full-fleshed arrows--would be my first view of eternity,
as if she were ministering angel (ministering devil?) I knelt
beside her and tried to take her hand. It was soft now as jelly-
fish, and almost as repugnant-~the touch shot my palm with a
thousand needles which stung into my arm exactly as if I had

been swimming at night and lashed onto a Portuguese man'o' war.
(52. pp. 30-31.)

The mood at this point becomes dangerously charged, when Rojack admits

that he still loves her and suffers from getting none back, and his

202

separation from her has made him feel as though he is coming apart.
Deborah responds by saying that she too has known this feeling, but ad-
mits to have loved another man far more than him, "the finest and most
extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast
of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him (BB, p. 33)."
Deborah adds to the humiliation of this by disclosing a particular un-
named sexual act which they used to share, and which Rojack believes she
would never have done with anyone else. She emphasizes that she now
practices it freely with other lovers. At this he slaps her, harder than
he intends, and she in turn charges him "like a bull," going for groin,
first with her knee, and then, "missing that, she reached with both hands,
tried to find my root and mangle me (BB, p. 35)." With all his accumu-
lated hatred released, Rojack starts to strangle her in a mighty effort
against her own extraordinary strength and kills her.

His murder of her is like his killing of the German soldier; it is
a mystical experience. His description of the strangulation shows the
relationship between the two events. He says first that he felt as though
"I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give
inch by inch to the effort." He is about to stop, but

I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and

heaven was there, some quiver of jeweled cities shining in the

flow of a tropical dusk, and I thrust against the door once

more. . . I was driving now with force against that door, . .

I was trying to stop but pulse packed behind pulse in a pres-

sure up to thunder head; some black-biled lust, some desire to

go ahead not unlike the instant one comes in a woman against

her cry that she is without protection came busting with rage

from out of me and my mind exploded in a fireworks of rockets,

and hurtling embers. . . and‘crack the door flew open, and the

wire tore hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness

as well, rot and pestilence, nausea, a bleak string of salts.

I was floating. I was as far into myself as I had ever been

and universes whelled in a dream. To my closed eyes Deborah's

face seemed to float off from her body and stare at me in
darkness. She gave one malevolent look which said: "There are

203

dimensions to evil which reach beyond the light," and then she

smiled like a milkmaid and floated away and was gone. '(BB, pp.

35-36.)

The result of this experience leaves Rojack with the sense that his
"flesh seemed new. I had not felt so nice since I was twelve. It seemed
inconceivable at this instant that anything in life could fail to please
(BB, p. 36)." Obviously, the door image has the function of releasing
every hatred that Rojack has buried in himself all these years. Further,
the brutal murder becomes the first illumination in Rojack's pilgrimage
from a spiritual illness as it is seen in cancer, to the regeneration of
psychic resources for more vital and autonomous correspondences with ex-
istence and thereby saves his soul. Suicide would have freed him from
falling "into nothingness"; but after the abortive suicide, murder is the
only other alternative to experience a total catharsis, a mental orgasm,
to prepare himself for growth. Here Mailer has given fictional expres-
sion to the full range of possibilities implicit in the hipster ethic of
"The White Negro":

Hip, which would return us to ourselves, at no matter what

price in individual violence, is the affirmation of the bar-

barian, for it requires a primitive passion about human nature

to believe that individual acts of violence are always to be

preferred to the collective violence of the State; it takes

literal faith in the creative possibilities of the human being

to envisage acts of violence as the catharsis which prepares

growth. (BBB, p. 328.)

And though Mailer had acknowledged in "The White Negro" the danger that

"Hip might actually destroy civilization," he was insisting then, as he

was still insisting at the time of the writing of An American Dream, that

 

the slow death by depletions of spirit which is institutional death may
be countered only by personal acts of violence.
Just after Rojack murders Deborah, and while still filled with the

"new grace," he muses a while, thinking about Deborah when she was alive,

204

about her own notions of grace, of the revelations he got from the smells
she gave off in sex (Bof the wild boar full of rot" and "something other--
a hint of sanctity, something as calculating and full of guile as high
finance (BB, p. 39)?), and of her own conviction that was "more good and
more evil than anyone alive," but in the balance, "evil if truth be told."
She had claimed to despise evil; however, it drew her because "evil has
power (BB, p. 40)." Living with such a person had caused Rojack to "come
to believe in grace and the lack of it, in the long finger of God and the
swish of the Devil, I had come to give my scientific apprehension to the
reality of witches (BB, p. 38)." Rojack's new state of grace also helps
him make a switch in his mind from an ego-dominated consciousness to that
part of the consciousness which is led by the instinctive self, the more
surely teleological "navigator at the seat of our being (BBB, p. 355)."

After a brief interior debate about whether to call the police, con-
fess the crime, and go to prison, another voice in his brain says "'Look
first at Deborah's face.‘ (BB, p. 43)? This he does, and believes that
he divines from her appearance in death and that "what was good in her
had been willed to me (how else account for the fine breath of this calm)
(BB, p. 43)" and that "every last part which detested me was collected
now in the face she showed for her death--if something endured beyond her
dying, something not in me, it was vengeance (BB, p. 43)." Adding this
to all that has gone on before, we see that Rojack's psychic turn is now
complete, and from here on his actions will be directed from what are to
be seen as totally different psychic resources; he has undergone an exis-
tential realignment to accommodate the reality outside:

The verdict now came clear. I was not going to call the police,

not now, not yet--some other solution was finding its way up

through myself, a messenger from the magician who solved all
riddles was on his way, ascending those endless stairs from the

205

buried gaming rooms of the unconscious to the tower of the
brain. He was on his way and I was doomed if I thought to do my
work in jail. For her curse would be on me. '(BB, pp. 43-44.)

Next, in obedience to another force which comes upon him, and which
seems rejuvenatingly sexual, Rojack strolls out of Deborah's bedroom,
walks down the stairs to the maid's room, and enters without knocking to
find her masterbating in bed. Led to Ruta's room by the magical force,
Rojack is in what is best described as a heightened mental state where
all his senses are remarkably keen and, for the first time in his life,
he feels the magic of his own potentialities. With this power, Rojack
has the intuitive sense of Ruta's greed, and so in the midst of their
sexual intercourse he turns her over and enters her anus. Like a scene
. in "The Time of Her Time," Rojack describes the "thin high constipated
smell" that came from her, and thinks:

She was hungry, like a lean rat she was hungry, and it could have
spoiled my pleasure except that there was something intoxicating
in the sheer narrow pitch of the smell, so strong, so stubborn,
so private, it was a smell which could be mellowed only by the
gift of fur and gems, she was money this girl, she cost money,
she would make money, something as corrupt as a banquet plate of
caviar laid on hundred-dollar bills would be required to enrich
that odor all the way up to the smell of foie ras in Deborah's
world and Deborah's friends. I had a desire suddenly to skip the
sea and mine the earth, a pure prong of desire to burger, there
was canny hard-packed evil in that butt, that I knew. But she
resisted, she spoke for the first time, "Not there! Verboten!"
(BB, pp. 46-47.)

When he completely penetrates her anal passage he calls her a Nazi,
to which she responds in the affirmative. He thinks:

There was a high private pleasure in plugging a Nazi, there was
something clean despite all--I felt as if I were gliding in the
celar air above Luther's jakes and she was loose and free, very
loose and very free, as if this were finally her natural act: a
host of the Devil's best gifts were coming to me, mendacity,
guile, a fine-edged cupidity for the stroke which steals, the
wit to trick authority. (BB, p. 47.)

As they continue, Rojack alternates between her anus ahd her vagina, "a

206

raid on the Devil and a trip back to the Lord." Her vagina was, however,
impoverished, a "graveyard." At the moment of their climax, even though
Rojack has finally chosen her vagina which has become "a chapel now, a
modest decent place," he cannot resist returning to the Devil, in large
part, it is suggested, because Ruta has made no contraceptive preparations.
He has chosen, then, death over life, the Devil over God, but he is too
late:

I had come to the Devil a fraction too late, and nothing had been

there to receive me. But I had a vision immediately after of a

huge city in the desert, in the same desert, was it a place on

the moon? For the colors had the unreal pastel of a plastic and

the main street was flaming with light at five A.M. A million

light bulbs lit the scene. (BB, p. 49.)

Rojack shows the intuitive understanding that Ruta does not have. He
knows part of the distinction between God and the Devil, and he knows
which is the place for each. It is significant, finally, that when he
returns to his wife's bedroom where she lies dead on the floor that she
has voided her bowels. "There was a stingy fish-like scent in the air,
not unreminiscent of Ruta. They were mistress and maid and put their musk
in opposite pockets (BB, p. 54),"

It is in this section of the extended dramatic description of Rojack's
seduction of Ruta, the dialectical argument of good and evil, and the meta-
physical and moral implications of womb and anus, that many reviewers
found especially disgusting. But one early critic, John Aldridge, did
recognize the inter-relations of scatology, sex, and existential growth
in Mailer's metaphysical system:

For over the years Mailer evolved a sort of eschatology of

scatology, a. . . metaphysics of feces. Excrement represents

to him the organic form of defeat and dread. It is linked in his

mind to the work of the Devil, who is engaged in unremitting

warfare with God to determine the ascendancy of death or life

in the universe, a contest which on the human level becomes the
individual's unremitting struggle against dread. Closely related

207

to this is the concept of apocalyptic orgasm which Mailer first
explored in his famous essay, "The White Negro," The apocalyptic
orgasm. . . is above all else a psychomystical experience whereby
new circuits of energy are generated in the self, which in turn
come into connection with the circuits operating through the uni-
verse. Finally, therefore, it is a means of attaining oneness
with God. But for this to become possible, the Devil in us must
first be vanquished. Hence, behind every apocalyptic orgasm is
an apocalyptic defecation. From one exit we ejaculate toward
divinity. From the other we ejaculate the devil's work. The
route to salvation is thus from anus to phallus, from organic
excretion to organic ecstasy. If there is in fact a Gregg Chain
of Being, Mailer's advice would obviously be to pull it.

Making such a connection between scatology and sex is certainly part of
Mailer's intention, but, instead of espousing the idea of a Great Chain
of Being, Mailer wants all the knowledge he got from Norman 0. Brown co-
20

herently assimilated in his American existentialist system.

Specifically, in American Dream, Rojack is convinced that he has

 

taken from Ruta gifts of guile and the toughness to get along, and more-
over, that these are the devil's gifts, since they are received largely ‘
through anal intercourse. He also believes that whatever force of good
there may have been in Deborah has been similarly passed to him by his
communion with her in murder. Thus the devil may not be so simply evac-
uated; it may become necessary to enter into some temporary contract with
him in order to withstand other evils and dangers to survival. Therefore,
Rojack's encounter with Ruta represents a fuller realization than before
in Mailer's fiction, within the confines of a single consciousness and a
single dramatized moment, of the dialectical of existential growth with
his new ideas absorbed into the system.

In "The White Negro," Mailer had declared, as shown in the previous
chapter, that a "dialectical conception of existence" which would be obli-
gatory for life and growth would include a conception of character so
radically existential, so isolated and autonomous, that it must proceed

on "no truths other than the isolated truths of what each observer feels

208
at each instant of his experience (BBB, p. 327)." Moreover, this life

would have no goals other than an eschatology of perpetual becoming, "a
life committed to the notion that the substratum of existence is the
search, the end meaningful but mysterious (BBB, p. 315)." In American
nggm, Mailer attempts a full expression of this "dialectical conception."
In Rojack's case, it is not so much that murder is being legitimized, but
it is that Rojack and his murder are, for his existential growth. From
now on Rojack will be put in each existential situation to experience
anxiety and test his courage. The situations are existential in the sense
that the end result of each situation is as unpredictable as that of the
other. Like the Kierkegaardian Abraham filled with "fear and trembling,"
Rojack is committed to ride through each of them ahead, depending mainly
on intuition and instinct. In the story, this will mean: (a) outwitting
the police by guessing their own strategy, and doing this by instinctively
reading the character of each one he comes in contact with, aided by the
character-revealing odors that each gives off; (b) braving down Mafia
types by telepathic battle in order to steal Cherry from them and gain

her respect; (c) learning to love for the first time and trying to live up
to the commitment to be brave which he believes its continuation will
depend upon; (d) surviving an encounter with the very large scale evil of
Barney Kelley, high in his suite in the Waldorf Towers, where Rojack, for
various reasons, attempts a walk around the parapet of the balcony.

When Rojack returns to his wife's body after the encounter with Ruta
and looks at her, he feels that he has not yet quite "plumbed the hatred
where the real injustice is stored" and feels an impulse "to go up and
kick her ribs, grind my heel on her nose, drive the point of my shoe into

her temple and kill her good this time, kill her right'(BB, p. 53)."

209

For diSposing of Deborah's body, he conceives a plan of having a cannibal
feast with Ruta:

I had a little fantasy at this moment. It was beyond measure.

I had a desire to take Deborah to bathroom, put her in the tub.

Then Ruta and I would sit down to eat. The two of us would sup

on Deborah's flesh, we would eat for days: the deepest poison

in us would be released from our cells. (BB, p. 53.)

Rojack finally rejects the plan. His instinct, the messenger, has slipped
in to the tower and tells him to push her body out of the window, "for it
was also the boldest choice. Was I brave enough? (BB, p. 53)“ Rojack's
instincts are telling him to make the existential choice, to enter into a
contest with the police in an extraordinarily conceived fake suicide. He
has chosen to risk everything rather than confess and go to prison.

During his initial questioning by the police, Rojack tells an elab-
orate series of lies. They know he has had intercourse with Ruta, they
discover Deborah's hyoid bone is broken, a sure sign of death by strang-
ulation, and suspect Rojack of murder. The religious reasons he gives for
Deborah's purported suicide are highly dubious. Suicide is forgiven by
God if "your soul was in danger of being extinguished." Although the arg-
ument has little impact on the police, the cancer that later shows up in
the autopsy seems to confirm some part of Rojack's story. Cancer begins
as the soul dies, and "If the soul is extinguished in life, nothing passes
on into Eternity when you die (BB, p. 68)." In the station the police are
unconvinced by Rojack's explanations and continue to question him. The
chain of events inaugurated by Deborah's fall on to East River Drive begin
to take form.

The car that hit the body contains Cherry, a Mafia Eddid Ganucci, and
his nephew. Because the police have a warrant for Ganucci, they do not

push their interrogation of Rojack. The first sight he has of Cherry,

“with the perfect American face, a small town girl's face with the sort of

210

perfect clean features which find their way onto every advertisement and
every billboard in the land (BB, p. 62)," causes his immediate interest.
Her presence in the station is one factor that prevents him from breaking
down and confessing; the other is the shame a confession and trial would
bring on Deborah's memory and on himself for pleading that he "too was
insane and my best ideas were poor, warped, distorted, and injurious to
others (BB, p. 86)." Too weak to cry out his guilt, his "voice" keeps
him in his chair ordering him to wait, "as if some power had cast a par-
alysis upon me (BB, p. 86)." Praying to God for a sign, he raises his
eyes and sees Cherry, and a voice tells him to "Go to the girl." From
her Rojack gets the address of the nightclub where she sings, and, al-
though she is mixed-up with the Mafia, he intends to go and see her.
Later, when he is released from the police station, he goes to the night-
club where Cherry is singing and then leaves with her. Rojack has recov-
ered his sense of magic and he finds a kindred spirit in Cherry.

Cherry understands Rojack's state and talks with him about death and
suicide, because she has her own set of corruptions and defeats. She is
indirectly responsible for her sister's suicide; she has had an affair
with Barney Kelley which resulted in an aborted pregnancy; she has been
the mistress of a Mafia narcotics king (she was passed on to him by Kel-‘
ley); she has been indirectly connected to gangland murders; and after
trying for love with Shago Martin, a famous black singer, she somehow
fails at this and has her pregnancy by him aborted as well. Thus her sex
so far has been "decreative" (as has Rojack's). However, Cherry, the fair-
haired Southern girl, is the diametric opposite of Deborah, the black-
haired bitch. Cherry understands the significance of death. In a sense
she and Rojack are allies because they are both locked in the danger and

potential that death gives.

211

So far, Rojack has been faced with a series of existential choices
each of which has challenged his Being, each of which has tested his
ability to discover his essential nature, whether he will create or des-
troy. And so far his instincts have been perfect. In his first love-
making with Cherry, he is committed to move in a better direction. When
they begin to make love, Rojack feels freed from his exhaustion. "I was
alive in some deep water below sex, some tunnel of the dream where effort
was discovered at last from price (BB, p. 121)." But as they continue,
Rojack feels hindered by the diaphram which Cherry is using, "that cor-
porate rubbery obstruction I detested so much." So they stop and he
removes it. When he enters her again, he comes face to face with her
will--their souls begin a battle. They cannot really fulfill each other
until he makes a decision and until they decide whether they will love
each other.

I was passing through a grotto of curious lights, dark lights,
like colored lanterns beneath the sea, a glimpse of that quiver
of jeweled arrows, that heavenly city which had appeared as
Deborah was expiring in the lock of my arm, and a voice like a
child's whisper on the breeze came up so faint I could hardly
hear, "Do you want her?" it asked. "Do you really want her, do
you want to know something I had never known before, and an-
swered; it was as if my voice had reached to its roots; and "Yes,"
I said, "Of course I do, I want love," but like an urbane old
gentleman, a dry tart portion of my mind added, "Indeed, and

what had one to lose?" and then the voice in a small terror, "Oh,
you have more to lose than you have lost already, fail at love
and you lose more than you can know." "And if I don't fail?" I
asked. "Do not ask," said the voice, "Choose now!" and some con-
tinent of dread speared wide in me, rising like a dragon, as if

I know the choice were real, and in a lift of terror I opened

my eyes and her face was beautiful beneath me in that rainy
morning, her eyes were golden with light, and she said, "Ah,
honey, sure," and I said sure to the voice in me, and felt love
at my back, and felt her will dissolve into tears, and some great
deep sorrow like roses drowned in the salt of the sea came
flooding from her womb and washed into me like a sweet honey of
balm for all the bitter sores of my soul and for the first time
in my life without passing through fire or straining the stones
of my will, I came up from my body rather than down from my

mind, I could not stop, some shield broke in me, bliss, and the

213

honey she had given me I could only give back, all sweets to her
womb, all come in her cunt. ‘(BB, pp. 122-23.)

Though mixed with sexual images, this is one of the most beautiful pas-
sages in the book. Breaking the shield of his old fears and restraints,
Rojack, in his sensitivity to his total being, and with the decisions of
life and death hanging over him, is able for the first time in his life
to express the deepest urgings of his soul for life. He is able to give
himself entirely to the voice of his deepest and essential Being, and
completely overcome all the other voices which plague him. Love is a
reward for those who are brave, for Rojack believes "God was not love but
courage." 'And it is also the existential willingness to risk all. Any
faltering in courage is a sapping of love.

Later on, Rojack has come to understand that one can fall in love
but that it is not very easy to maintain that love, for this takes great
courage, "for now I understood that love was not a gift but a vow (BB,

p. 156)." Both Rojack and Cherry have taken their vows, for Rojack has
committed himself to love Cherry and she had her first orgasm and both
believe that they have conceived a child. In order to earn the love of
Cherry Rojack forces himself into some final tests before the novel ends.
The first final test comes in facing down Shago Martin, Cherry's ex-lover.
After Cherry's confession to Rojack of her past and her links to Kelley,
they are intruded in their lovemaking by Shago Martin. Upon entering the
apartment and finding Rojack there, Shago threatens him with a knife and
orders him to leave. But when he sees Rojack does not cower and refuses
to leave, Shago begins to admire his courage. Shago himself is not to be
seen as a potentially heroic but finally defeated combatant of the Ameri-
can Negro with a fragmented identity. Shago's greatest failure is that

he wasn't brave enough to encounter the world head-on as he would have

214

been required to if Cherry had been allowed to carry her pregnancy with
him to termination. Now when he insults Rojack and flauntingly turns

his back on him, Rojack leaps on him from behind and subdues him by re-
peatedly lifting him up and smashing him to the floor. Then Rojack throws
him down a flight of stairs to the street.

After the fight and leaving Cherry asleep, Rojack goes to meet with
Kelley, only armed with the two drinks he has imbibed and the umbrella
Shago has left behind. Although Rojack manages to love Cherry freely and,
in spite of dread, courageously, he has not managed to keep his love safe
and Cherry falls victim to a gang of Harlem hoodlums while Rojack walks a
parapet railing around the balcony of Kelley's apartment. In fact, Ro-
jack has several chances to prevent Cherry's death. On his way to meet
Kelley, his inner voice tells him to go to Harlem: "'Do you want yourlove
to be blessed' said my mind, '90 to Harlem' (BB, p. 190)." He knows that
he has to see Shago. He has to meet Shago head-on in a fair fight; he has
to destroy the Devil in Shago that had damaged Cherry. If he does not,
that Devil will eventually destroy Cherry. Yet he is afraid; he is afraid
of the significance of murder for the first time:

No, men were afraid of murder, but not from a terror of justice

so much as the knowledge that a killer attracted the attention

of the gods; then your mind was not your own, your anxiety ceased

to be neurotic, your dread was real. Omens were as tangible as

bread. There was an architecture to eternity which housed us as

we dreamed, and when there was murder, a cry went through the

market places of sleep. Eternity had been deprived of a room.

Somewhere the divine rage met a fury. (BB, p. 192.)

It seems by this point that the instinct that served him so well up to now
is being worn down by perpetual crisis into something like neurotic com-
pulsiveness. It is in this state that Rojack goes to see Kelley whom he

equates with the Devil. If he can survive his confrontation with the mas-

ter, then he has lost relatively little by not going to meet his disciple,

Shago.

215

However, once at the Waldorf Towers, and riding in the elevator to
Kelley's tower apartment, Rojack feels again that this choice was a mis-
take, and that failing to go to Harlem will perhaps deprive him of some
extraordinary possibility within himself, as might also have his earlier
refusal to obey the call to suicide:

. . . once again I felt something begin to go out of the very

light of my mind, as if the colors which lit the stage of my

dreams would be more modest now, something vital was ready to

go away forever, even as once, not thirty hours ago, I had lost

some other part of myself, it had streamed away on a voyage to

the moon, launched out on that instant when I had been too fear-

ful to jump, something had quit me forever, that ability of my

soul to die in its place take failure, go down honorably. Now

something else was preparing to leave, some certainty of love

was passing away, some knowledge it was the reward for which to

live--that voice which I could no longer deny spoke again

through the medium of the umbrella. (BB, p. 195.)

Obviously, Rojack is beginning to understand that when one kills he tam-
pers with the divine economy, he competes with the gods. Hence he thinks
that his fear is a very real dread, the dread that Kierkegaard speaks of.

Rojack's final test occurs in his meeting with Kelley. Mailer has
almost made Kelley a symbol of the entire history of Ameridan totalitar-
ianism. This identity is combined with the worst of all evils, an air of
external calm and gentility comouflaging a bestial, violent, and power-mad
personality. If Deborah is a symbol of evil of High Society on the social-
political level and Ruta a symbol of hatred on the personal-metaphorical
level for a man of Rojack's American-Jewish background, Barney Kelley is
certainly a symbol of evil and hatred on all levels--“a kingly devil,
ready to tempt, bribe, and seduce in order to exert control."21 There is
also added to Kelley's sanguine disposition two separate manners: a Brit-
ish one "clipped jolly, full of tycoon; he might have you knifed but
dependably you would feel a twinkle as the order went down." The American

mien is found revealed in the eyes, "those wyes would_buyyou, sell you,

close you out, walk past your window. . . (BB, p. 206)."

216

The climactic scene takes place in Kelley's library. It is presented
as an evil which is rotten with the accumulated viciousness and greed
of aristocratic excess:

There was a presence in the room like the command of a dead

pharaoh. Aristocrats, slave owners, manufacturers and popes

had coveted these furnishings until the beseechments of prayer

had passed into their gold. Even as a magnet directs every

iron particle in a crowd of filings, so a field of force was

on me here, an air with surfeit and the long whisper of corri-

dors, the echo of a banquet hall where red burgundy and wild

boar went down. That same field of force had come on me as I

left Deborah's body on the floor and started down the stairs

to the room where Ruta was waiting. (BB, pp. 220-21.)
The confrontation with Kelley in his throne room and Rojack's walk around
the parapet is the longest episode in the novel. The surface subject is
Kelley's wish and Rojack's refusal that he attend Deborah's funeral.
Kelley intuits that Rojack did kill Deborah. He then draws Rojack into a
strange intimacy with him by making a long confession of his own past. A
man of enormous wealth, with extensive political and criminal connections,
from the President and CIA to the Mafia, Kelley is originally a Minnesotan
whose life is a moral inversion of the Alger myth. Rojack and Kelley both
shared the same ambition, to escape the world of the parvenu, to enjoy a
world money and position can buy, a world of political power and influence.

After relating an incident of temptation to incest with a grand lady
and her daughter, Kelley admits to his incestuous relationship with Deb-
orah. The Devil in the form of a goat had tempted him, and he had been
unable to repress the urge to go to her room. "Incest is the gate to the
worst sort of forces (BB, p. 225)." And incest is the act upon which
Kelley's power, his ultimate pact with the Devil, resides. Kelley also
gets Rojack to admit that he killed Deborah. Now that everything has sur-

faced, Rojack senses the powerful evil in Kelley, emanated as a sort of

sexual musk. Yet along with this he also senses just how closely linked

217

in brotherhood he is to Kelley. Kelley finally invites him to partici-
pate with him (and Ruta, who is also at the apartment) in a three-way
orgy:

. . . bring Ruta forth, three of us to pinch and tear and squat

and lick, swill and grovel on that Lucchese bed, fuck, until

her eyes were out, bury the ghost of Deborah by gorging on her

corpse. . . . (BB, p. 237.)
Responding to Kelley's carnality, Rojack feels desire stir in him similar
to the urge that made him want to "eat with Ruta on Deborah's corpse."
Kelley asks him, "Come on. . . shall we get shitty?” The proposal, tac-
itly understood by Rojack, is an invitation to a Satanic rite. They are
the evil impulses analogous to Nazi instincts Rojack had passed to him by
sodomizing Ruta. Kelley's desire to engage in a three-way orgy with R0-
jack is against the law of love, is sex for death, and lust, not creat-
ivity demanded by the life force. Rojack's first impulse is run, but the
ever-present threat of Kelley having the Mafia kill him anywhere nulli-
fies that alternative. He wants to:

escape from that intelligence which let me know of murders in

one direction and conceive of visits to Cherry from the other,

I wanted to be free of magic, the tongue of the Devil, the dread

of the Lord, I wanted to be some sort of rational man again,

nailed tight to details, promiscuous, reasonable, blind to the

reach of the seas. (BB, p. 238.)
Answering a voice which tells him to "walk the parapet," or "Cherry is
dead," he proposes to Kelley who accepts it as an alternative to his own
offer.

Once on the parapet, Rojack experiences intense fear, numbing cold
wind and rain, and Deborah's curse (Deborah's lone green eye flew into my
eye. Hands came to pull me off,.her hands. . . (BB, p. 242)." He suc-

ceeded in his first walk. With increased confidence he now decides to obey

another urge he has to go around again as final expiation for his murder

218

and also, somehow, to prevent harm from coming to Cherry. Kelley, however,
can't allow him the success this time and tries to poke Rojack off the
parapet with Shago's umbrella, which he has been holding. Rojack grabs

the umbrella from Kelley, jumps down from the parapet, and beats Kelley

to the floor with it. Resisting the urge to kill, Rojack turns to leave
the apartment. He then rushes back to Cherry's apartment to find her

dying from a beating by Shago's Harlem friends, for they thought that she
caused his death in a park.

The last chapter of the novel has Rojack going West to Las Vegas,
where in the air-conditioned world of the casinos, and the impossibility
of distinguishing between night and day, he sees America breeding a new
man. It is his last fling with the Devil--he has come to Las Vegas in
order to make enough money to pay off his debts he had accumulated while
married to Deborah. When he is done, he walks off into the desert where,
in a telephone booth, he "calls" Cherry and is told that she is getting
along with Marilyn and that "the moon is out and she's a mother to me
(BB, p. 252)." The next day, feeling "something like sane again" he
starts "on the long trip to Guatemala and Yucatan (BB, p. 252)."

Why does Rojack finally make a self-imposed exile to the jungles of
Central America? Considering Mailer's emphasis on Rojack's qualities of
primitive instincts, intuition, sex, magic and being, we may guess some
of the reasons for his heading south, to the tropical weather jungles.
Mailer answers part of the question in one of his "Presidential Papers":

. . . tropical people are unusually more sexual. It's easier to

co-habit, it's easier to stay alive. If there's more time, more

leisure, more--we'll use one of those machine words--more
support-from-the-environment than there is in a Northern country,

then sex will tend to be more luxuriant. Northern countries try
to build civilizations and tropical countries seek to proliferate

being. (£13.: pp. 145-47.)

219

Further, by observing Mailer's existentialist law of "grow or pay,"
Rojack has to keep on moving so as to grow. And in search for the true
"heavenly city" to stay, he, from East (New York) to West (Las Vegas),
finds that Las Vegas is after all only a distillation of the corruptions
and violences he has encountered in New York, or another tasteless Desert
D'Or. In the streets one sees not by sun but at night by immense towers
of neon. The desert to Mailer is a sacred place where "man may come to
feel immensely alive, more portenously in his own psychic presence than
any manifest in nature (BB, p. 191)." But in Las Vegas, the air itself
is "a smell of death in the nose." The air-conditioned hotels and casinos
are like a "pleasure of chamber of an encampment on the moon and fortified
air brought in daily by rockets from the earth. . . . You caught the odor
of an empty space where something was dying alone (BB, p. 251)." God no
longer reveals himself to solitary man in the desert and it is no longer
a sacred place. The insanity Rojack senses in the city of death in the
desert is beyond a cure. He consequently realizes that he has exhausted
all possibilities of growth provided by his culture. In this sense Ro-
jack is also ready to leave the country. At the beginning of the novel,
it is his existentialist new awareness that prompts Rojack to abandon the
American Dream of power but seek the Dream of Being. At the end, it is
the same awareness that guides him for the jungles of Guatemala and Mex-
ico.

As a full-fledged American existentialist hero, Rojack certainly has
not acted like Lovett the non-hero to retire into monastic seclusion to
wait for the sign of revolution. Despite the fact that he has lost the
true love of Cherry in his meeting with Kelley, Rojack has demonstrated
his courage by confronting the devil and walking parapets. Ultimately,

he has achieved the total freedom, kept his individualistic integrity, and

220
and fulfilled the American myth-~"to be free, to wander, to have adventure

and to grow on the waves of the violent, the perfumed, and the unexpected.
. . (BB, p. 39)." In Sartrean terms, Rojack has pursued the identifica-7
tion of the For-itself with the In—itself. For Sartre, such an identifi-
cation is impossible. That is why he asserts that man is a "useless pas-
sion." But for Mailer, Rojack is the man, the For-itself, who has created
his essence by the sum total of his free acts. In order to achieve this
total freedom for his being, Rojack has undergone various stages of spir-
itual progress: the murder of evil (Deborah), the conquest of hatred
(Ruta), the gain of true love (Cherry), and the face-to-face encounter
with the Devil (Kelley). He has undergone all these existential exper-
iences that Lovett, Sergius (both the old and the new), and Faye have each
only partially gone through. It is in this sense that Rojack finally con-
siders himself a "new breed" of man possessing a "new soul" and thus be-

comes Kierkegaard's "that individual."

10.

11.
12.

13.
14.

15.
16.

Notes to Chapter Five

Down Mailer's Way, p. 124.

 

Julius Lester, Search for the New Land: History as Subjective Exper-
1.9.199. (New York: Tile DiaT Press, 1969), p. 49.

 

Arnold S. Kaufman, The Radical Liberal--The New Politics: Theory and
Practice (New York: A Clarion Book, 1968), p. 47.

 

Ibid.. PP. 49-50.

Cannibals and Christians (New York: A Dell Book, 1966), p. 165.
'Hereafter all references are to this edition and will be cited in
the text.

 

Norman Mailer: The Countdown, p. 123.

 

Ibid.

 

Norman Mailer, An American Dream (New York: A Dell Book, 1965, 1974),
p. 8. All later references are to this edition and will be cited in
the text.

 

Helen Weinberg, The New Novel in America: The Kafkan Mode in Contem-
porary Fiction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp.
124-25.

 

 

Elizabeth Hardwick, "A Nightmare by Norman Mailer," in Norman Mailer:
The Man and His Work, p. 145.

 

 

Ibid., p. 150.

Joseph Epstein, "Norman X: The Literary Man's Cassius Clay," in IBe_
New Republic, (April 17, 1965), p. 24.

 

Ibid,, p. 25.

Philip Rahv, ”A Review on An American Dream," The New York Review of
Books, (March 25, 1965), p. 1.

 

Ibid.

Richard Poirier, "'Morbid-Mindedness'," Commentary_(June, 1965), col-
lected in Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work; Leo Bersani, "The
Interpretation of Dreams," Partisan Review7(Fall, 1965), collected
both in Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work and Norman Mailer: A
Collection of Critical Essays.

 

 

 

 

 

221

17.
18.

19.

20.

21.

222

Norman Mailer: A Critical Study, p. 34.

 

Howard M. Harper, Jr., Desparate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Salinger,
Mailer, Baldwin, and Updike‘(Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of

 

 

North Carolina Press, 1967), p. 123.

John W. Aldridge, "From Vietnam to Obscenity," Harper's Magazine
(February, 1968), reprinted in Norman Mailer: ThE'Man and His Work,
p. 189.

 

In developing his ideas about life after death and scatology, Mailer
drew heavily from Norman 0. Brown's book, Life Against Death: The
P§ychoana1ytical Meaning of History_(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 1959, 1977), especially those chapters like "Death,
Time, Eternity," "The Excremental Vision,“ "Filthy Lucre," and "The
Resurrection of the Body."

 

The New Novel in America, p. 135.

 

CHAPTER SIX ~
The American Existentialist Hero Sought Among Politicians and
Artists but Discovered as a Young Hunter Contaminated: Cannibals

and Christians and Why Are We in Vietnam?

 

 

Cannibals and Christians

 

Rojack's final departure from America, mainly resulted from his dis-
gust with the country--its mood of suicide and its dead end heroes. Both
Rojack and his creator seriously questioned the feasibility of America's
survival after Kennedy's assassination. "The American Dream of public
life as an outlet for individual growth is dead, and all of American fron-
tiers (even Kennedy's belated 'New Frontier') are closed to the individual

"1 Mailer's "unspoken" shock and grief immediately after

on the move.
Kennedy's death also shapes Cannibals and Christians (1966), a book in
which existential politics gives up all its meaning. As Donald Kaufmann
puts it, “The Dallas aftermath brings to the 'arena' President Johnson and
his great society whose advent marks the end of the 'art of the possible'
in American politics."2 Mailer's own response is as follows:

Jack Kennedy may not have been as skillful a politician as

Lyndon Johnson, but he had one hundred times as much effect

on the styles and modes of American life, on the desires of

Americans, on what they finally demanded from life; so Jack

Kennedy had a revolutionary effect on American life. (BB, p. 56.)

Although a volume of unrelated writings--political essays, poems,
stories, literary commentaries, interviews--Cannibals and Christians is

still thematically unified, for these writing "are parts of a continuing and

more or less comprehensive vision of existence into which everything must
223

224

fit (BB, p. xi)." By linking himself to writers such as D. H. Lawrence,
Henry Miller, and Hemingway, Mailer considers that "everything they wrote
was part of one continuing book--the book of their life and the vision of
their existence (BB, p. xi)." Whereas the structure of the book is sim-

ilar to that used in Advertisements and Presidential Papers, the theme,

 

 

as Mailer himself says,

has been the continuing obsession of this writer that the world

is entering a time of plague. And the continuing metaphor for

the obsession--a most disagreeable metaphor-~has been cancer.

The argument is old by now: its first assumption is that cancer

is a disease different from other diseases, an ultimate disease

against which all other diseases are in design to protect us.

(29,. p. 2.)

Perhaps the only difference is Mailer's search for an American exis-
tentialist hero has become so desperate that he even declares that "a
hero, even a failed hero, or a hero-as-monster, is more likely to create
other heroes, by his example or by opposite to him, than a man who gains
power and has never been anything at all (BB, p. 58).“ He further makes
a distinction between a political structure with heroes and that without
them:

A forceful political structure with a great number of particular
heroes is a way to describe the Renaissance; a powerful political
structure governed by faceless men is a way to describe the
Mafia. (BB, p. 58.)

However, the nation is bankrupt, bankrupt of "charisma" and "style." It
is because "the totalitarianism [steals] in from without, from the form-
less forms and
imprisoned air of a new society which had lost the clue that a
democracy could become equable only if it became great, that
finally the world would continue to exist only by an act of
courage and a search for style. Democracy flowers with style;
without it there is a rot of wet weeds. (BB, pp. 51-2.)
"Which is why," stresses Mailer, "we love the memory of F. D. R. and J.

F. K...

225

In this book Mailer still has not altered his convictions that sci-
ence and reason are inadequate explanations of all the mysteries of the
universe. The fact that a society consumed by the plague goes through
the motions of improving the conditions, but in reality only perpetuat-
ing an intolerable world, is proof of its lack of understanding of the
universal mysteries:

In a modern world which produces mediocrities at an accelerating

rate, and keeps them alive by surgical gymnastics which go be-

yond anyone's patience but the victim, the doctor, and the

people who expect soon to be on the operating tables themselves;

in a civilization where compassion is of political use and is

stratified in welfare programs which do not build a better

society but shore up a worse. . . (BB, p. 3.)

With a rudimentary faith in his American existentialism and regarding
himself as a physician to the national psyche, Mailer feels that he is
obligated "to explore the mystery (BB, p. 5)." He has first diagnosed
that modern man, in a search for a palliative to assuage his fear of
death, is corrupting his body and its biological capacities and thereby
is becoming weaker and sicker. And cancer is the consequence of the loss
of man's natural biological condition. The deterioration of workingman-
ship, the erecting of aesthetically drab buildings, the sexual revolu-
tion sustained on drugs, the survival of "mediocrities" by surgery, the
perpetuation of a bad society on welfare, an economy based on war and
war production are all symptoms of this illness. In "a world of such
hypercivilization," it is a world

not of adventurers, entrepreneurs, settlers, social arbiters,

proletarians, agriculturists, and other egocentric types of

dynamic society, but is instead a world of whirlpools and
formlessness where two types re-emerge, types there at the

beginning of it all: Cannibals and Christians. (BB, p. 3.)

The Cannibals are those of the Right Wing who believe "there is too

much on earth and too much of it is second rate." And they believe that

226

they can save the world by "killing off what is second-rate."
They believe that survival and health of the species comes from
consuming one's own, not one's near-own, but one's own species.
So the pure cannibal has only one taboo on food--he will not
eat the meat of his own family. Other men he will conserve in
his own flesh, their vices he will excrete, but to kill and
eliminate is his sense of human continuation. (BB, p. 4.)
The Christians, on the other hand, are "the commercial. The commercial
is the invention of a profoundly Christian natione-it proceeds to sell
something in which it does not altogether believe, and it interrupts the
mood (BB, p. 4)." Practically all those--"From Lyndon Johnson to Mao
Tse-tung,"--who are not of the Right Wing are Christians. What charac-
terizes the Christians is that
we believe man is good if given a chance, we believe man open to
discussion, we believe science is the salvation of ill, we be-
lieve death is the end of discussion; ergo we believe nothing is

so worthwhile as human life. We think no one should go hungry.
BB, p. 4.

For all their compassion and concern, these Christians are not really
interested in Christ. 0n the contrary, they have caused all the misery
that abounds in the world and have, in the name of progress and enlight-
enment and faith in science, poisoned the food, the sea, tampered with
the "genetics of our beasts," and broken the "food chains of nature.“
However, those who are Cannibals think they are Christians, because they
"think of Jesus as Love, and get an erection from the thought of whippings,
blood, burning crosses, burning bodies, and screams in mass graves (BB,

p. 4)" while the nominal Christians, opposed to war, have succeeded in
starting all the wars of this century.

Mailer's purpose in making these definitions is to restate some of
the social implications of his American existentialism. His concept of
the Hipster is similar to the Cannibal, but the Right Wing Cannibal, as

pointed out in "The Red Dread," does not understand the individual's

227

responsibility to explore the limits of existence and find the meaning
of his life. Rather, the Cannibals see the fulfillment of life in des-
truction for its own sake, instead of seeing personal violence as a key
to the secrets of Being. The Christian, on the other hand, because of
his fear of death, is the harbinger of the totalitarian society-~the
society which pretends to elevate man and create the perfect, but which
in fact, leads man to a living death, because it renders him incapable
of exploring the limits of life. By criticizing both the Cannibals and
the Christians, Mailer repudiates all forms of political ideology and
social programming. Even revolutionary socialism holds no attraction
for him. Society cannot survive the Christians nor can it endure the
Cannibals. The events of the mid-sixties, Goldwater's nomination and
the war in Vietnam, support Mailer's growing sense of impending doom, a
final cataclysmic eruption of plague terminating in an apocalypse.
Tinged with flip satire and black humor, the political tone throughout
the book appears more invective and intensely charged than before.

By covering the Republican Convention in 1964, Mailer had an oppor-
tunity to watch the rise of the Cannibal party in America. It is, he
asserts, the triumph of capitalism, an hysterical disease inherited from
the Puritans who "carried the viruses and were so odious that the Brit-
ish were right to drive them out (BB, p. 8)." Their heirs, the Gold-
water Wasps, are described as vindictive provincials left behind in the
development of the nation. Culturally supplanted by the immigrant East
and its intellectual Establishment, these Wasps demand a purge of every-
thing: civil rights, Jews, Communism, sexual excesses, everything they
believe that threatens them. But, on the other hand, as Mailer was

excited about the potentialities of Kennedy as President, the sense of

228

the existential, the powerful and threatening, and the risk of death

made Goldwater momentarily appealing to him. Mailer found that Gold-
water was a man who "had dimensions": "he was not an easy man to compre-
hend in a hurry (BB, p. 20)." Then, "He could be President of the United
States in less than half a year, he could stop a sniper's bullet he

never knew when, he was more loved and hated than any man in America (BB,
p. 24)." Finally, there was the sense of national suicide caused by the
Goldwater movement:

And this had an appeal which burrowed deep, there was excitement

at the thought of Goldwater getting the nomination, as if now

finally all one's personal suicides, all the deaths of the soul

accumulated by the past, all the failures, all the terrors,

could find purge in a national situation where a national murder

was being planned (the Third World War) and one's own suicide

might be lost in a national suicide. There was that excitement,

that the burden of one's soul. . . might finally be lifted.

(92. p. 25.)

It was a new crusade in which all the failures of the past would be
rectified and it was a crusade which was united in a mystical communion
of the dispossessed. Mailer welcomes this crusade:

Yes, the Goldwater movement excited the depth because the

apocalypse was brought more near, and like millions of other

whites, I had been leading a life which was a trifle too point-
less and a trifle too full of guilt and my gullet was close to
nausea with the endless compromises of an empty liberal center.

(92. p. 26.)

There was the hope that America was coming to face the essential total-
itarianism at its heart. And there was the sense that the Right Wing
Cannibals could have shaken the foundations of America. But Goldwater
lost because he was too inept to carry across his message. The Repub-
lican Convention of 1964 was otherwise another ordinary convention, but

Mailer sharpened his journalism to a fine art and spotlighted those

nuances that gave the convention a psychic drama all its own.

229

Immediately following the convention history is a review of John-
son's book, My nge for America. Johnson rallied the anti-Wasp forces
under the banner of liberalism, an ideology dependent on committees,
foundations, and science. "Lyndon Johnson is a triumph of spirit, wholly
scientific (BB, p. 67)." But to Mailer, Johnson has "no vision (BB, p.
67)" and does not have the kind of leadership that the country urgently

needed:

Yes, our country was fearful, half mad, inauthentic. It needed
a purge. It had a liberal Establishment obeisant to committees,
foundations, and science--the liberal did not understand that
the center of science was as nihilistic as a psychopath's sense
of God. We were a liberal Establishment, . . the much under-
rated and doubtless a power upon the land; civilization had
found its newest helmsman in the restraints, wisdom, and cor-
ruption of legit and illegit, all syndicates, unions, guilds,
corporations and institutions, cadres of conspiracy and agents
for health, Medicare, welfare, the preservation of antibiotics,
end the progiferation of the Pentagon could bend their knee.
9.9. p. 43.

Mailer's existential politics is based on unwavering assertion of the
individual over the community, personality over organization, and style
over system. For Mailer, Lyndon Johnson's takeover has pushed America

deeper into the "plague" and nearer the world of Barbary_Shore.

 

In reviewing My Hope for America, Mailer dismisses it as "an abom-

 

inable, damnable book, and what makes it doubly awful is that nearly all
of its ideas are blessed (BB, p. 49)." The book reveals no style but
was written in "totalitarian prose." According to Mailer,
The essense of totalitarian prose is that it does not define,
it does not deliver. It oppresses. It obstructs from above.
It is profoundly contemptuous of the minds who will receive the
message. So it does its best to dull this unconsciousness with
sentences which are nothing but bricked-in power structures.
(_c_g. p. 51.)
The Great Society, both advocated in his book and implemented by his

Administration, "famished for popularity," even to Johnson himself, "is

230

a dud": "The President believed very much in image. He believed the
history which made the headlines each day was more real to the people
than the events themselves. It was not the Negro Movement that poss-
essed the real importance, it was the Movement's ability to get space

in the papers (BB, p. 70)." And, "So the President needed another issue.
Then it came to the President. Hot damn. Vietnam (BB, p. 71)."

Vietnam for Mailer, among many things, is America's great scien-
tific war. It represents the merger of the Cannibal and the Christian.
The connection between the two concepts rest in Mailer's idea that
science, as the only religion left in America, destroys man's potential
to discovering the mysteries of the universe because it is tooinvolved
in facts and figures and has none of the sense of the spirit of mystery.
In HSpeech at Berkeley on Vietnam Day," Mailer explains that "President
Johnson's motive in escalating the war in Vietnam may be psychic in its
nature. . . it is a thesis which would say that the mystery of Vietnam
revolves around the mystery of Lyndon Johnson's personality (BB, p. 47)."
Mailer explores the "mystery" by finding that Johnson is alienated, but
certainly not alienated from power, because "he is the most powerful man
in the United States, but he is alienated from judgment, he is close to
an imbalance which at worst could tip the world from orbit (BB, p. 76)."
This alienation is equivalent to the kind of schizophrenia in which the
President takes on the characteristics of a member of a minority group—-
namely, he is a man who lives with two opposing concepts of himself:

What characterizes a member of a minority group is that he is

forced to see himself as both exceptional and insignificant,

marvelous and awful, good and evil. So far as he listens to the
world outside he is in danger of going insane. The only way he
may relieve the unendurable tension which surrounds any sense

of his own identity is to define his nature by his own acts;

discover his courage of cowardice by actions which engage his
courage; discover his judgment by judging; his loyalty by being

231

tested; his originality by creating. . . . What characterizes

the sensation of being a member of a minority group is that

one's emotions are forever locked in the chains of ambivalence--

the expression of an emotion forever releasing its opposite--

the ego in perpetual transit from the tower to the dungeon and

back again. (BB, p. 77.)

For Mailer nearly every American is a member of a minority group,
given this existential definition. The American fever has intensified
the anxiety of ambivalence so that it becomes necessary at a certain
point to have either a purge or a war. The nation turned to war because
this seemed to be the scientific way of coming to terms of American mal-
ady; it was the Christian way because Americans "are the defense of civ-
ilization" and the Communists are the barbarians out to destroy it. But
at the same time there is the appetite of the Cannibal in this solution
to this national sickness. Mailer states the connection between the two
as follows:

As is evident by now, the only explanation I can find for the

war in Vietnam is that we are sinking into the swamps of a

plague and the massacre of the strange people seems to relieve

this plague. (BB, p. 91.)

The Vietnam War of course also illustrates the lack of potent leadership;
Johnson is using it as a catharsis for everything wrong with America that

he did not have the courage to challenge.

In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer repeatedly points out that Ken-

 

nedy was the only American President since Roosevelt with the ability to
influence the style of American life by enriching "the emotional complex-
ity" of the people's lives. Besides his appeal as "an active principle,"
Kennedy is a man "who will grow and change and become--odds are--a power-
ful leader (BB, p. 58)." The political scene of the post-Kennedy sixties
was a landscape of faceless men. Mailer is still searching for a hero

who may coerce others to become heroic in opposition. Perhaps Robert

232

Kennedy is the only figure who offers a tenuous hope of an American exis-
tentialist hero: "I have affection for Bobby Kennedy. I think something
came into him with the death of his brother. . . . Something compassion-
ate, something witty, has come into the face. Something of sinew (BB,

p. 58)." However, the current style of democracy has turned America into
a "rot of wet weeds,B and totalitarianism is so deep-rooted in American
life that any "resistence" through politics would cover too small a part
of culture.

In An American Dream, Rojack's dream, after a political start, set-

 

tles on the "mysteries" of murder and suicide. Like An American Dream,

 

Cannibals and Christians starts with political essays but ends with pri-

 

vate visions, because it is no longer for Mailer to imagine "some opti-
mistic love affair with the secret potentialities of this nation. . . .
The romance seems not even tragic or doomed, but dirty and misplaced
(BB, pp. 72-2)." The only thing Mailer feels that America is better in
than the Soviet Union is that "our artists are better, our writers are
better, our jazz musicians are better, our painters go further, our
vision is more fierce, it explores more (BB, p. 89)." To Mailer, only
great art can penetrate into "the tomb of the modern soul and bring a
moment of cease to the backed-up murders of the modern heart (BB, p. 89)."
When neither the reactionary Cannibal nor the liberal Christian is
capable of producing an existentialist hero to enhance man's dignity and
hold his attitude of self-consciousness, art becomes the only tool left
to awaken the masses to their latent powers and the only shock treatment
to cure the plague-ridden for the great conversion. In eliminating pol-
iticians and scientists as a panacea for healing economical and social

ailments, Mailer turns to the artist for his hero quest. In his destiny

233

as savior, an artist is very similar to the nineteenth-century romantics'
notion of poet as a cultural hero. As the poet was the bearer of truth,
so is the existentialist artist the new Adam who may restore the city of
God and regenerate man by his existentialist vision.

However, Mailer does not credit contemporary American literature or
art for having providing the guidance and inspiration needed in a period
of turmoil. He instead finds that American writers have been engaged in
a war between Naturalism and the Genteel Tradition and neither has been
effective in describing or dealing with the problems that the country
has posed and continues to pose. In its early stage the upper class,
having adopted the European canon of taste and manners, was aligned
against the proletariat, immigrant lower classes, ignoring a generation
of readers needing fiction that stimulated a sense of class mobility,
"Because a young adventurer reads a great novel in the unvoiced hope it
is a grindstone which sharpens his axe sufficiently to smash down doors
now locked to him (BB, p. 97)." Ideally the novel is a clarification of
"a nation's vision of itself." A member of the upper class cannot write
such a book since all he has is the "strategy provided for him by the
logic of his class (BB, p. 98)." The gap in the literary tradition was
further widened by the lower class writer's--Steinbeck and Farrell, for
example--failure to create characters who could cross the bridge dividing
ruling class and proletariat. Mailer claims that the two greatest
writers of the century, Hemingway and Faulkner, were content to focus on
"microcosm" and to ignore the great unifying book. Their motto became
"the country could be damned. Let it take care of itself (BB, p. 99).“

As a result, the masses gave up literature as irrelevant; it became

an art form unsuited to their needs and dreams:

234

It was not quite vital to them. It did not save their lives,

make them more ambitious, more moral, more tormented, more

audacious, more ready for love, more ready for war, for charity

and for invention. '(BB, p. 99.)

Mailer now attributes everything he believes is wrong with America to the
failure of the novelist to write a book defining the national character,
the "great" book that would finally resolve the class distinctions that
are the heart of America's moral and spiritual predicament. The vacuum
in American letters is, however, filled by television, movies, and the
mass media in general:

The American consciousness in the absence of a great tradition

in the novel ended by being developed by the bootlicking piet-

ies of small-town newspaper editors and small-town educators,

by the worst of organized religion, a formless force filled

with the terrors of all the Christians left to fill the spaces

left by the initial bravery of the frontiersmen, and these

latterday Christians were simply not as brave. (BB, p. 102.)
Reacting against the rigidity of the social hierarchy, the lack of gen-
uine mobility open to the younger Americans and their hatred of America
"for what it offered and did not provide, what it revealed for oppor-
tunity and what it excluded from real opportunity (BB, p. 102)," Amer-
ican writers, according to Mailer, must assume the responsibility for
the nation's "schizophrenia," further worsened by the mass communica-
tions, as "the last liberators in the land."

The ideal novelist, the one who has the last chance of writing the
desperately needed great book, must be an American existentialist, a
writer who has the courage to make the journey through the jungle of his
unconscious and engage the concealed "bestiality" of the world. Death
is constant opponent; in his persistent encounter with death he derives
finest inspiration. Mailer also criticizes the modern writers that have

abandoned the spiritual quest for God's truth. They should realize that

with the curse of contemporary civilization modern society masks the

mysteries behind the mundane wiihs"a world of slick surface and rock
knowledge." Industry and a preoccupation with work prevent the ordinary
man from ever exploring the chaos beneath the surface, from wrestling
with hysteria and panic. "Thus a man cannot afford to go too deeply into
the underlying meaning of a single subject. He prefers to become inter-
ested in the practical surface of things (BB, p. 119)." Mailer insists
that the way back to salvation is in the artist's discovering of "the
world of the Self" and "the crossroads of the inner mind (BB, p. 129)."
In order to do this, the artist "must not explore into himself with lan-
guage given by another. A vocabulary of experts is a vocabulary greased
out and sweated in committee and so is inimical to a private eye (BB,
p. 129)." And in the unconscious there are still "hills," the "highest
faces an abyss." So there are dangers in the jungle, too, for the writer
brave enough to undertake the journey. Even "in the crucial climatic
transcendental moments of one's life, there is revealed still another
dilemma. God, is it God one finds, or madness (BB, p. 130)." The writer
needs to rediscover his personal piety by risking finding only madness.
Death as the end of existence, as has been shown, is intolerable to
Mailer, but nor does he agree with the conventional religious notions of
heaven and hell. One dies in life and condemns his soul by practicing
repression and sublimation and preventing his imagination from probing
into the mysteries of the universe and the self. To him there is "no
anguish on heaven or earth as awful as the inability to create one's
nature by daring, exceptional, forbidden, or socially impossible acts
(BB, p. 169)." If, as Mailer contends, God is only slightly more power-
ful than man, and that He is in danger of extinction because men do not

act as though He exists, then the God the writer is supposed to search

236

for in his unconscious could exist in a diminished form and possess
nothing, no transmittable logos that could liberate humanity from its
debased state. But all the courage and daring needed for staring into
the abyss is a cleansing of the unconscious dross that obscures the exis-
tentialist hero's vision and a purification of the flesh.

Obviously, Mailer intends the artist, like the former Hipster and
great politician, to be a leader in the society. And he must be even
more than a leader, he must be an existentialist hero. What it leaves
out is the specific means by which the artist can shock the society into
feeling, and free people from their repressions and dig down into the
subterranean core of their Being. The question for Mailer now is how
the artist is going to find those areas of human experience which will
effectively make people more alive. As my previous discussions have
indicated, Mailer used the "apocalyptic orgasm,“ the motivating force of
the Hipster's life, as a direct attack on the sexual repressions of the
society and the accompanying censorship of art. At the same time, he
was also concerned with any attack on apathy. He felt that nihilism and
violence of the Hipster's was essential. He was arguing that nihilism
and violence of the Hipster was really a counter-force to the nihilism
and violence of a totalitarian society--a nihilism that ignored the basic
needs of the human body and soul and a violence that brutalized man's
sense for himself and his potentiality for creative relationship.

Further, to be nihilistic and violent for the existentialist Hip-
ster meant to be a rebel against society, but not against life. It meant
leaving the "safety" of civilization behind and returning to the primi-
tive forces of life; it meant coming to terms with evil, it meant, fin-

ally, escaping from the cliches of social morality and moral

237

responsibility in order to discover and hopefully use the potentialities
within. And it also meant, like Rojack's nihilism and violence, throw-
ing oneself to the mercy of the unknown, entirely entering the arena of
the ultimate and most powerful battles of the most forces in the uni-
verse in order to discover moment by moment what one was and what his
relationship to those ultimate forces are.

The apocalyptic orgasm for Mailer is one of the best metaphors to
describe the search for the unknown, because it represented the most
powerful moment in the life of man, a moment at which all his being was
called into play, a moment which could change his life either by leading
him into a state of greater life through the discovering of hitherto un-
used energies and potential or into a state closer to death by the fail-
ure to achieve the actualization of such energy and potential. And one
is definitely changed by his act of sexual intercourse:

If one has the courage to think about every aspect of the act--

I don't mean think mechanically about it, but if one is able

to brood over the act, to dwell on it—-then one is Changed by

the act. . . . So finally one has had an experience which is

nourishing because one's able to feel one's way more difficult

or more precious insights as a resfiit'of it. One's able to live

a tougher, more heroic life if one can digest and absorb the

experience. (BB, p. 140.)

Thus a healthy, primitive sexuality is the very thing to rescue man from
falling into pathy but sustain his mood to develop his Self.

However, when it comes to the period of Cannibals and Christians,
Mailer is no longer exploring the meaning of life in orgasm, not the
"logic" of a particular act but the total context of the act, the mood
of it. The role of man, and particularly the role of the artist, there-
fore, becomes the search for mood: mood in oneself, in the separate parts

of oneself, and the mood in others, even mood in the universe at large.

Mailer is moving here clearly toward a definition of artist-as-the-

238

existentialist—hero, implying that the most potent politician that Amer-
ica can have might yet be the artist. Mailer develops the concept of
mood through an elaboration on the complexities of Being, the refinement
of his American existentialism. First of all, Mailer explains mood in
terms of a Gestalt:

Mood is harmony. The harmony of a Gestalt. The harmony of the

life in the room, or the harmony one senses in a landscape. And

harmony permits one to relax. As one relaxes, so new perception
comes from the conduits of the unconscious, and one has added

one's contribution to the mood, which is now subtly different

but still alive in the growing tissue of the previous sensation,

precisely that tissue of which was the mood of the previous

moment. When a mood is shattered, the life in the room contracts,

and a new mood, discontinuous to the last, begins its existence.

(BB, pp. 253-54.)

Mailer goes on to explain these ideas by describing the sexual relation-
ship between two adults:

Sex-as-mood is a conversation with respect for nuance. Does one

raise one's voice to make a point?--one may soften the next

remark. Does one wait too long?--the whip of wit must inter-

vene. The dialogue of such sex is tender, it is respectful--it

respects the slow conversion of character into mood, it seeks

for an artful loss of each separate identity in order to find

and give life to the mood which passes from body to body.

(BB, p. 256.)

The above quotation is a key passage for Mailer because it is an
obvious development of the ideas on sex expressed in "The White Negro"
and earlier work. But here he emphasizes that the orgasm always exists
in a particular Gestalt and so will be affected by that Gestalt. What-
ever mood is created, and it can be a mood of violence as well as a mood
of tenderness, it will determine the result of the orgasm. The reason
is "that a mood is a psychic organism. Like all living things it reacts
to each new breath of the environment. It can grow, be wounded, weakened,
changed, colored, fortified, it can adapt itself to many a change or

shift in its circumstances. It can also be killed. . . . But like any

239

other organism, a mood is mysterious, and the most exceptional intrusions
can give it life. . . . As is true of all organisms, the possibilities
are sometimes limitless (BB, p. 258)."

Mailer is moving toward the existential idea that life is affected
by the particular moment in which it finds itself, and so the essence of
life is to use each particular moment for self-discovery and change. But
what he is also moving toward, and this is what is significant about
these statements, is that the artist needn't, like the Hipster, search
for extreme situations. What he must do is realize that any situation
offers the potential he is searching for. He must realize, too, that he
is continually living in dramatic situations, and so he must become more
sensitive to each moment and the subtle and often quiet forces within.

Mailer further associates his ideas of mood with the concept of
harmony. He says that the artists are "those who see associations and
connections everywhere, tend to live in a psychic medium which is heavier,
more dense, than the average man's (BB, p. 265)." The role of the artist
is find the latent beauty in these connections, to find the harmony im-
plicit in all things. Harmony means "that separate parts function in a
lively set of rhythms with one another. No organ is too fast or too slow
vis-a-vis another organ. The pleasant relation inspires proportions in
the outer forms which are healthy, harmonious, and beautiful (BB, p. 265)."
Thus Mailer is seeing beauty and harmony in biological terms. And "our
concepts of beauty are not arbitrary but a function of nature (BB, p.
266)."

Mailer even argues that we can find beauty in things which are some-
times ugly or sinister because we have expanded our faculties for obser-
vation and thus are able to conceive what beauty should be--we have, in

other words, an ideal concept at any particular moment:

240

Compassion, for example, illumines the ugly, makes it beautiful.
As we look upon an ugly face--provided it is 9BB_kind of ugly
face--we see how it could have been beautiful, we see the loss
implicit in it, we feel tender toward the disproportionate or
even anomalous development of features in it. Their inversion
of beauty which failed to be, at least until that moment when

we conceived that this ugly sight could have been beautiful. So
at that instant, looking at a plain face we can feel intimations
of beauty. Beauty--so runs this argument-~has its sort in any
being which is harmonious, imaginative, adaptable, brave, art-
ful, daring, good for life, good for the continuation of life.
(BB, p. 266.)

Thus interpreted, beauty is the function of the individual's ability to
live fully at any particular moment, so that beauty will be perceived if
the individual has the capacity to understand and live fully with his
mood, if the individual is artistic enough to see the harmony in all
things. Even death and scatology take on the elements of beauty.

Mailer feels that death and scatology are necessary themes for the
existentialist artist precisely because they challenge him to find the
beauty in them, the meaning of existence in them. On the subject of
death he argues that each individual has within him a fear of death and
also a morbid fascination with death. The individual can only come to
terms with these emotions if he becomes consciously aware of them. They
must be brought to life through an experience which will enable the in-
dividual to understand them:

If I am secretly in love with death and terrified of it, then

the effort to restrain and domesticate these emotions and

impulses (which are no less than the cross-impulse of suicidal

bravery and shame-ridden cowardice) exhaust so much of my will

that my existence turns bleak. A dramatic encounter with death,

an automobile accident from which I escape, a violent fight I

win or lose decently, these all call forth my crossed impulses

which love death and fear it. They give air to it. So these

internal and deadly emotions are given life. In some cases,

satisfied by the experience, they will subside a bit, give

room to easier and more sensuous desires. (BB, p. 270.)

Mailer uses Hemingway as an example of an artist who had such conflict-

ing emotions. The measure of the success of an artist is how well he

241

tests himself, pushes himself beyond his own dares to "flirt with, engage,
and finally embrace death. . . (BB, p. 271)." Once again Mailer is com-
mitting himself to the drama of life, to the search for the harmony which
is the beauty of existence.

Mailer moves at this point to the final level of the nature of mood,
harmony, and beauty. The essence of an individual's life resides in his
biological foundations. If the individual can return to the primitive
sense of life, he will be able to find the connection between his mind
and his body. He must break through the socially imposed impasse between
mind and body in order to uncover the drama that is continually taking
place at the core of his being, the drama which defines his being. Once
the individual becomes aware of his internal nature he is on the thresh-
old of defining his relationships with the world outside himself, he is
ready to discover that he is part of the universe. Mailer further de-
fines being as "anything which lives and still has the potential to
change, to change physically and to change morally. A person who has
lost all capacity for fundamental change is no longer a being (BB, p.
297)." The soul is one element in the struggle of the individual to
extablish his being. It is the individual's connection to eternity, to
the world beyond himself. Hence the individual's relationship to his
soul defines his being by clarifying his relationship to the universe,
to God.

Soul is what continues to live after we are dead. It is possible.

I should think, that if the soul does exist, that if there is

such an entity, that if there is indeed a part of us which is

eternal, or which can endure certain conditions remain eternal,

that the soul could well have the prOperty of being able to

migrate from body to body, from existence to existence, . . .

So long as the soul resides in a body or is trapped in a body

or at war in a body or indeed even enamored of the body in which

it finds itself, the soul must exist in a relation with that
body which is not unlike marriage. The soul affects the body,

242

the body is able to affect the soul. They grow together or apart,

they are good for one another or they may be bad, they can be

tragic for one another or merely cool and efficient, tolerating

one another because they would be savage and wasteful if apart.

(BB, pp. 278, 287-88.)

All that Mailer has explained about mood, harmony, beauty, and fin-
ally soul is a counter argument to science, the latter day Christianity,
which he insists has destroyed man's ability to deal poetically with the
universe, to see mysteries in metaphor. Modern science, he says, ”began
with the poetic impulse to treat metaphor as equal to equation; the
search began at that point where a poet looked for a means (which only
later became an experiment) to measure the accuracy of his metaphor (BB,
p. 308)." The discovery was, however, in the metaphor and the purpose
of science was simply to reveal the insights of man's deepest experience
--the poetic insights into the mysteries of life. So twentieth century
science is nothing more than technological achievement built on the work
of men who approached nature with awe, a poetic vision deriving from
their culture and motivated by a desire to reveal nature, not to dominate
it.

Metaphor is Mailer's way of saying here that all experience is re-
lated. As an example of the use of metaphor in science, Mailer talks
about a disease as a drama enacted on the stage of the body. All disease
is a message from the body that should not be suppressed with medication.
If an illness wages "conflict, drama, and distress through the body, and
has obliged the body to sit in attention upon it" the body has gained
knowledge of itself, "its experience has become more profound, its inti-
mate knowledge of its own disharmony is more acute (BB, p. 309)." Di-

sease, then, "is the last attempt (at a particular level of urgency) to

communicate from one part of the body to the other, a last attempt to

243

tell us that if we do not realize the function before us is now grev-
iously out of harmony, then we will certainly sicken further (BB, p.
309)." However, chemical healing is the worst of the two evils since
"the body does not know how well it could have cured itself, or even pre-
cisely what it had to cure." The cured patient is trapped in ambiguity,
the "seat of disease." Since the individual no longer knows what caused
his illness nor what form it may manifest itself in again, he has been
deprived from the drama enacted in his body. The body loses its chance
to explore its mysteries, to understand the core of its own life. Thus
science in this sense blocks man from pursuing the psychic, the metaphor-
ic, the most profound mysteries of existence.

Well aware that the European eixstentialism is extremely inadequate
in explaining the relationship between body and soul, and the possibility
of soul's eternity, Mailer in his last essay, "The Political Economy of
Time," further treats his newly developed view on soul. By doing so,
Mailer has made his version of existentialism uniquely American and
uniquely his own. He now emphasizes that soul exists in terms of vision,
which it struggles toward and tries to satisfy:

When the soul inhabits a body, it tries to exercise its intent

within that body. Sometimes it satisfies itself, often it fails,

but it carries some instinct which leads it toward something
mysterious, something I will be so badly mistaken as to now

call the Vision. . . . The Vision may be beautific, heroic,

epic, contemplative, tragic, harmonious, or even Faustian; the

Vision may shift in its direction; perhaps it is capable of a

Satanic contract. . . . For now, it is enough to say that by

our definition the soul has an instinct which leads it toward

that part of the Vision it can sense or comprehend. . .

(BB, p. 329.)

The soul needs to manifest itself in some physical form and is always

striving to do so. The reason for the struggle of the soul is that the

soul existed in a body "as a dynamic will. . . it was part of a body

244

which was able to change its environment. Yet once the body is dead, a
soul is no longer free, or at least it is no longer free to alter its
environment actively through the agent of the body (BB, p. 330)."

The struggle of the soul leads it to discover its essence, for when
the soul enters this new state, a state outside of a form, it must re-
sist those forces which would destroy it by rejecting them. This state
of war enables the soul to reduce itself to its bare essentials. In this
state of essence the soul looks for a new body or object which it can
inhabit. When it finds such an object it exerts its will upon it. The
object in turn can then have an influence on other people or objects, and
in this way the soul continues to live. Thus the soul takes on the func-
tion of God: as a result of its struggle for survival it reveals the
shape of its being, its essence. And all the time that the soul is ex-
erting its will to find a new home, it is opposed by Satan, who Opposes
it because he hates nature, who hates nature because he cannot control
it.

So far, Mailer's explanation of soul is still closely linked to the
ancient idea of "Transmigration of Souls." Soul's existential meaning
is best seen when Mailer tries to define it as a creature:

Suppose I define soul by saying that it is a sort of creature,

doubtless invisible, which has a purchase on eternity. It also

has an individual life, a personal life, which is, contained

in itself, and this personal life is carried through its meta-

morphoses. . . the soul is amoral. Its purpose is not to be

ethical, but to live. Its desire is to live. . . . So long as

it is a healthy soul, its nourishment comes from growth and

victory, from exploration, from conquest, from pomp and pageant

and triumph, from glory. . . . It lives for stimulation, for

pleasure. It abhors defeat. Its nature is to become more than

it is. (BB_pp. 340-41.)

The soul then is the root of the unconscious. It is the core of the in-

dividual. "Passion comes from the soul. But the soul can only love what

245

offers it growth. It loves most what offers it the happiest, richest
growth. It detests sickness, dying, death (BB, p. 341)." Still the soul
can die if it is not offered beauty, if it cannot find the appropriate
spirit (or function) which will allow it to fulfill itself.

If the soul cannot find beauty or is afraid to put its trust in the
spirit that it will bring it to beauty, then it stops growing the body
it inhabits begins to die. Or if the soul cannot find the kind of har-
mony or beauty essential to it, then the body it inhabits might even
choose to die. The soul in such situations would rather risk looking for
beauty somewhere in eternity than to continue to exist in a state where
there is no beauty or no possibility for beauty, because the soul itself
dies when it gives up its struggle toward eternity, toward beauty and
harmony. More often than not, the world is striving to frustrate the
soul's need for stimulation, growth, and challenge because it is the
Devil's environment, and the Devil needs to exhaust men's souls if he is
to win his battle with God for the universe. The "Plague" is the Devil
at work killing soul by creating through technology an environment in
which all the challenges necessary for human growth are suppressed.

In this essay Mailer is primarily concerned with explaining that the
writer as an American existentialist must develop a "coherent view of
life," and that this view of life must enable him to find the soul and
spirit of his characters and situations. Equally important, the writer
must be in command of mood, or harmony--this is his only way to beauty
and truth. In other words, the writer must discover and be true to his
own soul. This is particularly true when the writer creates a charac-
ter. A good character is someone you can grasp as a whole, you can have

a clear idea of him, but a being is someone whose nature keeps

246

shifting.”3 Likewise, "a book takes on its own life in the writing.

I has its laws, it becomes a creature to you after a while."4 And

if the novel fails to fulfill its potential as a being, then the

writer has failed, he has destroyed the beauty inherent in the work.

To prevent himself from deteriorating as a soul and as an existential-
ist artist, the novelist must continue to keep himself alive and
sensitive to everything he experiences. And he must bring this sen-
sitivity to his work. Thus American can be saved by the existentialist

writer inspiring the "people with the great, unifying novel."

247

Why Are We in Vietnam:

 

Just as An American Dream is, thematically, closely related

 

to Iheyflresjgential Papers, so is Bhy Are We in Vietnam? (l967) to

 

 

fannibals_anduBflriyti_ns. This pattern—-a collection of essays
followed by a novel--suggests that Mailer has felt the need to
clarify and extend the themes he has stated in the essays in a work
of fiction so that an existentialist hero may be created to embody
the stated ideas. In so doing, the new novel may capitalize on

his new understanding and extend the themes of his existential

philosophy even further and refine them even more. The close con-

nection on surface between Cannibals and Christians and Why Are

 

We in Vietnam? is the war in Vietnam. One year (l966-67) saw the

 

war situation changed from bad to worse. War protest almost
became a national phenomenon in America. The question of "Why are
we in Vietnam?" was then a question asked by millions of Americans.

Mailer offered his own answer first in Cannibals and Christians,

 

and then he tried to respond to the question by exploring right

into the national psyche in Why Are We in Vietnam?, and finally

 

he elaborated it further in The Armies of the Night.

 

However, no matter how close in terms of the Vietnam theme the

connection between Cannibals and Vietnam may be, the theme itself is

 

not explicitly but only obliquely expressed in the story of the novel.
Roger Ramsey even argues that ”the novel is not about Vietnam; it is

always about 0. J."5 Ramsey's argument clearly derives from the fact

248
that Why Are We in Vietnam? is the story of a bear hunt in the far North
and that the Vietnam war is not directly mentioned until the last page
of the book. I would agree with Ramsey that the story is about 0. J.
But I am not convinced by his argument that the story, either implicitly
or explicitly, has nothing to do with the title of the book. Both one
year before the novel in Cannibals (1966) and one year after it in AEEiEE.
(1968), Mailer was almost obsessed with the war in Vietnam. In "Speech
at Berkeley on Vietnam Day," he asserted that America turned to war as
the only way to relieve her plague-ridden situation and Johnson escalated
the Vietnam War because of his personal schizophrenia. These ideas were
greatly elaborated in BBmies, Only about six months after the novel was
published, Mailer wrote:

He [Mailer himself] came at last to the saddest conclusion of
them all for it went beyond the war in Vietnam. He had come to
decide that the center of America might be insane. The country
had been living with a controlled, even fiercely controlled,
schizophrenia which had been deepening with the years. Perhaps
the point had now been passed. Any man or woman who was devoutly
Christian and worked for the American Corporation, had been
caught in an unseen vise whose pressure could split their mind
from their soul. For the center of Christianity was a mystery,
a son of God, and the center of the corporation was a detesta-
tion of mystery, a worship of technology. Nothing was more in-
trinsically opposed to technology than the bleeding heart of
Christ. The average American, striving to do his duty, drove
equally further each day in the opposite direction--into work-
ing for the absolute computer of the corporation. . . . Every
day the average American drove himself further into schizoph-
renia; the average American believed in two opposites more
profoundly apart than any previous schism in the Christian soul.
Christians had been able to keep some kind of sanity for cen-
turies while countenancing love against honor, desire versus
duty, even charity opposed in the same heart to the lust for
power-~that was difficult to balance but not impossible. The
love of the mystery of Christ, however, and the love of no mys-
tery whatsoever, had brought the country to a state of suppressed
schizophrenia so deep that the foul brutalities of the war in
Vietnam were the only temporary cure possible of the condition
--since the expression of brutality offers a definite if temp-
orary relief to the schizophrenia. So the average good Chris-
tian Amegican secretly loved the war in Vietnam. (Armies, pp.
211-12.)

249

This passage fully demonstrates that during the period of his writing
the novel Mailer hardly changed his view of America and the American in-
volvement in the Vietnam war. Actually in many respects, the story, as
this study will show, anticipates almost all the ideas expressed in the
above passage. It both answers the question posed in the title, though
its action and setting have nothing directly to do with Vietnam or Amer-
ican conflict there. In his review of the novel, Eliot Fremont-Smith
noted, "He [Mailer] sees the war as a wholly destructive, wholly brutal-
izing exercise of American violence whose only rationale now is the ver-
ification of a vulgarized self-image of potency, toughness, masculinity.
Why are we in Vietnam? Because it's there, man. And violence is Ameri-
can as cherry pie."7
The occasion for the story is a going—away party given by D. J.'s
parents for himself and his best friend, Tex Hyde, on the eve of their
departure for Vietnam. The story itself is formed by D. J.'s remini-
scence of an Alaskan bear hunt undertaken two years befOre when he was
sixteen. His memories begin as he sits at the party. Ranald (D. J.)
Jethroe, who narrates the story, is the eighteen-year-old son of a high-
ranking executive in one of those conglomerate corporations, "David

)n8

Rutherford Jethroe Jellico Jethroe, RusBy_(Vietnam, p. 14 and his wife,

 

Hallie. The hunting expedition from Texas into Alaska includes Rusty,

D. J., Tex, and "Rusty's two accompanying flunkies," M. A. Pete and M. A.
Bill ("Medium Asshole Pete and Medium Asshole Bill (Vietnam, p. 51).")
The hunt, as D. J. remembers it, is a ghastly travesty of the Hemingway
cult where one tests one's personal courage against that of animals; the
hunters use a helicopter and outrageously powerful weapons. Thus 0. J.'s

experience of the hunt is another version of the American myth in which

250
knowledge is achieved through a mystical confrontation with the forces
of nature.
Mailer maintains that he has never read Faulkner's "The Bear," but he

needn't have, in order to write Why Are We in Vietnam? because he could

 

have found the formula easily enough in Huckleberry Finn or Moby Dick.

 

What, then does Mailer's version of the story contribute to a tradition
which has been enriched by Faulkner, Twain, and Melville? Of course, the
conduct of the hunt itself reflects American policy in Vietnam, with pain-
fully obvious parallels being drawn between the hunters' delight in their
outsized weapons against which the animals' instincts are helpless, and
the napalming of the Vietnamese population. Rusty's obsession with vic-
tory over the bear is analogous to the American insistance upon victory
in Vietnam. For instance, the head guide, Big Luke, thinks like a gen-
eral when placing the men in the hunt. Mailer wrote:

Big Luke had a military decision. Whether due to the atom bomb

or to Al Bell and his 47J and numerous other yclepts helicopts

from Sam Sting Safari, and other Safari Counters with their

reflective airplane, Cop Turds, and general fission of the

psychomagnetic field. . . of the wild life in the Brooks Range,

the fact is that the grizzers were charging the hunter before

the first shot. So Big Luke took a military fix. (Vietnam, p.

118-19.)
To complete the analogy, the guide employs a helicopter to transport the
party from place to place and in extreme cases to protect them from dan-
gerous animals. Rusty--as Mailer's corporation executive who supports
the war in Vietnam--regards himself as the "fulcrum of the universe."
If he misses getting a bear, he will fail, and his failure will be the
"world's doom." This seems to be the same self-important pretentiousness
that accounts for the American involvement in Southeast Asia, the notion

that upon American righteousness the world stands or falls. Perhaps in

this sense, the novel also answers the question of its title.

251

Of course, Why Are We in Vietnam?, unlike Barbary Shore, is more

 

 

than a merely political allegory. The most outstanding qualities of this
novel, which distinguish it from Mailer's all preceding novels, are its
style and language. These qualities will be pursued later. But 0. J.'s
linguistic display has not only restated Mailer's thesis about the dis-
eased and obscene environment in which D. J. and his contemporaries live,
but revealed as well that D. J.'s perceptions are so much affected by the
environment that he as a Mailer hero is no longer able to hold the Mailer
code as Faye, new Sergius, and Rojack were able to hold. In other words,
his American existentialist vision is in part contaminated. In the pro-
cess of searching for American existentialist heroes, Mailer, it seems,
has come to the point of impasse by creating an American existentialist
like D. J. Such an impasse in Mailer's hero creation was almost anti-
cipated in the final section of my examination of Stephen Rojack in the
preceding chapter. Perfect as Rojack was as Mailer's American existen-
tialist hero, he was ready to leave the country. His flight to Central
America suggested that a Mailer hero like him, "active rather than pas-
sive, 'self—centered' rather than 'other-directed,‘ given to murder

"9 could not possibly exist any longer within the

rather than suicide,
limits of American culture. In the meantime, it intimated that a similar
hero might not appear again in Mailer's fiction, because such an embattled
hero would be contaminated as Mailer himself already was--"the man and the
society are each grappling with his own piece of the plague (BB, p. 3)."

D. J. is just such a contaminated existentialist hero. Instead of chal-

lenging, strongly and violently, the post-war "technologizing“ of America

and the American involvement in the Vietnam War, D. J. compromises him-

self by disclosing an appreciation of American technology and much

252

enthusiasm for going to Vietnam. For the rest of this chapter will be
devoted to the exploration of these points.

As O. J. himself explains, "D. J." stands for "Disc Jockey to the
world (Vietnam, p. 22)." As disc jockey, D. J.'s medium is the radio
and the air-waves which transmit his voice. In this sense, Mailer has
captured in D. J.'s patter the frenzied pace and characteristic collo-
quialisms of the hundreds of all-night radio disc jockeys who keep Amer-
icans awake and supplied with popular music. Thus, D. J.'s voice is a
typical and familiar one to many Americans. In addition, D. J. addresses
his "listeners" directly--"dear grassed-out auditor"--echoing the compan-
ionable style of the disc jockey who always assumes audience involvement.
At one point ("Intro Beep Six") he even apologizes at length for having
held up the progress of the narrative: "forgive and forget that slow
smelly backed-up hardly moving narrative stream of facts, figures and gen-
eral meaningless horse-shit which D. J. has been feeding. . . (Vietnam,
p. 96)" thus demonstrating his good will toward all Americans "little pun-
sters out in the fun land (Vietnam, p. 185)." As Ramsey noted, "The novel
is apparently meant to be read as though one were listening to an actual

t."10 Mailer thus has created a popular character who may

radio broadcas
fully identify himself with the American mass media and thereby with the
American culture in general. He is no longer a Lovett who was fettered

by his own "Narcissus." Nor is he a Faye who constantly sought to live
perilously so as to purge himself of all pity for the great mass of "snobs
. . . who always think what they have to think (BB, p. 128)." Nor is he

a Rojack who was deeply interested in the exploration of the existential

psychic mysteries. Certainly, D. J. is not in the same way that Rojack

is, an exemplar "of that 'new consciousness' requisite to continuing

253

life's ancient battle against death in a psychotic world bordering on
apocalyptic crisis," as Richard Foster has thought they are.11

Throughout the novel, Marshall McLuhan is mentioned several times.
D. J. shows interest particularly in the electronic gadgets which are,
as McLuhan claims, "the extensions of man," extending "our central ner-
vous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time
as far as our planet is concerned."12 McLuhan further defines that "rad-
io is that extension of the central nervous system that is matched only
by human speech itself."13 And "Radio created the disc jockey, and ele-
vated the gag writer into a major national role. Since the advent of
radio, the gag has supplanted the joke, not because of gag writers, but
because radio is a fast hot medium that has also rationed the reporter's
space for stories."14 Here we have found the very source of D. J.'s idea
as "Disc Jockey to the world." 0. J. is surely also a gag writer, for he
suggests that his story is "a tape recording of my brain in the deep of
its mysterious unwinding (Vietnam, p. 23)." According to McLuhan, the
miracles of electronic media will bring back to the self the "wholeness,
empathy and depth of awareness which have been lost since "the Gutenberg
technology had produced a new kind of visual, national entity in the six-
teenth century. . ."15 Therefore, we have lost the communal, medieval

village life. But radio "certainly contracts the world to village size
"16

and "turns to the individual needs of people." D. J. undoubtedly
borrows this idea from McLuhan to assure his own optimism as he describes
himself as America's "own wandering troubadour brought right up to date,
here to sell America its new handbook on how to live, how to live in this
Electrox Edison world, all programmed out (Vietnam, p. 6)," derisively
telling all of us squares, fools, and cowards "out there in all that im-

plosion land" how the good life is to be lived.

254

Furthermore, D. J. shows his appreciation of technology in general
by quoting Edison at the beginning of his story (Vietnam, p. 6) and
praises him not only for the phonograph (the disc jockey's livelihood)
but for his philosophy as well: "Edison was hip, baby, the way you make
it is on the distractions (Vietnam, p. 6)." Sometimes D. J.'s language
also suggests an admiration for electricity: "incest is electric man,
never forget," and "the itch-dick memory of electric red on the leaves
(Vietnam, p. 128)," and ". . . this land up on the top, cold bare elec-
tric land of North, magnetic-electro fief of the dream, and D. J. full
of iron and fire and faith (Vietnam, pp. 210-11)," especially in the
description of the climatic moment of the Northern Lights:

. . . over the next half hour the Arctic lights began, Aurora

Borealis was out like she had not been out any night in

September this trip and looked to begin above their feet

across the pond, North of them in a corona of red and electric

green wash and glow colors rippling like a piece of silk and

spikes of light radiating up like searchlights, diamond spikes
from the crown of the corona going two hundred miles up verti-
cally into the sky while rays and bands, curtains of light,
draperies rustled, pulses of color went up into the dark,
something agitated in the bend of the night, and a crackling

sound like agitations of sparks run over a run of silk, some

light was alive and spoke to them. (Vietnam, pp. 216-17.)

This is one of the most beautiful descriptive passages in the book. The
electricity images are vividly visualized through a variety of colors of
Aurora Borealis. McLuhan argues that "the instant speed of electric in-
formation that . . . permits easy recognition of the patterns and the
formal contours of change and development" and men will be freed from
the slavish identification with the linear processes of machinary:

Electricity compels us to play our mechanical development back-

ward, for it reverses much of that development. Mechanization

depends on the breaking up of processes into homogenized but
unrelated bits. Electricity unifies these fragments once more

because its speed of operation requires a high degree of inter-
dependence among all phrases of any Operation. It is this

255

electric speed—up and inteidependence that has ended the
assembly line in industry.

Apparently, none of McLuhan's ideas and concepts are accepted by
Mailer the American existentialist. "Mailer perceives no particular
difference between what mechanical "aids" have done for and what elec-

tronic ones will do. They are only heightened causes of the same sad,

dehumanizing process":18

The twentieth century may yet be seen as the era when civilized
man and underpriviledged man were melted together into mass man,
the iron and steel of the nineteenth century giving way to
electronic circuits which communicated their messages into man,
the unmistakable tendency of the new century seeming to be
creation of men as interchangeable as commodities, their
extremes of personality singed out of existence by the psychic
field of force the communicators would impose. This loss of
personality was a catastrophe to the future of the imagination

. . . (BB, pp. 38-39.)

Since Advertisements for Myself, Mailer has had an outspoken rejection

 

of technology. In most of his writings technology is considered part of
the American "plague." But in this novel, unlike his creator, 0. J.,

"in both his pretended profession of disc jockey and in his language

19 Robert Solotaroff even calls 0. J. " a dis-

20

patterns, relies on it."
ciple of the celebrated Canadian," Marshall McLuhan. To Mailer, D. J.
is an American existentialist hero contaminated by American technology.
However, it is only when D. J. further identifies himself as "Dr.
Jekyll," and as "some genius brain up in Harlem pretending to write a
white man's funk fuck book in revenge (Vietnam, p. 26)," does he exhibit
qualities of Mailer's American existentialist hero in his youthhood.
Roger Ramsey suggests that when "D. J." is reversed, it stands for juve-
nile delinquent. D. J. surely sounds like one, like the twentieth-cen-
tury Huck Finn or the Holden Caulfield of the late Sixties. This is how

he starts broadcasting his story to the silent audience, where he intro-

duces the major existential themes of the novel:

256

Well, Huckleberry Finn is here to set you straight, and his
asshole ain't itching, right? so listen to my words, One World,
it's here for adolescents and overthirties--you'll know what
it's all about when you and me are done, like the asshole
belonged to Egypt, man, and penis was the slave of the Hebes

and the Brews, for they got it girdled with a ring of blood
fire, and the nose was the Negroes, for they split it. Now,
remember! Think of cunt and ass--so it's all clear. We're go-
ing to tell you what's all about. Go go, Dr. Jek tell the folk,
we're here to rock, the world is going shazam, hahray, harout,
fart in my toot, air we breathe is the prex, present dent, and
God has always wanted more from man than man has wished to give.
Zig a zig a zig. That is why we live in dread of God. Make

me another invention, Edison. Bring in the electric come mach-
ine. Do you know I think there's a tape recorder in heaven

for each one of us? and all the while we're sleeping and talk-
ing and doing our daily acts, bonging the gong, blasting the
ass, chewing the milch, milking the chintz, and working the
jerk, why there is that tape recorder taking it all down, this
is D. J. broadcasting from Texas, from Dallas, Big D in Tex,

and listen children to your old dear ma, ever notice how blood
smells like cunt and ass all mix in one, but rotten, man, the
flesh all rotten like meat and fish is biting each other to
death, and Death where is your gates, Mother Fucker, are they
hot? Big ass tomb, big ass tomb, the fish are in the fireplace.
and the nerve's begun to sing, make it cool, D. J., make it cool.
(Vietnam, pp. 6-7.)

Nevertheless, D. J. is not an ordinary juvenile delinquent. What clearly
singles him out from all other juvenile delinquents is his credibility.
At eighteen D. J.'s independence is complete; there is no one in the
older generation, no Eitel or McLeod from whom he can learn, just a gen-
eration helplessly bogged down in "shit." And his credibility is proved
by his repeated references to his creativity and intelligence ("You're
contending with a genius, D. J. is his name (Vietnam, p. 21).") and the
accuracy of his perceptions: "take it from D. J.--he got psychic trans-
istors in his ears. . . which wingding on all-out hearts of the prissy-
assed and the prigged (Vietnam, p. 160)."

D. J. is particularly adept at piercing the manly facade which is
assumed by those in control of American corporations, whose mental out-

look is suitably characterized by D. J.'s "Anal Referent Metaphor":

257
"D. J. sees right through shit. There's not a colon in captivity which
manufactures a home product that is transparency proof to Dr. Jekyll's
X-ray insight. He sees right into the claypots below the duodenum of his
father. . . (Vietnam, p. 50)." Barry Leeds doubted whether the narrative
voice is integral to the ideas and concepts expressed by D. J. and whether
we should accept Rojack and D. J. with equal credibility.21 The main
problem with Barry Leeds' criticism of D. J.'s credibility is in his
grouping together the forty-three-year-old Professor of Existential Psy-
chology with the eighteen-year-old small-town Texan. D. J. does not
follow the straight line of Faye, new Sergius, and Rojack in Mailer's
development of American existentialist heroes. 0. J. never poses prob-
lems about his Being as Rojack usually did. One thing Leeds has certainly
missed in his reading of this novel is D. J.'s comic qualities. At this
point, Jean Radford's observation is more pertinent when she thought that
D. J. as a hero "differs in two key respects: he is presented as a comic-
hero in ways Faye and Rojack clearly are not, and, since in this novel
character gives way to language, he exists as the 'voice' of the novel
rather than just its 'hero'."22 I still have reservations to call D. J.
a comic-hero. He does own some comic qualities, but not necessarily a
comic-hero, for in his seriousness D. J. speaks soberly and continues to
elaborate on Mailer's existentialist concepts of soul, form, scatology,
and the conflict between God and the Devil. Besides, he honestly admits
to perplexity when necessary, as when he puzzles over the cause of
Rusty's status with the hunting guide, Big Luke: it forms "an ambiguity
right at the center of D. J.'s message center." In contrast to "all
those North American shit heads," D. J.'s vision is pure. Even his rant-

ing and obscene rhetoric have certain purifying functions.

258

The style and language, as noted earlier, are different from any
of Mailer's previous works. Except for a few passages at the end, D.
J.'s language is deliberately obscene and his tone, offensively sneer-
ing. At the appearance of the novel, even those who could fairly appre-

ciate An American Dream were shocked. Even a sympathetic critic like

 

John Aldridge declared that "the book was obscene--relentlessly, bril-
liantly, hilariously obscene, very probably the most obscene novel ever
published in this country."23 Many critics believe that the style of
this novel derived from Mailer's encounter with William Burrough's Bang_

4

Lunch.2 But in his most recent writing (1976), Mailer attributed his

indebtedness of Why Are We in Vietnam? like Naked Lunch to Henry Miller:

 

 

It is even not unfair to say that Henry Miller has influenced
the style of half the good American poets and writers alive
today; it is fair to ask if books as different as Naked Lunch,
Portnoy's Complaints, Fear of Flying_and Why Are We in Vietnam?
would have been as well received(Or as free in styig) without
the irrigation Henry Miller gave to American prose.

 

 

 

This statement clarifies two points: (1) both Naked Lunch and Mailer's

 

Vietnam are in a sense indebted to Henry Miller, (2) Mailer's novel is

"different" from Naked Lunch. We might further assume that these novels

 

have benefited from Miller's "irrigation" in the sense that they were all
written in a prose reacting against the totalitarian society.

The style of Why Are We in Vietnam? is even closer than that of AD.

 

American Dream to the ideas Mailer as an existentialist artist presented

 

in both his "Paris Interview" and Cannibals and Christians, for with it

 

he is trying to create a being, instead of a character, "whose nature
keeps shifting." In so doing, "one's emotions are forever locked in the
chains of ambivalence-~the expression of an emotion forever releasing
its opposite-~the ego in perpetual transit from the tower to the dungeon

and back again (BB, p. 77)." D. J. is clearly such a being who has a

259

multiple voice to present himself. On the one hand, he is both himself
and a Mailer hero who "sees right through shit." But on the other hand,
he is the mirror of American culture which reflects both the minds of
the Christians and the Cannibals. Richard Poirier called him "the theor-
ist of multiple identity."26 D. J. does respond to this idea when he cau-
tions us that

We have no material physical site or locus for this record,

because I can be in the act of writing it, recording it,

slipping it (all unwitting to myself) into the transistorized

electronic aisles and microfilm of the electronic Lord (who, if

he is located in the asshole, must be Satan) or I can be an

expiring consciousness, I can be the unwinding and unravelings

of a nervous constellation just now executed, killed, severed

or stopped, may be even stunned, you thunders, Herman Melville

go hump Moby wash his Dick. Or maybe I am like a Spade and

writing like a Shade. (Vietnam, pp. 25-26.)
The "voice" here is a composite of various identities, attuned to the pace
of a disc jockey taped talk. But in the very psyche of D. J. there is a
kind of battleground where both internal and external, or psychological
and social, forces inhabit and war for possession. The reader is never
certain about who the narrator is or what he is, but forced to face up
to the confusion and the ever-present dread that D. J. himself faces.

The language of the novel is accordingly adapted to the emissions
of D. J.'s hopped—up mind. As John Aldridge has pointed out, "0. J.
speaks by turns with tongue of a Hell's Angel, a Harlem hippie, a small-
town Southern deputy sheriff, a drunken tent-revivalist preacher, and the

"27 In the meantime, D.

filthiest-minded top sergeant in the U. S. Army.
J.'s strings of four-letter words are not just appropriate to his age and
his viewpoint, but also the outlet of the subconscious suppressed streams
of American thought that can be expressed only at night:

If the illusion has been conveyed that my mother, D. J.'s own
mother, talks the way you got it here, well little readerster,

260

you're sick in your own drool, because my mother is a Southern
lady, she's as elegant as an oyster with powder on its ass,
she dog't talk that way, she just thinks that way. '(Vietnam,
p. 21.

Mailer further says that man is "obscene as an old goat." The common

man's obscenity works to help him keep his sanity. In Why Are We in Viet-

 

nam? he allows D. J.'s language to play on obscenity as freely as he
wishes. Mailer made this point very clear as he reflected on the novel

in The Armies of the Night:

 

He had kicked goodbye in his novel Why Are We in Vietnam? to
the old literary corset of good taste, ietting his sense of
language play on obscenity as freely as it wishes, so dis-
covering that everything he knew about the American language
(with its incommensurable resources) went flying in and out of
the line of his prose with the happiest beating of wings--it
was the first time his style seemed at once very American to
him. . . (Armies, p. 62.)

 

In addition, reacting against the totalitarianism manipulated by
"communication engineers" like LBJ, D. J. also employs his obscene rhet-
oric "as the terrible swift sword of conscience that slices through the
pretensions of everything he finds obscene in American'society."28 In
the book, D. J. fully uses his eloquency to attack all the pretensions
of his father, Rusty. Rusty has a long history of development in Mai-
ler's fiction: he is a General Cummings, a Hollingsworth, a Subversive
Committee of U. S. Congress, and a Barney Kelley all wrapped in one.

He is identified with a multitude of organizations from local country
club to the CIA. He is the top executive of a firm engaged in manufac-
turing plastic cigarette filters. D. J. half-jokingly says that Rusty
is "an unlisted agent for Luce Publications, American Airlines Overseas
Division." Rusty, who is violently competitive and will destroy anyone
who gets in his way, is a rough, fast-shooting cowboy proud of his an-
cestors. Here I will quote D. J. at length to demonstrate his penetrat-

ing insight into the archetypal corporate man:

261

Well, now Rusty's got normally some kind of big pointy nose
with fleshy backing, good shape, but it's a tool, man. On pot,
it looks suddenly like a hand, got a red mean finger at the

tip, stab you right in the middle of your lie, or grab your
mouth and twist it off. It's a shit converter of a nose-~any
flunky talking to Rusty and not knowing what to say cause he's
hiding some fuckup is going to find all the hardpan consti-
pated Texas clay in his flunky gut turning abruptly to sulfur
water and steam. . . . But it's Rusty's eyes kick off the old
concept of dread in D. J. Fyodor Soren Kierkegaard Jethroe
because they remind him of his favorite theory, which is that
America is run by a mysterious hidden mastermind, a secret
creature who's got a plastic asshole installed in his brain
whereby he can shit out all his corporate management of
thoughts. I mean that's what you get when you look into Rusty's
eyes. You get voids, man, . . sort of dead ass and dull with a
friendly twinkle--typical American eyes--and when he's turned on,
like when he's ready to prong a passing cunt in a hurry-- which
D. J. estimates six eight times a year--or when he's about to
consummate the big signing (listen to the silent bagpipes) in
some ten-mouth pass-the-buck or stand-and-fuck game of nego-
tiations, why then Rusty's eyes are like yellow coals, liquid
yellow fire ready to explode in its own success. . . . If D.

J. wouldn't take to pot at family dinners he might not have such
a Fyodor Kierk kind of dread looking into Big Daddy's chasm and
tomb. But that dread's out there, man. Because Rusty suggests
D. J.'s future: success will stimulate you to suffocate!
(Vietnam, pp. 36-38.)

The dread that D. J. feels when looking at his father partly results
from Rusty's courageous determination and tremendous selfishness, because
he represents a destructive and debasing force in American society. The
plastic cigarette filters his company manufactures sterilize and destroy
the natural. The "Pure Pores" filter can, says 0. J., also be used as a
contraceptive for women. It not only prevents life, but corrupts it as
well, for it is said to cause cancer of the lip. As Jerry H. Bryant has
explicated it in this way:

The filter and the men who produce it represent that feature of

American business which dams up all impulses and healthy spon-

taniety, straining out all but the conforming, and produces

cancerous kggbs of unexpressed desires which turn into "knots

of hatred."

D. J.'s dread also results in part from his father's strength and the

necessity of competing with him. Actually it is the nature of the

262

competition that fills D. J. with this kind of dread, because the real
relationship between the two is an Oedipal relationship. This is brought
out in the episode in which Rusty and D. J. escape from the surveillance
of Big Luke, their guide, and go off to kill their own bear. Separated
from the rest of the hunting party, the two begin to develop a close
emotional bond. They are in the wilds together, totally dependent upon
each other for survival, and thus can potentially experience the classic
bond between father and son—-the father guiding and teaching the son.
Rusty himself, freed from the corporate spirit of the hunt and out in
nature with his son, is able to tell 0. J. of the worst thing he ever
saw--an eagle killing an already wounded deer--and considers it "a secret
crime that America. . . is nonetheless represented, indeed even symbol-
ized by an eagle, the most miserable of the scavengers, worse than a crow
(Vietnam, pp. 139-40)."

D. J. feels familiar with his father for the first time in his life.
He describes his feelings this way:

On and on they go for half an hour, talking so close that D. J.

can even get familiar with Rusty's breath which is all right.

It got a hint of middle-aged fatigue of twenty years of doing

all the little things body did not want to do, that flat sour

of the slightly used up. . . but with all this distraction,

fatigue, booze, Nick the Teen, . . it's still a good breath, it

got muscle and a big happy man with that clean odorless white

American flesh. . . is that D. J. riding on currents of love

can take all the smell of his daddy's breath and love him still,

cause that's love--you can go to the end of the other's breath

and still forgive him. (Vietnam, pp. 140-41.)
But it is right after this description that Rusty and D. J. come upon the
tracks of a bear and the smell changes and with it the love that D. J.

feels for his father turns to hatred. The reason is that D. J. comes in

contact with death and his father represents death to him.

263

And 0. J. breathes death-~first in his life-~and the sides of
the trail slam into his heart like the jaws of a vise cause
that grizzer could come erupting out of the brush, . . it's
death 0. J.'s breathing, it comes like attack of vertigo when
stepping into dark and smelling pig shit, that's what death
smells to him, . . terrible fear right out of his lungs and
pores, mucous lining now flappy-ass organs, . . cause D. J.

for first in his life is hip to the hole of his center which

is slippery desire to turn his gun and"bTast a shot into Rusty's
fat fuck face, thump in his skull, whawng! and whoong! with the
dead-ass butt of his Remington 721, D. J. is shivering on the
death in this hot-ass vale of breath, cause each near-silent
step of his toe on the trailsounds a note, chimes of memory,
angel's harp of ten little toes picking out the blows of Rusty's
belt on his back, he five years old and shrieking off the fuck
of his head, cause the face of his father is a madman ass, a
power which wishes to beat him to death--for what no longer
known. . . D. J. just remembers the beating, screaming, plead-
ing, smell of pig shit in his five-year-old pants, and death,
coming in like oscillations red and green, stop, go, Rusty's
eyes in to kill on D. J.--fat five-year-old spoiled beautiful
little fuck in the middle between husband and wife. . . little
pretty seed of back-up murder passed from valve asshole

Rusty's heart to the seat of D. J.'s brain, for Hallie rushed
in then, picked up decanter whiskey, flung it through on a line
through windows, and glass crackedall scythe and lightnings,
and spell broke, murder weather cracked in thunder, and D. J.
all pig shit smell and five-year-old ass and back burning like
the flesh in the burns of Hell run all screaming into Hallie's
arms, little man saved by cunt, virility grew with a taint in
the armature of the phallic catapult, call it tumor if that's
'what D. J.'s got in his brain, cause brilliance is next to mur-
der, man, . . . Death is on him, memory of father near to mur-
dering the son, breath of his own murder still running in the
blood of his fingers, his hands, all murder held back, and then
on the trail came a pressure, no longer the fear of death but
concentration, murder between the two men came to rest, for
murder was outside them now, some murder which had been beaming
in to D. J. while he thinking of murdering his father, the

two men turned to comtemplate the beast. (Vietnam, pp. 143—46.)

 

This long passage is again a revealing one in the novel. It not
only spells out the deep-rooted incompatible relationships between father
and son, but it also states in what sense 0. J. is a Hipster, or a "phil-
osophical psychopath." A psychopath, according to Mailer, is one who has
"chosen" to express his infantile fantasies-~"those violent parallels to
the violent and often hopeless contradictions he knew as an infant and

as a child (BBB, p. 320)." "In thus giving expression to the buried

264

infant in himself, he can lessen the tension of those infantile desires
and so free himself to remake a bit of his nervous system (BBB, p. 320)."
This is exactly what D. J. intends to do. By killing or murdering, he
may empty his hatred. He wants to kill his father in the same way that
Rojack wants to kill Barney Kelley. With his desire comes a memory. He
sees his father beating him when he was five years old, and his father's
face has the look of a madman, reflecting "a power which wishes to beat
him to death." Only in attempting to carry out such a murderous action,
does D. J. discover his sense of self, "the hole of his center." Al-
though he has not actually killed his father, his killer instinct is
given vent to in his shooting of the bear.

D. J.'s total rejection of Rusty and Rusty's final inability to
break away from the corporate spirit are presented in the conclusion of
their bear hunt. After D. J. and Rusty turn their separate impulses to
murder to the collective will to kill the bear, both of them get shots
off. But it is D. J. who wounds the bear first and feels compelled to
walk up to it before it dies. In this episode, 0. J. experiences a sim-
ilar mystery as Rojack experienced with the fourth wounded German sold-
ier before he died:

His eyes looked right at D. J.'s like wise old gorilla eyes, and

then they turned gold brown and red like the sky seen through

a ruby crystal ball, eyes transparent, and D. J. looked in from

his twenty feet away and took a step and took another step and

another step and something in that grizzer's eyes locked into

his, a message, fellow, an intelligence of something very fine

and very far away, just about as intelligent and wicked and

merry as any sharp light D. J. had ever seen in any Texan's

eyes any time. . . those eyes were telling him something singe-

ing him, branding some part of D. J.'s future, . . . and that

wild wicked little look of intelligence in the eye, saying

something like, "Baby, you haven't begun," and when D. J.

smiled, the eyes reacted, they shifted, they looked like they

were about to slide off the last face of this presence, they

looked to be drawing in the peace of the forest preserved for
all animals as they die, the unspoken cool on tap in the veins

265

of every tree, yes, griz was drawing in some music of the un-

heard burial march, and Rusty--wetting his pants, doubtless,

too shoot, and griz went up to death in one last paroxysm. . .

(Vietnam, pp. 155-56.)

In recognition of nature at its most fierce, D. J. recognized "Mr. D
(Death)" and D for Dread at the same time. This recognition has both
matured D. J. and led him to seeking the ultimate experience that the
bear's eyes suggest. But such a significant moment of an ultimate ex-
perience is stripped off by Rusty when he, in his fear and frustration,
destroys the bear. On the existential level, Rusty, in D. J.'s eye, is
associated with violence, death, dread, and destruction. Rusty has
brought death to animals, but he has never faced the fact of death in his
own mind. He knows only the experience of dread, the great fear of de-
feat, but never "such a Fyodor Kierk kind of dread looking into Big
Daddy's chasm and tomb."

The classical bond of father and son is completely shattered when
Rusty falsely claims the bear as his. As they return to camp, Big Luke
asks who got the bear:

D. J., in the silence which followed, said, "Well, we both sent

shots home, but I reckon Rusty got it," and Rusty didn't con-

tradict him--one more long silence--and Rusty said, "Yeah, I

guess, it's mine, but one of its sweet legs belongs to D. J."

Whew. Final end of love of one son for one father. (Vietnam,

pp. 156-67.)

Rusty is, as D. J. has said earlier in the book, "the cream of corpora-

tion corporateness" and the direct current of Washington, D. C. In this
connection, Joseph Epstein has made a good association in his review of

the book:

Rusty, in his obsessive need for victory in landing a bear,

disaffects his son, so America in its obsessive need not to

lose face in Vietnam has disaffected some of the best of its

young people. The style of these Texans is characterized by

mindless destruction, awe of technology and a mania for status,
but these elements are not absent from the American venture in

266

Vietnam. Mailer . . . has created a powerful metaphor for his

own nation's intrusion in another land, and through the force

of this megaphor shown that intrusion to be the wretched affair

as 1t 15.

After Rusty takes credit for killing the bear that D. J. actually
downed, disillusioned with Big Luke and his violation of the hunter's
code by using a helic0pter ("Cop Turd"), and fouled with nausea emanating
from the company of "high grade asshole" (Rusty) and "medium grade ass-
hole" (Pete and Bill), "0. J. sneaks out of camp with his best friend,
Tex Hyde. D. J. proposes a walk to "clean their pipes," departing from a
"general state of mixed shit (Vietnam, p. 186)." Obviously, the flight
into the Brook Range away from guides and the omnipresent helicopter is
a retreat from cowardice and the technology the older men use to disguise
their fear and incompetence in the forest. In a seemingly pointless sec-
tion on the guns the men are carrying, Mailer gives the largest caliber
rifle to the biggest coward. Each has a weapon disproportionately more
powerful than is necessary to kill Alaskan game. The helicopter is a
deviCe to aid men who have lost the woodsman's lore and is an aid to com-
pensate for a lost endurance.

By deliberatley having the boys undergo the "purification ceremony,"
the last part of the novel certainly reminds one of Faulkner's classical
story “The Bear." 0. J. and Tex are cleansing themselves through a rit-
ual regression to a primitive communion with the forces of nature. They
first defeat a wolf in a psychic battle, then they witness a struggle
between the wolf and an eagle and finally they watch a bear kill a young
caribou. But what they are continually faced with is the dread of being
alone in the North. Their confrontation with dread is both exhilerating
and overwhelming. In the beginning of their journey they are pure and

are able to live, as the rest of nature, on their sense of smell. 0. J.

267

describes his sensations the following way:

And once again they feel just as clean and on-edge and perfect
as would you, sedentary send-in-terror auditor of their trip,
when you, sir, are about to insert the best peice of cock you
ever mustered up into a cunt which is all fuck for you, and your
nose is ozone you so clean and perfect, well, they feeling like
that every instant now, whoo-ee! whoo-ee; they can hardly hold
it in, cause this mother nature is as big and dangerous and
mysterious as a beautiful castrating cunt when she's on the

edge between murder and love, forgive the lecture, Pericles,

but the smell is everywhere, the boys are moving on smell,

snow smell, better believe it, good here, not so good there. . . .
Man, it's terrifying to be free of mixed shit. (Vietnam, pp.
196-97.)

However, when they witness the death of the calf at the paws of the
grizzly, D. J. says, "and she breaks like a stick of wood and is there
lifeless and her death goes out over the ridge and slips into the bowl
and the afternoon takes a turn and is different having just passed through
one of those unseen locks of the day, everything is altered, not saying
how (Vietnam, pp. 206-07)." And then they watch the mother of the calf
sniff the body of her creation, kicking at the excrement that the bear
has left "as if hate was suddenly stinging her feet":

But never takes her nose off as if she is going to smell on
through to the secret of flesh, as if something in the odor of
her young death was months ago when some bull stud caribou in
moonlight or sun illumined the other end of the flesh somewhere
between timber slide and lightning there on the snow, some
mystery then recovered now, and woe by that mother caribou
nuzzled in sorrow from her nose while the sky above blue as a

cologless sea went on and sun burned on her. . . (Vietnam, p.
208.

D. J. is then led by this sight into a meditation on the nature of smell,
as the night comes on:

A sigh came out of the night as it came on and D. J. could have
wept for a secret was near, some mystery in the secret of things
--why does the odor die last and by another route?--and he

knew then the meaning of trees and forest all in dominion to

one another and messages across the continent on the wave of
their branches up to the sorrow of the North, the great sorrow
up here brought by leaves and wind some speechless electric
gathering of woe, no peace in the North, not on the top of the
rim. . . (Vietnam, p. 211.)

268

Writing some twenty-five years late after Faulkner and from an urban back-
ground, Mailer seems to question the traditional dichotomy between un-
spoiled nature and corrupted civilization. Like the eagle Rusty described
earlier, the grizzly is blind and castrates any other living thing, not
for food but simply for the sake of the kill. At least this is the basis
of nature that D. J. is exposed to. Tony Tanner has summarized Mailer's

attitude in this manner:

Man does indeed despoil the beauties of nature, cuts himself

off from its prime mysteries, devotes himself to corporations

like the Pentagon, collects guns and contracts cancer, invents

helicopters defoliate and decimate, lives inside the deadening

impurities of industrial and mental smog, and is curiously
attracted to death-~all this and more is touched on by Mailer's
novel. But it generates the further suggestion that the original
prompting for this compulsion to waste substance was not

brought by man into the unspoiled realms of nature but rather

contracted there--whether in the jungle, the desert, or at the

polar ice cap.

What Tony Tanner has said about Mailer's attitude toward nature might
be in part Mailer's intent to present through D. J., but the trip by the
boys is made into an existential experience. In terms of purification,
the trip does serve the function of antidote in the beginning to the ob-
scenity of the mechanized bear hunt. This can even be seen by D. J.'s
language. In the long lyric passages describing the boy's first day alone
in the forest, the four-letter words are almost entirely absent; so are
the various cants and mixed media gags. But, the thing is that this kind
of purifying experience has not lasted long. As the story draws to its
climatic moment, right in the center of this idyll there are suggestions
of violence, killing, death and "a Fyodor Kierk kind of dread." These
messages are most dramatically presented in their witnessing the Arctic

Lights. In the middle of the night, they are suddenly awakened by a spec-

tacular display of the Aurora Borealis. Stimulated by the electric

269
messages of this sight, they experience the mysteries of their beings in
the novel to see D. J.'s struggle to identify himself with his Being and

his failure to do so, I like to quote the paragraph in its entirety:

Silence. And they each are living half out of their minds. For
the lights were talking to them, and they were going with it,
near to, the lights were saying that there was something up
here, and it was really here, yeah God was here, and He was

real and no man was He, but a beast, some beast of a giant jaw
and cavernous mouth with a full cave's breath and fangs, and
secret call: come to me. They could almost have got up and
walked across the pond and into the north without their boots,
going up to disappear and die and join that great beast. In

the field of all such desire D. J. raised his hand to put it
square on Tex's cock and squeeze and just before he did the
Northern lights shifted on that moment and a coil of sound

went off in the night like a blowout in some circuit fuse of

the structure of the dark and D. J. who had never put a hand

on Tex for secret fear that Tex was strong enough to turn him
around and brand him up his ass, sheer hell for a noble Texan
but he, D. J., was beloved son of perfume of the poo Halleloo
and her sweet ass was his sweet ass and so temptation made him
weak at the root of his balls and he always swelled to be muscle
hard around Tex so that Indian could never get it up his ass

nor no man living, and vibrations coming off Tex tonight like

he giving up the secret of why he never tried to bugger old

D. J., Tex who'd bugger any punk, cause asshole is harder to
enter than cunt and so reserved for the special tool but Tex,
who never sucked a dick and never let no one near him not even
to touch, could bugger all but was never ripe to try for D. J.'s
dangerous hard-ass soft mother's cherry although secret unvoiced,
almost unknown panic for attempting such entrance had him nipped
in the groin with a claw, but it came out in the night some
tension of waves of unspoken confession from Tex to D. J.

that Tex Hyde he of the fearless Eenyen blood was finally

afraid to prong D. J., because D. J. once become a bitch would
kill him, and D. J. breathing that in by the wide-awake of the
dark with Aurora Borealis jumping to the beat of his heart knew
he could make a try to prong Tex tonight, there was a chance to
get in and steal the iron from Texas' ass and put it in his own
and he was hard as a hammer at the thought and ready to give

off sparks and Tex was ready to fight him to death, yeah, now

it was there, murder between them under all friendship, for

God was a beast, not a man, and God said, "Go out and kill--
fulfill my will, go and kill," and they hung there each of them
on the knife of the divide in all conflict of lust to own the
other yet in fear of being killed by the other and as the hour
went by and the lights shifted, something in the radiance of

the North went into them, and owned their fear, some communion
of telepathies and new powers, and they were twins, never to be
near as lovers again, but killer brothers, owned by something,
prince of darkness, lord of light, they did not know; they just

5.70

knew telepathy was on them, they had been touched forever by

the North and each bit a drop of blood from his own finger and

touched them across and met, blood to blood, while the lights

pulsated and glow of Arctic night was on the snow, and the deep
beast whispering Fulfill my will, go forth and kill, and they

left an hour later in the dark to go back to camp and knew on

the way each mood of emotion building in Rusty and Big Luke and

Ollie and M.A. Bill and Pete and their faces were etched just

as they had forseen them and the older men's voices were filled

with the same specific mix of mixed old shit which they had

heard before in the telepathic vaults of their new Brooks

Range electrified mind. (Vietnam, pp. 217-20.)

This dramatic account fully presents D. J.'s failure to maintain his
stature as one of Mailer's American existentialist heroes. It is in this
paragraph that we see that D. J. the American existentialist and D. J.
the small-town Cannibal meet head-on in the struggle for possession of
D. J.'s Being (soul). In the process of this struggle, the ideas of,
love and hatred, murder and suicide, God and the Devil, are all dialect-
ically presented to dramatize the embattled state in D. J.'s mind. The
struggle starts with the revelation from the Aurora Borealis: "the lights
were saying that there was something up here. . . yeah God was here, and
He Was real and no man was He, but a beast." With an image more fright-
ening than the bear, the beast like the one in Yeats's "Second Coming,"
is a sign, in Mailer's system, of the Devil instead of God, of decline
instead of growth. The secret call is the indication to induce D. J. to
death by committing suicide. 0. J. perceives the meaning of the beast
instantly and responds to it by putting out a hand to touch Tex so that
he may overcome his suicidal death by "buggering" Tex, because at this
moment he does not have a Deborah to be murdered or a Ruta to be sodo-
mized to clear his existential vision. In his attempt to have an anal
intercourse with Tex, D. J. simply desires to gain Tex's power to main-

tain his own. 0. J. believes at first that "there was a chance to get

in and steal the iron from Texas' ass and put it in his own."

271

Tex is the son of a mortician, "the fattest strongest fuck of an
undertaker in Dallas ass County (Vietnam, p. 170)." While Tex is a boy
filled with vitality and "full of daddy-love," D. J. is a "my-Momma—
loved-me" one. The relationship between Tex and D. J. is the relation-
ship built on the merger of father love and mother love; each is the
other's ultra ego. Thus, homosexuality is, both consciously and uncon—
sciously, a natural tendency for either of them, which as a result would
lead to their deterioration, for, to Mailer, "homosexuality has to be
overcome in the process of earning manhood." Therefore, even D. J.'s
attempt to sodomize Tex is successful, his resistence to the beast's call
will not be necessarily successful. In the mysteries of murder and sui-
cide, only the action of murder may, as Mailer has repeatedly emphasized,
relieve one of his suicidal temptation, such as Rojack's murder of Deb-
orah.

In addition, 0. J. has a secret fear "that Tex was strong enough
to turn him around and brand him up his ass. . ." It is certainly pos-
sible for Tex to "bugger" him, because Tex does have an "unvoiced almost
unknown panic for attempting such entrance." So each is desirous of
maintaining his own powers by gaining the other's. Yet, Tex, too, has
his own fear, "because 0. J. once become a bitch would kill," especially
when he is under the influence of the Arctic lights just as Rojack was
under the influence of moonlight. In such a highly strained situation,
0. J.'s emotions are undeniably "locked in the chains of ambivalence--
the expression of an emotion forever releasing its opposite." As O. J.
himself says, "they hung there each of them on the knife of the divide
in all conflict of lust to own the other yet in fear of being killed by

the other and as the hour went by and the lights shifted, something in

272

the radiance of the North went into them. . ." Then D. J. hears the
secret call from the beast for the second time, "Go out and kill--ful-
fill my will, go and kill." Through "some communion of telepathies and
new powers," they become "twins, never to be near as lovers again, but

killer brothers, owned by something, prince of darkness. . . Finally,
0. J. has lost God's message of growth; instead he is possessed by the
Devil. The temporary "purification ceremony" has turned out to be D.
J.'s initiation for death, because he has accepted the Cannibal ethic

of the beast: "but to kill and eliminate is his sense of human continu-
ation (BB, p. 4)." After their return to the camp, 0. J. willingly
becomes part of "the older voices filled with the same specific mix of
mixed old shit which" he has heard before. Two years later, D. J. ac-
cepts his parents' go-away party with pleasure and is prepared for Viet-
nam with enthusiasm as he in the end announces to his silent audience,
"This is D. J., Disc Jockey to America turning off. Vietnam, hot dam
(Vietnam, p. 224)."

As is evident by now, the world is indeed McLuhan's global village,
for no one is able to escape from "the total electronic configuration,"32
not even a Mailer hero. 0. J. finally sees himself "not as a soldier of
Growth but as an amplifier of that hopelessly debased morality pouring

"33 Mailer the American existentialist is of course not con-

through him.
tent nor unconcerned to see his heroes, such as Faye, new Sergius, Rojack,
find self-fulfillment through a denial of life. He is much more preoc-
cupied with how the individual can reaffirm his authentic existence by
going to its limits--to death--and by encorporating death into life

rather than by giving life over to death. D. J. is obviously not such a

a hero though he has the potentiality to become one. Irreparably conta-

minated by the American technology, he simply loses all his courage at

273

the most crucial moment to assert his authenticity by risking his life
to overcome his fear. Ultimately, D. J. and Tex are but instruments of

a diabolic power so enormous as to defy rebellion.

10.
11.
12.

13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.

Notes to Chapter Six

Norman Mailer: The Countdown, p. 67.

 

Ibid., p. 62.

"A Paris Review Interview," in Norman Mailer: A Collection of Crit-
ical Essays, p. 34.

 

 

Ibid., p. 35.

Roger Ramsey, "Current and Recurrent: The Vietnam Novel," Modern
Fiction Studies, XVII, 3 (Autumn, 1971), 415,

 

Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (New York: A Signet Book,
1968), pp. 211-12. Hereafter all references are to this edition
and will be cited in the text.

 

Eliot Fremont-Smith, "Norman Mailer's Cherry Pie," The New York
IjmgB, CXVI (September 8, 1967), p. 37.

 

Norman Mailer, Why Are We in Vietnam? (New York: A Berkley Medallion
Book, 1967, 1971), p. 14. Hereafter, all quotations are referred to
this edition and will be cited in the text.

 

Norman Mailer: A Critical Study, p. 42.

 

"Current and Recurrent: The Vietnam Novel," p. 417.

Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work, p. 37.

 

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 4 and'3.

 

Ibid., p. 302.
Ibid., p. 303.
Ibid., p. 301.

I id., p. 306.

—u——

Ibid., p. 352.

CT

Down Mailer's Way, pp. 183-84.

 

"Current and Recurrent: The Vietnam Novel," 418.

274

20.
21.
22.
23.
24.

25.

26.
27.
28.
29.
30.

31.

32.
33.

275

Down Mailer's Way, p. 183.

 

The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer, p. 196.

Norman Mailer: A Critical Study, p. 38.

 

John W. Aldridge, "From Vietnam to Obscenity," p. 181.

See Adams's Existential Battles, p. 100; Solotaroff's Down Mailer's
Bgy, pp. 202-03; and others.

 

 

Norman Mailer, Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings

 

of Henry Miller (New York: Grove Press, 1976):’p. 5.

 

Richard Poirier, Mailer, p. 132.

Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work, p. 184.

 

Ibid., p. 184.

Jerry H. Bryant, The Open Decision, p. 391.

 

Joseph Epstein, "Mailer Rides Again: Brilliant, Idiosyncratic,
Unquotable," Book World, (September 10, 1967), p. 34.

 

Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970 (New York:
Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 367-68.

 

Down Mailer's Way, p. 199.

 

Ibid., p. 200.

CHAPTER SEVEN
Norman Mailer the American Existentialist as the Hero:

The Armies of the Night and Of a Fire on the Moon

 

 

The Armies of the Night

 

In his creation of the young American existentialist D. J. in BBB

Are We in Vietnam?, Mailer's search for a hero has suffered, as has been

 

shown in the preceding chapter, a regression. This regression results
not so much from D. J.'s lack of the existentialist insight into the
nature of the reality in which he lives, as from his lack of courage to
assert himself and his failure to obey his inner voice to act at the
crucial moment. Instead, D. J. has become a tragi-comic hero of a new
kind in Mailer's world of fiction. 0. J. is tragic in the sense that he
has deserted Mailer's original code for growth, and his act--going to
Vietnam--he finally takes is his own destruction, which will annihilate
not only his physical body but also his spiritual soul. And 0. J. is
comic because he is the "shit-oriented late adolescent" hero with "Dr.
Jekyll's X-ray insight (Vietnam, p. 50)," whose obscene language pro-
vokes humor more often than not.

By creating a tragi—comic American existentialist like 0. J.,
Mailer has evidently changed his direction in his search for a hero.
After about a decade in his effort to make "a revolution in the conscious-
ness of our time," Mailer as a writer, especially a novelist, clearly
perceives that he has not wielded enough power to force America to change

its direction. The kind of fiction he hopes to write lies tantalizingly

276

277

beyond his imaginative grasp. The "great book" he has promised to pro-

duce in his Advertisements still seems as remote as his election to the

 

Presidency.1 The period after Bhy Are We in Vietnam?, ”with every thought

 

of beginning a certain big novel which had been promised for a long time,"
Mailer did intend to start writing it but "the moot desire to have one's

immediate say on contemporary matters kept diverting the novelist impulse

"2

into journalism. Mailer wrote this in the preface to Existential Er-

 

rands (1972). But before its appearance and after Vietnam, he produced

The Armies of the NighB_(1968), Miami and the Siege of Chicagg_(1968),

 

Of a Fire on the Moon (1970) and The Prisoner of Sex (1971). In all these

 

 

journalistic writings or fictional journalism Norman Mailer the American
existentialist is the hero that Mailer the Novelist has been in search of.
That Mailer finally decided to make himself the hero he has been
seeking for more than a decade is not without its reasons. First of all,
when it came to the late Sixties, the hipster suggested as a possible

hero in Advertisements fOr Myself, Mailer later realized, could represent

 

only one extreme but not a viable embodiment of the existentialist phil-
osophy he later has developed into his system. And after the death of
John F. Kennedy, Mailer was forced to create a fictional possibility in
Stephen Rojack as the super-American existentialist hero of that time.
But "[with] the deaths of his candidates for heroism" as recently noted
by Laura Adams, "and with the expatriation of his fictional hero, Rojack,
Mailer in these years is coming to rely more heavily upon his own poten-
tial heroism."3 He became more politically active and in 1969 he ran for
Mayor of New York. In the meantime, Mailer centered his attention on the

war in Vietnam from Cannibals, Vietnam, to Armies.

 

Another reason for making himself the hero in the four journalistic

efforts is closely related to his existential theory of growth, trying

278

to assimilate Mailer the existentialist politician, Mailer the existen-
tialist journalist, and Mailer the existentialist celebrity in the idea
of Mailer the existentialist hero. Though Mailer did not explicitly
utter such an assimilation, his recent development of the theory of growth
certainly implies it. As he said in the 1968 Playboy interview:
I think moving from one activity to another can give mementum. If
you do it well, you can increase the energy you bring to the next
piece of work. Growth, in some curious way, I expect, depends on
being always in motion just a little bit, one way or another.
Growth is not simply going forward; it's going forward until you
have to make a delicate decision either to continue in a difficHlt
situation or to retreat and look for another way to go forward.
D. J. is positively a character signaling that Mailer's search for a hero
"is not simply going forward" but "to retreat and look for another way to
go forward." And Mailer also said in this interview "that the best way
to growth was not to write one novel after another but to move from ac-
tivity to activity. . . "5
This new development in Mailer's theory of growth is aimed both to
justify his recent political activities and his intention of turning away
from the writing of fiction. Upon the completion of his four non-fic-
tional writings, he further justifies his intention by reiterating what
he said about his Cannibals in the following manner:
Such passing books began to include man of the themes of the big
novel. On the way shorter pieces were also written for a variety
of motives and occasions, written in a general state of recogni-
tion that if one had a philosophy it was being put together in
many pieces. Still a view of life was expressed in those books
and those years.
While putting together a philosophy is one motive, having himself as the
sustained hero to voice the philosophy in these pieces is undeniably

another of his motives. As early as 1952 in his review of Riesman's

Individualism Reconsidered, Mailer already thought that the novelist plays

 

a role as important to the definition and description of society as the

279

_sociologist and scientist. As he has matured as a novelist and as he has
developed his existentialist philosophy, Mailer has come more and more to
see the importance of the artist's role in criticizing and shaping the
society.

A particular reason for making himself, similar to D. J. in his full
manhood, Mailer as the tragi-comic hero of Armies attempts to explore the
depth of his own guilt and his own courage in order to determine to what
degree he is able to speak to the society as an existential social critic.
Armies is therefore a deeply introspective and autobiographical work. As
history, the book records a single political event, the March on the Pent-
agon in October, 1967 to protest against the Vietnamese war. The work is
divided into two books. Book One is "History as a Novel: The Steps of the
Pentagon." However, Mailer explains his process at the conclusion of Book
One, saying that what started as a history of the March on the Pentagon ne-
cessarily turned into a history of himself over the four day period of the
preparations for the March and its immediate aftermath. It is the main rea-
son for his writing the history of this kind. This idea is much more clear-
ly illuminated in his review of Norman Podhoretz's Making It:

If a man is writing an accurate narrative about himself with real

names, and this narrative arises because some imbalance or pres-

sure or obsession or theme persists in dogging the man through

all his aesthetic or moral nature until he sets to work, then he

is willy-nilly caught in the act of writing into the unexplored

depths of himself, into those regions which are as mysterious to

him as other people. So he can comprehend, no, rather he can deal

with himself as a literary object, as the name of that man who

goes through his pages, only by creating himself as a literary

character, fully so much as any literary character in a work of

undisputed fiction.7
This is precisely what Mailer himself has done in Armies. By "creating

himself as a literary character. . . as any literary character" in

Armies, Mailer wrote "into the unexplored depths of himself."

280

Another point which is even more illuminating is Mailer's explana-
tion of the difficulty the writer may encounter in creating himself with
his own name as a literary character in the narrative work:

The real woe is that one is forced to examine oneself existen-

tially, perceive oneself in the act of perceiving, (but worse,

far worse--through the act of perceiving, perceiving a Self who

may manage to represent the separate warring selves by a Style).

It is necessary to voyage through the fluorescent underground of

the mind, that arena of self-consciousness where Sartre grappled

with the pour-soi and the en-soi; intellections consuming flesh,
consciousness the negation, yes, the very consumptign of being.

One is digesting one's own gut in such an endeavor.

In this case, Sartre's pour-soi is the subjective experience of the hero
while his en-soi is the objective happening of the events. For Mailer

in writing Armies, the most difficult thing is the question of how the
hero with a subjective consciousness intends to present the objective
events of the March to the Pentagon. And further, how the hero is able

to perceive what he perceived of the events is objective. This is the
necessary agonizing process the hero-narrator must go through in his pres-
entation of the events.

Mailer's existential approach is that once he has uncovered the sig-
nificance of his own personal struggles in the event, he has a perspec-
tive from which to write a history of the event itself. Mailer believes
that by examining his own reactions to his experiences he could grasp the
"mysterious character of that quintessentially American event (Armies,
p. 241)."9 But what further worries Mailer the Novelist is the "Style"
to be employed "to represent the separate warring selves." Mailer solves
this problem by playing two narrative roles. As the Historian he focuses
on what happened, when and to whom and also presents an account of the
cause and effect relationships between the people and the events in his

narrative. But in this respect he still insists on finding an appropriate

protagonist related to the event:

281

To write an intimate history of an event which places its focus
on a central figure who is not central to the event, is to in-
spire immediate questions about the competence of the historian.
Or, indeed, his honorable motive. The figure he has selected may
be convenient to him rather than critical to the history. Such
cynical remarks obviously suggest themselves in the choice of

our particular protagonist. It could be said that for this his-
torian, there is no other choice. (Armies, p. 67.)

Mailer the Novelist goes beyond those historical facts and their
relationships to suggest their moral, emotional or spiritual importance
to the people who experienced them. As the Novelist he could also seek
to manipulate the reader's emotions by adapting suspense to his narra-
tive. Mailer addresses this directly to the reader:

One of the oldest devices of the novelist--some would call it a

vice--is to bring his narrative (after many an excursion) to a

pitch of excitement where the reader no matter how cultivated is

reduced to a beast who can pant no faster than to ask "And then
what?" At which point the novelist, consummate cruel love, intro-
duces a digression, aware that the delay at this point helps to
deepen the addiction of his audience.

This, of course, was Victorian practice. Modern audience,
accustomed to the superhighways, put aside their reading at the
first annoyance and turn to the television set. 50 a modern
novelist must apologize, even apologize profusely, for daring
to leave his narrative, he must in fact absolve himself of the
charge of employing a device, he must plead necessity. (Armies,

p. 152.)

However, the Novelist, "working in secret collaboration with the Histor-
ian," sometimes makes the transition between these roles right before the
reader's eye, as he does at the beginning of Book Two: "Let us prepare
then (metaphors soon to be mixed--for the Novelist is slowing to a jog,
and the Historian is all grip on the rein) let us prepare then to see
what the history may disclose (Armies, p. 246)."

That Mailer could play such double roles of the Novelist and the
Historian is justified by Kierkegaard's proposed notion that "truth lies
in subjectivity." Accroding to Kierkegaard, the "paradoxical character
of the truth is its objective uncertainty; this uncertainty is an expres-

sion for the passionate inwardness, and this passion is precisely the

282

truth."10 In Armies, the existing individhal is of course Norman Mailer
the American existentialist. For Mailer, the reason for the Novelist
and the Historian to play the interchangeable role is that facts are
always elusive and no single impression of an event is without distor-
tion. This statement can be certainly supported by the conflicting ac-
counts given by the mass media covering the same events. So every his-
tory is finally
interior--no document can give sufficient intimation; the novel
must replace history at precisely that point where experience is
sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychic, moral, existential,
or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian is pursuing
the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcating
limits of historical inquiry. (Armies, p. 284.)
In other words, while history is factual in recording specific bits of
data, the novel, drawing as it does on the novelist's impression of the
data, is factual as well in recording as it does the truth of the in-

ternal reality of an individual mind.

The Armies of the Night begins with a scathing Time account of Mai-

 

ler's speech at the Ambassador Theater the night before the March. By
starting with this article Mailer opens war on one of his primary ene-
mies, and he shows his intention of distinguishing his book from simple
reportage by immediately dismissing Iimefs account of the events. In-
stead he will tell the reader what happened. Iime_refers to "antistar

. . . author Norman Mailer"; borrowing limefs labelling practices, Mai-
ler reverses their purpose, and uses labels throughout the work to expand
his personality by suggesting his many faces, faults, and talents. He is
thus, at various points in the book, "the Participant," "the Beast," "the
Historian," "the Novelist," "the Master of Ceremonies," "the Existential-
ist." At one point he celebrates some of his titles as D. J. did about

his voices in Vietnam. He is a:

283

Warrior, presumptive general, ex-political candidate, embattled

aging enfant terrible of the literary world, wise father of six

children, radical intellectual, existential philosopher, hard-
working author, champion of obscenity, husband of four battling
sweet wives, amiable bar drinker, and much exaggerated street

fighter, party giver, hostess insulter. (Armies, p. 153.)

All these titles may serve to clarify, but, paradoxically, also to sug-
gest the impossibility of discovering one "real" Mailer, and thus it is
impossible to say exactly what motivated him to perform various acts on
the weekend in Washington. Yet Mailer's account adds rich mood, an ac-
count of his mental struggle, ethics, and even metaphysics. His report
is much more complex, and is therefore more accurate. He constantly re-
minds the reader of how close inaccuracy lurks to the surface of any re-
port. At the party before the Ambassador Theater speech he notes that
he

ran into Paul Goodman at the bar--a shOrt sentence which contains

two errors and a misrepresentation. The assumption is that Good-

man was drinking alcohol but he was not; by report, Goodman never
took a drink. The bar, so-called, was a table with a white table-
cloth. . . . Finally he did not run into Goodman. Goodman and

Mailer. . . tended to slide about each other at a party. In fact,

they hardly knew each other. (Armies, p. 34.)

This accuracy is comic, but it hints at some roots of the press's lies.

The press fosters assumptions, misnames things in order to simplify, and
chooses words too hastily, ignoring or purposely promoting false conno-

tations.

Mailer's "scrupulously phenomenological (Armies, p. 138)" account
of himself, the event, and other participants has certainly succeeded in
making himself a tragi-comic hero of his own brand. And it is this tragi-
comic American existentialist hero who embraces all the titles in one

character. By combining his double roles, many faces and talents, Mai-

ler "the‘existential philosopher"

284

has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped
with telescopes to study--at the greatest advantage-~our own
horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes
warped, but the instruments of all sciences--history so much as
physics--are always constructed in small or large error; what
supports them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of
the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes. . . had given
some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and
the imbalance of his tower. (Armies, p. 245.)

As "the master builder of the tower," Mailer the hero tries to approach
as close to truth as the limitations of human perceptive powers permit.
The particular warpings of the telescopes and the crookedness of the
tower produce a picture of the demonstration that none of the newspaper
accounts, even those favorable to the demonstrators, could produce. For
this reason, Barry Leeds has a very high opinion of the book. Comparing

it with Barbary Shore, says Leeds, "The Armies of the Night, by contrast,

 

 

is the effective culmination of Mailer's perceptive movement towards an
assimilation of the best of his perceptions within a clear and compelling

"11 I also share Leeds' opinion about Mailer's heroic qual-

prose voice.
ities exhibited in this book:

If Mailer is often deadly serious in this book, he is also his own

comic figure. If he examines the motives of others, from hippies

to literary peers to governmental figures, he islgqually honest,
painstakingly so, about the validity of hlS own.

In Brmies, by giving a personal shape to the elements of history,
Mailer has made history as personally oriented as possible and most of
the time examines himself by analyzing the contrasts between himself and
the youth or himself and those well-known participants he both likes and
dislikes. The first part of the work outlines the themes of the psychic
struggles which Mailer experiences during the entire week-end of the
March on the Pentagon. The two battles which he is fighting within him-

self from the outset are the battle with his pervasive guilt and the

battle against his romantic egotism. He talks about guilt initially in

285

reference to his inability to fully understand the psychic characteris-
tics of the people participating in the March.

On the afternoon of October 19, 1967, Mailer the hero arrived in
Washington because he had agreed to speak that night at the Ambassador
Theater with Paul Goodman, Robert Lowell, and Dwight Macdonald. From the
start, Mailer is offended by Paul Goodman's "scientific humanism.“ Mai-
ler is upset that Goodman, a leader of youth, has tried to take guilt out
of sex, even homsexuality and onanism areausvalid forms of sexual activ-
ity as heterosexual activity. Such a position runs against Mailer's basic
assumption that guilt was the existential edge of sex. Without guilt
sex was meaningless (B59123, p. 36). Mailer further stresses the vices
of homosexuality and onanism:

Onanism and homosexuality were not, to Mailer, light vices--to

him it sometimes seemed that much of life and most of society

were designed precisely to drive men deep into onanism and homo-

sexuality; one defies such a fate by sweeping up the psychic

profit which derived from the existential assertion of yourself--

which was a way of saying that nobody was born a man; you earned

gangood provided you were good enough, bold enough. (Brmfles, p.
Here Mailer once for all clarifies his ideas on onanism and homosexuality
and reaffirms his basic American existential doctrine that nothing could
be more evil than the concepts or assumptions that obstruct one's total
assertion of his own growth as an existing individual. For Goodman "all
obstacles to the good life derived precisely from guilt: guilt which was
invariably so irrational--for it derived from the warped burden of the
past (Brmigs, p. 36)." For such rationalistic thinking, Mailer disdains

Paul Goodman.

The Prisoner of Sex, except for the ultra-conservative statement

 

that "the prime responsibility of a woman probably is to be on earth long

enough to find the best mate for herself, and conceive children who will

286

improve the species,"13 is a book that makes a plea against the techno-
logizing and totalitarianizing the sex act by women's liberationists and
their allies. Mailer abhors many of the new sexual freedoms, such as

the use of birth control devices, because they take all the dread and
guilt out of sex, and therefore technologize it. In the 1968 Playboy
interview he says, "The American liberal is programmatic about sex. . . .
When sex becomes programmatic, in walks the totalitarian."14 For Mailer,
guilt, dread, irrationality are all states of mind which oppose technol-
ogy: they must not be eliminated from the sex act.

Mailer is also particularly concerned with the youths' awareness of
guilt or their lack of it. He sees hope in the power emerging among the
youth of America. Their willingness to test themselves through drugs,
sex, and confrontation with the Establishment is examplary of the cour-
age he sees necessary to become totally human. They seem willing to face
death, too. For Mailer this means that they might be more capable of
leading a heroic life than the rest of society, and if they are, then
their power will eventually reside in a vision of life based on a per-
petual advance into the unknown, paralleled by a continual search for
the Self. However, Mailer has grave doubts about whether it is possible
and whether the youth will define themselves as they go, gathering new
energy with each courageous action. He fears that the youth have an
insufficient sense of evil to enable them to fight the forces they have
undertaken to battle. He fears, in fact, that they may deceive them-
selves about their own souls, not having a realistic understanding of
the tremendous amounts of courage they will need, and fall into the evil
themselves. For instance, he is at first delighted with the hippies

assembled for the March in the costumes from history, comics, films, but

287

he is “haunted by the nightmare that the evils of the present not only
exploited the present, but consumed the past, and gave every promise of
demolishing whole territories of the future'(BBmie§, p. 110)." Although
Mailer gives these hippies his "final allegiance," he sees them as "vil-
lains who . . . had gorged on LSD and consumed God knows what essential
marrows of history, wearing indeed the history of all eras on their back
as trophies of their gluttony (Bymies, p. 110)."

Mailer's fear is that one can be too easily tempted away from strug-
gling with the society and struggling within the self; one can too easily
"drop out." Unless the youths were sufficiently sensitive to the threat
their principles posed to the mass of Americans, particularly their prin-
ciples on drugs and sex, their political involvement might not have the

effect they wished it to have. In Miami and the Siege of Chicago, for

 

example, he says, "They did not necessarily understand how much their
simple presence hurt many good citizens in the secret velvet of the heart
--the Hippies and probably the Yippies did not quite recognize the depth
of that schizophrenia on which society is built."15 Thus Mailer fears
that a rejection by the society will simply turn them toward some kind of
emotional totalitarianism, some emotional equivalency to the existing
society. Mailer articulates his concern this way:
These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from sin,
their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds,
their innocence, their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable
indifference to waste: twenty generations of the buried hopes
perhaps engraved in their chromosomes, and now conceivably burning
like faggots in the secret inquisitional fires of LSD. It was a
devil's drug--designed by the Devil to consume the love of the
best, and leave them liver-wasted, weeds of the big city. (Armies,
p. 47.)
Mailer also fears that the youth might be coming closer to the Devil and

not God if they do not confront their intellectual and moral heritage.

288

Mailer has all these doubts and fears because he has seen the pattern of

the young revolutionary in himself. And he begins to fear that he has
fallen short and his capacity for public courageous action is already
gone. And he perceives that he is no longer the underground leader in
the city. So reflects Mailer:

For years he had envisioned himself in some final cataclysm, as

an underground leader in the city, or a guerrilla with a gun in

the hills, and had scorned the organizational aspects of revolu-

tion, the speeches, mimeograph machines, the hard dull forging

of new parties and programs, the dull maneuvering to keep power,

the intolerable obedience required before the over-all intellectual

necessities of each objective period, and had scorned it, yes, had
spit at it, and perhaps had been right, certainly had been right,
such revolutions were the womb and cradle of technology land, no
the only revolutionary truth was a gun in the hills, and that

would not be his, he would be too old by then, and too incompe-

tent, yes, too incompetent said the new modesty, and too showboat,

too lacking in essential judgment. . . . No gun in the hills, no
taste for organization, no, he was a figure-head, and therefore

he was expendable, said the new modesty--not a future leader, but

a future victim: there would be his value. (Armies, p. 94.)

For Robert Lowell, Mailer evidently could not at all become a future
leader if he had not virtually turned out to be a victim, for Lowell's
eyes expressed, "Every single bad thing I have ever heard about you is
not exaggerated (Armies, p. 54)." Toward Lowell, Mailer has mixed feel-
ings: admiration and disgust. What Mailer admires is that Robert Lowell
is the one who best understands the imperatives of self-control for the
continual struggle for the self and against the demands of the society:
Lowell maintains the reserve and dignity needed to elevate the meeting at
the theater two days before the March and capture the audience. Lowell
also understands the inadequacies of the audience and the place to deal
fully with the moral issues which the March calls forth. Yet he is upset
at Lowell's silent condemnation of him for his antics in attempting to
focus on the moral issues of the March. He is upset because he believes

that he has been true to his own style, something he thinks Lowell should

289

appreciate. Lowell has not been sufficiently sensitive to the guilt
which Mailer is laboring under and to his efforts to challenge the aud-
ience to face their inner emotions also. If he had the chance, Mailer
would challenge Lowell and ask him:
"You, Lowell, beloved poet of many, what do you know of the dirt
and the dark deliveries of the necessary? What do you know of
dignity hard-achieved, and dignity lost through innocence, and
dignity lost by sacrifice for a cause one cannot name. What do
you know about getting fat against your will, and turning into
a clown of arriviste baron when you would rather be an eagle or
a count, or rarest of all, some natural aristocrat from these
damned democratic states." (Armies, p. 54.)
The phrase "natural aristocrat from these damned democratic states" sug-
gests that Mailer feels the conflict between the idea of egalitarianism
in democracy and the special need for heroism and natural nobility in an
individual's life.
Lowell is an aristocrat by birth whereas Mailer must win his aristo-
cracy if he desires it. Personally, Mailer resists what apparently is to
him the limiting classification of being known as a Jew from a lower-

middle class family. In this book he mockingly notes that there was one
personality for himself he found absolutely insupportable--the nice Jew-
ish boy from Brooklyn (Brmies, p. 153)." He fears being regarded as aver-
age; he rebels against a feeling of modesty "because modesty was an old
family relative, he had been born to a modest family, had been a modest
boy, a modest young man (BBmies, p. 93)." The statements may appear
humorous, but Mailer seems to mean them seriously. Mailer might wish to
ignore his background, but he is always aware of it, as this book clearly
shows. The "only subject" that Mailer shares with Lowell "is that spec-
ies of perception which shows that if we are not very loyal to our unen-

durable and most exigent inner light, then some day we may burn (Armies,

p. 54)." If they are the same in this aspect, continues Mailer his

290

challenge, "how dare you condemn me! You know the diseases which inhabit
the audience in this accursed psychedelic house. How dare you scorn the
explosive I employ? (Armies, p. 54)" After such a silently bullying
challenge of Lowell, Mailer is wrenched by his jealousy and led to an-
other round of psychoanalyzing of himself:

Mailer was jealous. . . . A buried sorrow, not very attractive,

. released itself from some ducts of the heart, and Mailer

felt hot anger at how Lowell was loved and he was not, a pure

and surprising recognition of how much emotion, how much simple

and childlike bitter sorrowing emotion had been concealed from

himself for years under the manhole cover of his contempt for

bad reviews. (Armies, pp. 58-9.)
At first, the bad reviews of his books did not make him feel the sting,
"but in the subsequent pressure which, like water on a point, collected
over the decade (Armies, p. 58)," he did feel the pain, because "People
who had not read your books in fifteen years were certain they were miss-

ing nothing of merit (Armies, p. 59)." For Mailer all these bad reviews

may affect the audience's reception of him. While Lowell's grand Maitre

 

brought himself adoration and "a good standing ovation, much heartiness
in it," ”Mailer knew his own version of 93229.Mflilfié.did not compare.

Of course no one would be there to accept his version either (Bymies, p.
58)."

Robert Lowell and Paul Goodman are obviously Mailer's opponents at
the Ambassador Theater. Mailer has no "intellectual accord" with Good-
man and the Dissent crowd. While they are with their "scholarly Social-
ist minds," Mailer with "his private mixture of Marxism, Conservatism,
Nihilism, and large parts of existentialism (Bymies, p. 35)." With
Lowell, Mailer desires the love he receives and his aristocratic bearing.
In short Mailer admires and envies the very qualities and the environment

and tradition that spawn those he has been attacking for years. His

291

mixed feelings derive from the fact that he is jealous of the man but con-
demns the class. Among the literary peers who spoke on October 19, 1967
at the Theater, Dwight Macdonald was the only author, Mailer thought,
that evoked his most respect, because Mailer tells us that it was Mac-
donald who had given him the most important lessons he had ever learned
about writing:

Of all the younger American writers, Mailer was the one who had

probably been influenced most by Macdonald, not so much from the

contents of Macdonald's ideas which were always going in and out

of phase with Mailer's, but rather by the style of Macdonald's

attack. . . . Macdonald had given him an essential clue which

was: look to the feel of the phenomenon. If it feels bad, it_is

bad. Mailer could have learned this as easily from Hemingway, as

many another novelist had, but he had begun as a young ideologue

--his mind had been militant with positions fixed in the concrete,

and Macdonald's method had worked like Zen for him--at the least

it had helped to get his guns loose. (Armies, p. 37.)
If a writer is concerned with ideology, as Mailer is, it is still not
sufficient to articulate such ideology only through "the substance of
one's ideas." The better way to get at the "feel of the phenomenon," to
discover the mysteries of an event, to understand the soul of the society
and the relationship between that soul and one's own soul is through "the
style of one's attack." Good examples of this aesthetic can be found

in An American Dream and Why Are We in Vietnam?

 

 

On Friday, October 20, 1967, Mailer the hero attended and spoke to a
gathering in front of the Department of Justice Building, and "he watched
the delegation take the bag into the Department of Justice with 994 cards
contained inside. . . (BBBBBB, p. 94)." These draft cards were intended
to present to Attroney General Ramsey Clark, but Clark was not in his
office and his assistant refused them. However, right before this, Mai-
ler saw a clear difference between the students and the faculty in col-

lecting their cards. The students' were collected in "a little more than

292

a half hour while the faculty must have stood there debating with them-
selves for a long time before the decision could be reached. Mailer
visualized the moral struggle in their minds:

Unlike the students, they had not debated these matters in open

forum for months, organized, proselyted, or been overcome by arg-

ument, no, most of them had served as advisers to the students, had

counseled them, and been picked up, many of them, and brought along

by the rush of this moral stream much as a small piece of river

bank might separate from the shore and go down the line of the flood.

It must have been painful for these academics. They were older,

certainly less suited for jail, aware more precisely of how and

where their careers would be diverted or impeded, they had families

many of them, they were liberal academics, technologues, they were

being forced to abdicate from the machines they had chosen for their

life. Their decision to turn in draft cards must have come for many

in the middle of the night; for others it must have come even last

night, or as they stood here debating with themselves. Many of them

seemed to stand irresolutely near the steps for long periods, then

move up at last. (Armies, pp. 92-3.)
The passage reveals not only Mailer's sympathetic attitude toward these
faculty members but also his own drastic change in attitude. Mailer the
protagonist is no longer "the wild man in himself" and the "Romantic great
military dream" is gone as well. As stated earlier in this chapter, the
protagonist is not most of the time now savoring the revolutionary poten-
tial of men turning away from "the machine they had chosen for their
life.“ The guerrilla with the gun in the hills is no more the image he ad-
mires. Instead Mailer the hero looks inward and explores his own fears. At
this time he has "fear of the consequences this weekend in Washington, for
he had known from the beginning it could disrupt his life for a season or
more. . .(Armies, p. 93)." In other words, he is fighting with his own var-
iation of dread, the dread that comes from the uncertainty of one's role
in the actions he is witnessing.

Then Mailer makes the most open confession about his enjoyment of the
middle-class life he has earned in these years (he has made a lot of money

and established himself as one of the major American writers of the last

293

a half hour while the faculty must have stood there debating with them-
selves for a long time before the decision could be reached. Mailer
visualized the moral struggle in their minds:

Unlike the students, they had not debated these matters in open

forum for months, organized, proselyted, or been overcome by

argument, no, most of them had served as advisers to the students,

had counseled them, and been picked up, many of them, and brought

along by the rush of this moral stream much as a small peice of

fiver bank might separate from the shore and go down the line of

the flood. It must have been painful for these academics. They

were older, certainly less suited for jail, aware more precisely

of how and where their careers would be diverted or impeded, they

had families many of them, they were liberal academics, technol-

ogues, they were being forced to abdicate from the machines they

had chosen for their life. Their decision to turn in draft cards

must have come for many in the middle of the night; for others it

must have come even last night, or as they stood here debating

with themselves. Many of them seemed to stand irresolutely near

the steps for long periods, then move up at last. (Armies, pp.

92-3.)
The passage reveals not only Mailer's sympathetic attitude toward these
faculty members but also his own drastic change in attitude. Mailer the
protagonist is no longer "the wild man in himself" and the "Romantic great
military dream" is gone as well. As stated earlier in this chapter, the
protagonist is not most of the time now savoring the revolutionary poten-
tial of men turning away from "the machine they had chosen for their
life." The guerrilla with the gun in the hills is no more the image he ad-
mires. Instead Mailer the hero looks inward and explores his own fears.
At this time he has "fear of the consequences this weekend in Washington,
for he had known from the beginning it cuuld disrupt his life for a season
or mor. ... (Armies, p. 93)." In other words, he is fighting with his own
variation of dread, the dread that comes from the uncertainty of one's role
in the actions he is witnessing.

Then Mailer makes the most open confession about his enjoyment of the
middle-class life he has earned in these years (he has made a lot of money

and established himself as one of the major American writers of the last

294

decade):

He was forty-four years old, and it has taken him most of those
forty-four years to begin to be able to enjoy his pleasures which
eluded him--it was obviously no time to embark on ventures which
could eventually give one more than a few years in jail.

(Armies, p. 93.)

Mailer is ShOWing definite signs that the firebrand of Advertisements for

 

Byselfi is cooling. If he still disdains the liberalism of "liberal aca-
demic intelligentsia," he desires to remain outside the arena of ideolog-
ical dispute. As Mailer shows at the beginning of the book, it was with
reluctance that he agreed to join the peace marchers in Washington. "When
was everyone going to cut out the nonsense and get to work, do their real
work? One's literary work was the only answer to the war in Vietnam (BE?
BBBB, p. 19)." Literature, not brawls at the Pentagon, is his solution to
the perplexing and socially divisive Vietnamese War, and "Mailer wished as
the Washington weekend approached the the Washington weekend were done
(Bfmigg, p. 21)."

On Saturday, October 21, Mailer the hero attended a rally at the
Lincoln Memorial and then marched with about fifty thousand others
across the Potomac and into the vast north parking lot of the Pentagon.
One of the key reasons for him to join the March was that it is an "open
ended" political activity which fits perfectly well with his existential
politics. The goals and reasons for it are uncertain: "Politics had
again become mysterious, had begun to partake of_Mystery; that gave life
to a thought that the gods were back in human affairs (Brgies, p. 103)."
On the one hand, the speech is "improvised, impromptu, or dangerously
written": the speaker cannot predict what the outcome of his speech will
be. On the other hand, "The aesthetic of the New Left now therefore
began with the notion that the authority could not comprehend nor con-

tain nor finally manage to control any political action whose end was

295

unknown (Armies, pp. 104-5)." About the hippies, Mailer the Existen-
tialist, though very much opposed to their abuse of such dangerous drugs
as LSD, now describes them at the Pentagon with great sympathy:

The new generation believed. . . in witches, in tribal knowledge,
in orgy, and revolution. It had no respect whatsoever for the
unassailable logic of the next step: belief was reserved for the
revelatory mystery of the happening where you did not know what
was going to happen next; that was what was good about it. Their
radicalism was in their hate for the authority-—the authority was
manifest of evil to this generation. (Armies, p. 103.)

In addition to their spontaniety and anti-authoritarianism, their
New Left politics also earns Mailer's hearfelt support because

The New Left was drawing its political aesthetic from Cuba. The
revolutionary idea which the followers of Castro had induced
from their experience in the hills was that you created the rev-
olution first and learned from it, learned of what your revolu-
tion might consist and where it might go out of the intimate
truth of the way it presented itself to your experience. . .
what seemed significant here, was the idea of a revolution

which preceded ideology. (Armies, p. 104.)

In a word, the youth believed in action first and logic next. All these
ideas conspicuously reflect the fundamental principle of existentialism:
"existence precedes essence." As "a good working amateur philosopher
(Armies, p. 107)," Mailer also applies this principle to speaking and
writing. Like revolution, a good writer's style must precede fixed
ideas. Mailer thus makes a complete equation between his style and the
political event it describes:

Just as the truth of his material was revealed to a good writer

by the cutting edge of his style (he could hope his style was in

each case the most appropriate tool for the material of the ex-

perience) so a revolutionary began to uncover the nature of his

true situation by trying to ride the beast of his revolution.

The idea behind these ideas was then obviously that the future

of the revolution existed in the nerves and cells of the people

who created it and lived with it, rather than in the sanctity

of the original idea. (Armies, p. 104.)

The March is a mystery, possibly a revolution; the marchers will

discover its true nature only by participating in the event, riding the

296

"beast" of it. Mailer's style thus suited to the occasion is as flex-
ible, changing, and irreducible as the March itself. It is almost dry
and spare in the second, "Novel as History" part of the book. In the
first part it often seems overblown, almost absurd, like the "hero" it
describes. Like 0. H. Lawrence, whose work he so much admires, Mailer
is not afraid of an overstatement which might be dismissed as silly. A
very long sentence about the passing of witchery and magic from the small
towns of America almost seems like a parody of Faulkner. The sentence
tumbles together metaphors, abstractions, and examples; the punctuation
varies wildly, and there is a staccato quality almost like a loss of
breath at the end. The sentence mirrors the madness of the Vietnam war
and of its causes:

[The small town]. . . had grown out of itself again and again,

its cells traveled, worked for government, found secruity through

wars in foreign lands, and the nightmares which passed on the

winds in the old small towns now traveled on the nozzle tip of

the flame thrower, no dreams now of barbarian lusts, slaughtered

villagers, battles of blood, no, nor any need for them--technology

had driven insanity out of the wind and out of the attic, and out

of all the lost primitive places: one had to find it now wherever

fever, force, and machines could come together, in Vegas, at the

race track, in pro football, race riots for the Negro, suburban

orgies--none of it was enough-~one had to find it in Vietnam;

that was where the small town had gone to get its kicks. (Armies,

pp. 173-4.)
This sentence, which demands some reader sympathy, is a good example of
Mailer's placing existence before essence, having "the truth of his mat-
erial. . . revealed. . . by the cutting edge of his style." Obviously
he rejects linear logic in trying to explain a phenomenon like the war in
Vietnam; he does not wish to fall into the brickwork-logic trap of the
Old Left. His explanation of the war goes beyond politics and his style

encourages the reader to find the meaning with him at the same time.

And further, Mailer does not fear being wrong: to seek total correctness

297

by avoiding unusual or daring thoughts leads to technologese. The
trouble with Paul Goodman's language is that "everything he said was
right, so naturally it had to be said in a style which read like LBJ's
exercises of Upper Rhetoric (Armies, p. 115)."

By joining the March, Mailer not only finds that the open-ended
nature of the New Left's strategy and tactics corresponds with his poli-
tical and philosophical preoccupations of the last twenty years, but at
the same time Mailer, walking "in this barrage of cameras, helicopters,
TV cars, monitors, loud-speakers, and wavering buckling twisting line of
notables," perceives a new conception of himself: "the sense of America
divided on this day now liberated some undiscovered patriotism in Mai-
ler so that he felt a sharp searing love for his country in this moment
and on this day, crossing some divide in his own mind wider than the
Potomac, a love so lacerated he felt as if a marriage being torn and
children lost--never does one love so much as then. . . (Armies, p. 132)."
Even after the event is completely over, Mailer the hero still feels the
new growth in him:

Mailer knew for the first time why men in the front line of a

battle are almost always ready to die: there is a promise of some

swift transit--one's soul feels clean; as we have gathered, he

was not used much more than any other American politician, lit-

tereur, or racketeer to the sentiment that his soul was not

unclean but here walking with Lowell and Macdonald, he felt as if

he stepped through some crossing in the reaches of space between

this moment, the French Revolution, and the Civil War, as if the

ghosts of the Union Dead accompanied them now to the Bastille. . .

he was in fact in love with himself than he had thought he might

have. . . in some part of himself at least, he had grown. (Armies,

p. 132.)

But Mailer the hero must take one final step before he can under-
stand his new relationship to himself and his new relationship to his

country. He must move beyond the symbolic into the physical, the actual,

the real. For him the psychic world is only meaningful as long as it is

298

in parallel with the physical from in which to function. In this book
Mailer makes a connection between his search for his soul, the soul of
America and the soul of his wife:

He would have considered it irretrievably heavy-handed to have

made any direct correspondence between his feelings for his wife,

and the change in his feelings toward America. . . but he would
also have thought it cowardly to ignore the relation, and dis-
honest to assume that none of his wife's attractiveness (and un-
attractiveness) came from her presence so quintessentially

American. (BBBBBB, p. 193.)

Mailer is convinced that the search for love incorporates all the char-
acteristics of the search for the individual soul, and the search for

the individual soul is equivalent to the search for the soul of America.
It is in this connection between the search for love--love of self, love
of his wife and love of America--that Mailer the hero discovers the light
of his new vision.

This new vision strengthens his idea that he is "an egotist of the
most startling misproportions, outrageously and often unhappily self-
assertive, yet in command of a detachment classic in Severity. . . (BB-
mies, p. 68).“ In Kierkegaardian terms, he is the existent individual
"who is in an infinite relationship with himself and has an infinite
interest in his destiny" and at the same time "always feels himself to
be in Becoming, with a task for him."16 Since he is such an existent
individual, Mailer later in the book calls himself "a simple of a hero
and a marvel (BBmies, p. 241)." And among the groups of the protest
movements, he "can feel no sense of belonging to any of those people
(EIIEEEJ p. 83)," even though he has definite sympathy for the New Left.
As he sees "members of SANE, or Women Strike for Peace--looking about,

there were signs enough: American Friends Service Committee, CORE, W.E.B.

DuBois Clubs. . ." Mailer observes:

299

In the apocalyptic garden of hi§_revolution these sects and

groups and clubs and committees were like the rusty tin cans.

He had the impression from previous days--now so much as fif-

teen years ago, for he had not gone near a sect in years; as

quickly would he breed mosquitoes!--that the best to be said

was that they were probably like vitamins, injurious to a

healthy stomach, smelling like the storeroom of a pharmacology

company's warehouse, doubtless productive of cancer over the

long haul, but essential perhaps! to a Left forever suffering

from malnutrition. (Armies, pp. 111-12.)

Urged by the new conception of himself and also feeling himself "to
be in Becoming," Mailer the American existentialist hero desires to be
arrested: ". . . it was not his March on the Pentagon in conception or
execution. . . . His function was to be arrested-~his name was expendable
for the cause. He did not like the idea of milling about for hours while
the fine line of earlier perception (and Vision!) got mucked in the gen-
eral confusion (Armies, p. 137)." He was pleased that he was finally
being arrested for a real cause after twenty years of radical opinions.
Mailer was proud that upon the arrest the many dissimilar parts of his
life--his many ages--came together:

He felt his own age, forty-four, felt it as if he were finally

one age, not seven, felt as if he were a solid embodiment of

bone, muscle, flesh, and vested substance, rather than the will,

heart, mind, and sentiment to be a man, as if he had arrived,

as if this picayune arrest had been his Rubicon. (Armies, p. 157.)
Mailer purposely "transgressed a police line" as Ceasar crossed the
Rubicon river to initiate the war, so that he might be as heroic as
Ceasar was. Mailer proclaims in the 1968 Playboy interview that "the
West is built ultimately on one assumption--that life is heroic," like

what he said in Presidential Papers that "America was the land where

 

people still believed in heroes."17 Being arrested is one way to fulfill
his veiw of existential heroism. By using himself as the representative
"hero" he intends to create, Mailer the Novelist has virtually turned

Armies into a "song of himself." He explains his choice of himself as

300

star rather than as mere camera eye as follows:

An eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is
required, further he must be not only involved, but ambiguous
in his own proportions, a comic hero, which is to say, one can-
not happily resolve the emphasis of the category--is he finally
comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic association; or is
he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in
the coric? Or is he both at once, and all at once. (Armies,
p. 67.

Of course, Mailer himself means that his heroic qualities are "both at
once" and "all at once."

The tragi-comic hero of Brgfle§_comes to Washington to confront power.
His journey through Washington is a small "rite of passage" similar to
the ones the pioneers made. But Mailer's new vision has not blinded him
from perceiving the evil represented by the powerful forces of the Pen-
tagon. As Mailer faces at the symbolic source of all these forces, he
recapitulates what he has said about the Pentagon throughout the book:

. . . Pentagon: an enormous office building in the shape of a
fortress housed the military center of the most powerful nation
on earth, yet there was no need for guards--the proliferation
of the building itself was its own defense: assaSsination of
any high official in the edifice could serve only to augment
the power of the Pentagon; vulnerable to sabotage, that also
could work only for the fortification of its interest. High
church of the corporation, the Pentagon spoke exclusively of
mass man and his civilization; every aspect of the building
was anonymous, monotonous, massive, interchangeable. (Armies,
p. 255.)

The opening events at the Pentagon focused, appropriately for Mailer's
metaphysics, on the exorcism of hatred, evil and death from the Pentagon
and the infusion of love, God, and life. A flier passed out to those
assembled included the following:

We Freemen, of all colors of the spectrum, in the name of God. . .
do exorcise and cast out the Evil which has walled and captured
the pentacle of power and perverted its use to the need of the
total machine. . . . We are demanding that the pentacle of power
once again be used to serve the interests of God manifest in the
world as man. We are embarking on a motion which is millenial in
scope. Let this day, October 21, 1967, mark the beginning of
suprapolitics. (Armies, pp. 139-40.)

301

By a series of compromises with the Mobilization and the group dir-
ecting the March, the government however manages to dim the "revolution-
ary aesthetic (Bymies, p. 268)" and thus rob the day of any significant
drama and heroism. The Pentagon spokesman spoke "in totalitarianese,
which is to say technologese, which is to say any language which succeeds
in stripping itself of any moral content (Brmies, p. 315)." Such a lan-
guage of course leads to the deterioration of heroism and individuality,
or what Mailer the hero calls the "negative rite of passage”: "How much
must a spokesman suffer in such a way? (BBBBBB, p. 316)“ Even the govern-
ment technique of arrests is geared to this destruction of individual
acts of heroism:

The essence of that technique is to arrest at random. The

arrested hero having done nothing in particular feels like a

victim or a fool. Upon his release, his friends treat him

like a hero. But he is the sort of hero who must end by

disappointing them. (BBmies, p. 302.)

Mailer the existentialist tries to avoid feeling like either a vic-
tim or a fool on the weekend in Washington; he fights to act heroically,
following his existential "warlike credo" that "nobody was born a man;
you earned manhood provided you were good enough, bold enough" and "Mai-
ler hated to put in time with losers (BBBBBB, p. 18)." As a represent-
ative hero in Bymieg, Mailer's struggle to act heroically is a paradigm
of the March itself, and his success provides some hope that individuals
will survive to continue the fight against all the forces that produce
mass man. The hope in BBmies, because of Mailer's success, is stronger
than the hope in his preceding works. In his congratulatory review of
Bymflgs, Alfred Kazin compares Mailer's use of himself to Whitman's work:

"Whitman staked his work on finding the personal connection between sal-

vation as an artist and the salvation of his country."18 In like

302

fashion, Mailer's heroism or lack of it in BBmies_becomes a crucial fac-
tor in determining the possibility of salvation for America.

As for America, however, at a high moment on the March, Mailer feels
"some undiscovered patriotism," and, paradoxically, while considering the
might of the Pentagon, finds "some dim unawakened knowledge of the mys-
teries of America buried in these liberties to dissent--What a mysterious
country it was (B59125, pp. 132-33).“ Mailer the "amateur philosopher"
could not arrive at a definite conclusion about America's future. Amer-
ica could give birth to the "most fearsome totalitarianism the world has
ever known" or to ”a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and
wild." With a "gloomy hope" for the regeneration of a few middle class
youths, Mailer the existentialist finally invokes, "Deliver us from our
curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death,

and the dream of love give promise of sleep (Armies, p. 320)."

Of a Fire on the Moon

 

If the first March on the Pentagon, 1967, is a history-making event
significant enough for Mailer to make himself the hero in it, man's first
trip to the moon, 1969, is more so for him to project himself as "Aquar-
ius," to recast history as individual experience from his on-the-spot
report of Apollo 11, for the latter is far more portentous in world his-
tory than the former can possibly be. If the American politics and vio-

lence are challenging enough for Mailer the Existentialist in The Armies

 

of the Night to examine and define the darker motives for America's in-

 

volvement in Vietnam, the American technology and the NASA spacecraft

are even more so the chance for Aquarius the hero in Of a Fire onythe_Mppn

 

(1970) to explore motives of the same kind for the moon decision.

303

America needs the Vietnamese war, Mailer the Existentialist repeatedly

finds out in Cannibals, Vietnam and Armies, and will continue to need

 

wars as therapy for the schizophrenia at the nation's core. Vietnam and
all the future wars are predictable "so long as the future technology ex-
panded on every road of communication, and the cities and corporations
spread like cancer, the good Christian Americans needed the war or they
would lose their Christ (BBmies, p. 212)." What Aquarius has found out
as the darker motives behind the flight of Apollo 11 parallels those be-
hind the war decision in more aspects than one may expect. The enormity
of the event proves nothing but:

a meaningless journey to a dead arena in order that men could
engage in the irrational activity of designing machines which
would give birth to other machines which would travel to mean-
ingless places as if they were engaged in these collective acts
of hugely organized but ultimately pointless activity because
they had not the wit, goodness, or charity to solve their real
problems, and so would certainly destroy themselves if they did
not have a game of gargantuan dimensions for diversion, a devil-
ish entertainment, a spend-spree of resources, a sublimation,
yes, the very word, a sublimation of aggressive and intolerably
inhuman desires as if like a beast enraged with the passion of
gorging nature, we looked now to make incisions into the platinum
satellite of our lunacy, our love, and our dreams. (Fire, p.
138.)

Like The Armies of the Night, Of a Fire on the Moon is another fic-

 

 

tional journalism with author as the protagonist narrating in the third
person the historical event of man's first trip to the moon from the NASA
Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. It may appear that this book is,
thematically, another repetition of his old implacable hostility to the
technologizing of human existence. But Mailer insists this time that he
is "detached this season from the imperial demands of his ego" and there-
fore "in superb shape to study the flight of Apollo 11 to the moon (Bing,
p. 11)." I think he is mainly correct, in the sense that his philosophi-

cal scheme is in a state of constant qualification and transmutation as

304

each time the fresh information or bald fact is assimilated into his ex-
istential system. He may still attack the new development of the dehum-
anizing technology as severely as he did more than a decade ago; but he
could no longer afford to ignore its ego-shattering impact, nor could he
remain unnoticed about its heroic qualities in the test and proof of
America's national manhood. As Raymond A. Schroth points out,

The first moon voyage was seldom seriously challenged in public;

it seemed to flow naturally from the American spirit--a continu-

ation of the first voyage of Columbus, a fulfillment of God's

promise to the New Isreal, an extension of the Turner frontiers-
man's struggle with the forests and plains and the Wilsonian

battle for democracy.

Therefore in the meantime Mailer tries to convince the reader that the
radically novel challenge of his subject forced him to become "an acolyte
to technology. . . to live without his ego. . . to observe as if he were
invisible (Bire,pp.55-6)."

It took Mailer more than a decade of unswerving attack on the tech-
nocrat before he could create a hero who did more than just oppose the
excesses of the technocrat. The hipster hero was not the answer to the
excesses of the technocrat. the scientist, the military industrial mag-
nate; the hipster was a reaction to him. The truth of the hipster is the
truth of opposition. The hipster was criminal because it was the last
way to be creative in the smother and gloom of the Eisenhower years. It
is possible that Mailer knew all along that the hipster's merit was not
absolute but provisional and that his true value lay in his ability to
promote the dialectical process. Change, Mailer has repeated endlessly,
must come before creation. Faye, the first revolutionary of the instinc-
tual among Mailer's American existentialist heroes, broke through the

brick walls of security and conformity so that the new Sergius, Rojack,

and finally Aquarius could pass through. Mailer's achievement in this

305

book, even more desirable than what he did in the creation of D. J. in
Vietnam and Mailer the Existentialist in BBmies, has been to create a hero
whose dimensions of sensibility not only counterweigh the impoverishment
of a technological culture but reveal how one can move beyond the alien-
ation ofthat culture and live with contradictions disentangled if not
completely resolved. Aquarius has shown that the hipster can grow be-
yond his violence. As Mailer predicted in "White Negro," "the affirma-
tion implicit" in the hipster's denial of social restraint "is that man
would then prove to be more creative than murderous and so would not
destroy himself (BBB, p. 328)."

However, Aquarius has not gained his dimensions of sensibility with-
out a bitter struggle with his ego. He fights his disappointment and
turns the event into an experience in self-education--which comes some-

what to resemble The Education of Henry Adams, with its famous account of

 

Adams' unexpected awe before that earlier artifact of 20th-century tech-
nology, the dynamo.21 Even the three-part structure of the book bears
out the dialectical process of Aquarius' struggle and ambivalence in his

attempts to comprehend the moonshot mission. Part I, "Aquarius, could
be the thesis: Aquarius' earth-bound view of himself and his complaints
that NASA strips the romance from heroism. Part II, "Apollo," by far the
largest portion of the book, might be said the antithesis: the imagined
fact-recording version of Apollo 11 mission and the astronauts on the
moon. Part III, "The Age of Aquarius," comparatively short, is the tent-
ative synthesis that Aquarius could reasonably draw after a brief com-
parison of the Provincetown nihilists and their NASA counterparts: he
"must in some part applaud the feat and honor the astronauts because the

expedition to the moon was finally a venture which might help to disclose

the nature of the Lord and the Lucifer who warred for us (Fire, p. 412)."

306

In this sense, Of a Fire on the Moon is Mailer's best organized treatise

 

on his fully developed existential eschatology. It deserves a much ful-
ler consideration than most critics have provided.22

In Part One, as a reporter covering Apollo 11, Aquarius works back
and forth between the Houston Manned Space Center and the Cape Kennedy
launch complex attending orientations and parties, reading handouts, in-
terviewing the main figures and going to the astronauts' homes. After a
time, however, it becomes apparent that the interconnected complexities
of the event cannot be dominated intellectually. Consequently, Aquarius
begins to feel more and more inadequate; and the looser his grip on him-
self becomes, the less sense of self he has. Finally, he can only see
the lunar mission largely in terms of his own loss. Aquarius' main prob-
lem is, in waiting to witness the first attempt to put on the moon, his
persistent attempts to construct a conceptual framework with which to
both protect his sense of self-importance and to dominate his subject.
In pitting his own ego against the inhuman mechanization he notices in
almost every aspect of the NASA manned space program, Aquarius is attempt-
ing to define himself every bit as much as he is attempting to define the
moonshot. He finds that he cannot intellectually do this, because at
this stage he still suffers from "the imperial demands of his ego" and
he cannot "think about astronauts, space, space programs, and the moon,
quite free of the fact that none of these heroes, presences, and forces
were by any necessity friendly to him (Eire, pp. 11-12)."

Part of Aquarius' problem is also implicitly expressed in his atti-
tude toward Hemingway's suicide at the outset of the book. Though he
does not state it directly, Aquarius seems to wonder in giving itself

over so completely to technology, the twentieth century, like Hemingway,

307

is about to commit a kind of spiritual suicide. Certainly something
beautiful and courageous is dying as the century approaches its end:

Hemingway constituted the walls of the fort: Hemingway had
given the power to believe you could still shout down the
corridor of the hospital, live next to the breath of the
beast, accept your portion of dread each day. Now the great-
est living romantic was dead. Dread was loose. The giant
had not paid his due, and something awful was in the air.
Technology would fill the pause. Into the silences static
would enter. (Fire, p. 10.)

Heroism, romance, courage, the will to live intimately with one's fears:
these are the things which seem to Aquarius to have died with the Heming-
ways, the Monroes, the Kennedys and Kings of the Sixties. As he wan-
ders through the Manned Spacecraft Center, Aquarius feels "like a spirit
of some just-consumed essence of the past (Fire, p. 12)," which could not
catch up with the Age yet, for he senses that those outstanding human
qualities have been simply reduced by NASA technology into mathematical
formulas. For instance, those at NASA, "like real Americans. . . always
talked in technological code (Fire, p. 17)." When the astronauts are
asked what would happen if the Lem failed to reignite and lift them off
the face of the moon:

Aldrin spoke of this as a "new item” then of rendezvous with the

Command Module, which would return them to earth, of "various

contingencies that can develop," of "a wider variety of trajec-

tory conditions"--he was talking about not being able to join

up, wandering through space, lost to life in that short eternity

before they expired of hunger and thirst. Small hint of that in

these verbal formulations. Even as the Nazis and the Communists

had used to speak of mass murder as liquidation, so the astro-

nauts spoke of possible personal disasters as "contingency."

The heart of astronaut talk, was a jargon which could be easily

converted to computer programming, a language like Fortran, or

Cobol or Algol. Anti-dread formulations were the center of it,

as if words like pills were there to suppress emotional symptoms.

(Fire, p. 29.)
Thus the astronauts' language, computerized and stripped of the personal

feelings, is purely functional. One astronaut could have completed any

308

given sentence for another in their communication. From Aquarius' per-
spective, the anti-dread formulations of the astronaut's language are
symptomatic of one of technology's greatest threats. It deadens certain
elements of the human psyche while accelerates others.

Astronauts' machine-like natures are not just reflected in their
language but in their unheroic assumption of their lunar mission as well.
They insistently avoid attaching more than a technological significance
to their mission when Armstrong was asked, "Would he at least recognize
that his endeavor was equal in magnitude to Columbus' adventure?" his
answer was “Our concern has been directed mainly to doing the job." It

seems to Aquarius virtually to reply, "If not me, another, and to assert
that "there had been only one Columbus--there were ten astronauts at least
who could do the job, and hundreds of men to back them up (Fire, p. 40)."
So they are only representatives of "a collective will." Aquarius was
utterly disappointed,

he could not forgive the astronauts their resolUte avoidance of

a heroic posture. It was somehow improper for a hero to be with-

out flamboyance as if such modesty deprived his supporters of

any large pleasure in his victories. What joy might be found in

a world which would have no hope of a Hemingway? . . . it was as

if the astronauts were there to demonstrate that heroism's pre-

vious relation to romance had been highly improper--it was

technology and the absence of emotion which were the only fit

mates for the brave. (Fire, pp. 100-01.)

At NASA, Aquarius is disappointed not only at the astronauts' total
lack of heroic personality and their codified language, but also by the
contrived artificial environment. It is so artificial that it seems to
eliminate the need for all senses but the sense of sight. And also, NASA
has performed these changes on such an incredibly gargantuan scale as to
block out Aquarius' charged-up consciousness of self. The sheer size of

the thirty-six-story Saturn V Vehicle Assembly Building is intimidating:

309

The full brawn of the rocket came over him in his cavernous womb

of an immensity, this giant cathedral of a machine designed to

put together another machine which would voyage through space.

Yes, this emergence of a ship to travel the ether was no event

he could measure by any philosophy he had been able to put

together in his brain. (Fire, pp. 54-5.)
At the conclusion of Part One, with the astrOnauts already having landed
on the moon and safely begun their journey back to earth, Aquarius leaves
for Provincetown to write his account, not at all sure that he has really
understood what he has seen, but determined nevertheless, if he cannot
find the answers to his questions on the television screens at Mission
Control, to find them in himself. "The true gestalt of an event is avail-

at.“

able only to the charged-upromantic imagination acting as co-creator of

reality in a universe adapted more to the metaphor than the computer."23
Most of Part Two is not narrated from Aquarius' earth-bound point of

view, but rather from the point of view of what John Sisk has called

Aquarius charged-up imagination acting as co-creator of reality." We
may also say that it is narrated from his ubiquitous impersonal alter-
ego. At the beginning of Part Two we are told that having already seen
the mission once, we are going to see it yet again, this time from a dif-
ferent perspective, and that byrehearsing the event this second time and
perhaps a number of additional times we will learn more about what it
meant than we could have otherwise known. Thus, after a short transi-
tion, the second part of the book describes Apollo not as it was seen by
a witness-narrator situated inside the command capsule with Armstrong,
Aldrin and Collins. Now Aquarius is a narrator who has lost his ego and
has no personality; in this sense he is markedly different from the for-
mer Aquarius with frustrations, fears and preconceptions.

However, while free from self-doubts, envies and prejudices, the

narrator now also lacks Aquarius' sense of purpose--there are no ego-

310

related identity crises forcing him to answer questions. The large amount
of unselected technical data in Part Two demonstrates that Aquarius in
this part has a psychology like those of the machines he described in

Part One. He collects data not in order to construct rational explan-
ations of what has happened or is about to happen as Aquarius formerly
did. He does not distinguish between the important and the trivial. It
seems that he sees everything with an equal eye, to be just as interested
in recording the astronauts' sleeping patterns as in describing what they
do on the face of the moon. In fact, in a way the Aquarius of this part
bears a close resemblance to the astronauts themselves:

This endless preciosity of specification was necessary. In rela-

tion to their equipment, the trip was not unique, but merely

another store of information in the continuing line of missions

from the past which would lead toward expeditions in the future.

So everything was important--the malfunctions in the oxygen trans-

ducer, and the glare from the foil wrappings of the Lem, the

time it took the waste—water cloud to dispense, and the hours

they slept, the unexpected reactions of the computer. Everything

was important. After a while everything began to seem equally

important, even the crumpling of the food bag. Like narcissists,

like children, like old people, the astronauts all exhibited a

single-minded emphasis on each detail which arrived before them,

large or small. (Fire, p. 243.)

It might be said that Mailer uses the imaginary fact-recording meth-
od in this part of the book to bring the reader right into the very center
of the technologized world and dramatizing it. By doing so, Mailer demon-
strates the distinct contrast between the humane world of personal narr-
ative of Part One and the mechanical world of the fact-recording report
of Part Two. And Mailer might also intend to show that a reader is so
overburdened with technological facts that he may be in danger of for-
getting his humanistic inquiry about the astronauts' ultimate function

to the moon, but become just submerged in the objects of our rational

thought. However, Aquarius the hero warns, too, in this section that the

311

highly sophisticated electronic gear aboard Apollo may sometimes behave
as if it had a mind of its own, which defies rationalistic grasp:

If the title of our chapter is The Psychology of Machines, the

bewilderment of the reader at the notion is a hint direct to

the anxieties of technology. For if machines have psychology,

the technology is not quits with magic--technology is founded

on the confidence that magic does not exist and so machines may

be designed to perform the most extraordinary acts. It is the

premise of magic that if the same act is repeated ceremoneously

enough times, it will invoke a spirit. Or at least it will if

the conditions are appropriate. (Fire, p. 147.)

By defying the rationalistic assumptions of their makers, these machines,
rather than producing the expected results, produce just the opposite:
completely unforeseen, mystifying results.

Obviously, such an imagined fact-recording approach--a mind—without-
ego approach--is not a valid approach to understanding either the mission
or the astronauts. Further, it is unreal and dream-like. As a matter of
fact, all along with the fact-recording description in this section, there
is Aquarius' retrospective voice which constantly reminds the reader that
the state is unreal and dream-like in the astronauts' Command capsule.

If we read Part II carefully, we notice a subtle alternation between two
voices, one of them, retrospective, centered somewhat outside the event
itself, separated in time and space from the action, and the other, fact-
recording, located almost directly amidst the action. Through this al-
ternation of focus, we may sense two contrasting views of a single moment
in time:

Optics were zeroed for the night, and the crew had dinner and

prepared for sleep. Music was heard in the background. The crew

played music while eating dinner. The last chores were worked

upon. . . . The problem of automatic reacquisition of signal

was finally solved to the satisfaction of Mission Control. The

bunks and zip-in hammocks were set up. Around midnight the crew

went to sleep. They would be up in six hours. It was their last
night before the moon landing. They were obliged to wonder whe-

ther two of them would sleep tomorrow on the moon or sleep for-
ever. Yet calmly they went to sleep. . . . There are souls whose

312

health is to sleep upon the edge of profound uncertainty, men

whose greatest calm resides in the edge of danger. Who indeed

can understand the psychology of astronauts? Let us try to com-

prehend how men can be so bold yet inhabit such insulations of

cliche. As they sleep, we are forced to think again about the
mysteries of makeup in these men who are technicians and heroes,
robots and saints, adventurers and cogs of machine. Let us try

to think of astronauts. (Eire, pp. 276-77.)

In this passage we move from a highly detailed record of what the astro-
nauts are doing inside their capsule to a retrospective reflection on the
psychological implications of their actions. The first half of the pass-
age is rather specific and emotionally noncommital while the second half
is more personal and seems to be aimed at establishing an immediate con-
tact between reader and narrator, or listener and speaker. The effect is
reminiscent of a documentary film; the focus shifts from picture to voice,
from the imagined experiential context of the tale itself to the meta-
phorical context of its telling.

The retrospective voice is used to emphasize the psychological sig-
nificance of Apollo 11. Since the long middle section is located in
space, in which the protagonist Aquarius travels out into space with the
astronauts on an imaginative journey, it could best be described as a
kind of dream to be differentiated from the first section that is located
on earth. The astronauts' flight into space is mirrored by Aquarius'
flight into a dream, and the astronauts' exploration of the moon becomes
a metaphor for a similarly important exploration of Aquarius' mind.
Clearly, for Aquarius, there is a connection between the Apollo 11 space
flight and the kinds of flights men make in their dreams. By suggesting
that both dreams and space explorations serve similar purposes, Aquarius
opens up an interesting interpretive possibility. Is it possible, he

asks, that the twentieth century had made the Freud-like mistake of over-

simplifying the significance of the dreams which created the moonshot in

313

the first place? 15 the Apollo mission in fact a projection of our own
future fears and anxieties, a sort of psychic simulation by which we plot
the future trajectory of national consciousness.

Speaking of the Age itself, Aquarius points out that if we are to
learn anything from such dreams as these, we must first realize that over
the years we have become so rational, so single-mindedly devoted to the
techniques of our craft, that we have frequently forgotten the questions
we set out to answer. In the process of doing this we have lost not only
our selves, but our sense of reality as well:

There was no security. Everybody was underwater, and even the

good sons of the middle class could panic in those depths, for

if there were no surface, there was no guide. Anyone could lose

his soul. The recognition offered a sensation best described as

bottomless. So the Twentieth Century was a century which looked

to explain the psychology of the dream. The real had become

more fantastic than the imagined. And might yet possess more of

the nightmare. (Fire, p. 128.)

Clearly, then, if Americans are ever to climb back out of the topography
of their technological dreams, they must realize that their technological
dreams Bre_dreams, and that being dreams, they must be understood as
dreams are understood, not simply in terms of rational analysis alone,
but rather in terms of conceptual frameworks which take their primitive
irrational elements into account as well.

There is little doubt that Aquarius tends to think of the moonshot
as a dream. Watching Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the moon via televi-
sion in Houston, he is struck by the essential impalpability of their
images:

The television image was improving. It was never clear, never

did it look any better in quality than a print of the earliest

silent movies, but it was eloquent. Ghosts beckoned to ghosts,

and the surface of the moon looked like a ski slope at night.

Fields of a dazzling pale ran into caverns of black, and through

this field moved the ghost of Armstrong. There were moments when

one had the impression it was possible to see through him. His
image was transparent. (Fire, p. 115.)

314

Thus, the moon is the very "centrifuge of the dream (BiBe, p. 252); it
accelerates all our new ideas into "incandescent states." Yet just as
mysterious and surrealistic as the moon, is Our own moonshot, which com-
bines two of the most mysterious elements in man's experience: the mas-
tery of fire and the communication of human thought. The Saturn V, with
its command module on top, is the very essence of these mysteries; and
man's lighting a fire on the airless surface of the moon is a pardox
almost beyond analysis.

If the first section of this book constitutes one vision of the
Apollo 11 story, then clearly this second section represents a separate
vision of the moonshot, one which has the same relation to the first ver-
sion that a day's events "recaptured in a dream" have to their original
context. Moreover, the implication is that this second telling, imagined
fact-recording narration in a dream-like state, has an existential qual-
ity altogether different from that of the former telling. Rather than
focusing on the day-to-day frustrations Aquarius suffered as the narrator
of the first section, it focuses on the "more extraordinary" reality of a
dreamer's inner spaces.

At this point Aquarius the existential psychologist explains his own
version of the function of the dream. First, he says that the mind oper-
ates both consciously and unconsciously. The conscious mind, the mind in
possession of its sense of self, functions on a day by day basis arrang-
ing its perceptions in ways which are designed to gratify certain needs
and desires. It has a will, and it seeks self-satisfaction. In addition
to this conscious part of the mind there is a more mysterious, more in-
tangible, unconscious area of the mind, which acts as a kind of seismo-

graph of the psyche. The unconscious stores "varieties of practical

315

information (Fire, p. 142)" in the memory, and registers a wide range of
more or less irrational, symbolic, primitive impressions in the imagin-
ation. It is with this part of the mind, we are told, that one thinks
of such things as "the rites of barbarians in all the dark forest; we
think of witches, and sniff the communions of mood (Fire, p. 142)"; in
this part of the mind, in the "mansions, theaters, and dungeons of the
deepest unconscious. . . knowledge of a more poetic and dread-filled
nature may reside (Fire, p. 142)."

Standing midway between these two parts of the mind, acting as the
agent of the conscious will in the unconscious, is what Aquarius calls
the Navigator, which provides a sort of mediating influence. The Navi-
gator co-ordinates conscious and unconscious thought; thus he acts as a
guide and plays many roles. On the basis of whatever information is
available, this Navigator

was usually capable of piloting a man's life through everything

from the small decisions of a day to the critical dilemmas of

the age. . . . The Navigator had varieties of conscious and un-

conscious information available on request. He was, if one were

to think on him crudely, a memory bank of reference to everything
which had been learned and was still available to recall, as well
as a cerebral library of the opinions and judgments of respected
authorities outside oneself. On the basis of one's acquired
experience and those worldly guidelines one was ready to accept
from without, a future course of action could be estimated, and
large and little decisions could be taken. The Navigator was

thus the agent of the ego in the unconscious, the dispatcher at

the switch. (Fire, pp. 142-43.)

Since, according to this scheme, the Navigator is a kind of decision-
maker, one of his primary responsibilities is to create a comprehensive
vision of the world as a basis on which to make his decisions. Like a
novelist, the Navigator creates a version of the way things are. How-

ever, since events themselves are continually taking shape in unpredict-

able patterns, the Navigator is forced to keep altering his vision of

316

the world; thus he is "forever drawing up new social charts upon which
to make his calculations (BiBe, p. 143)."

One of the means by which these new charts are drawn up is by dream-
ing. "The dream," says Aquarius, "provided another sort of information
for the Navigator. It ran simulations. Perhaps they were not unlike the
simulations put into the computers in Mission Control at the Manned
Spacecraft Center (fire, p. 143)." Thus, the Navigator has three inter-
related perceptual tools at his disposal: the conscious mind, which pro-
vides the will to act; the unconscious mind, which provides vision of a
third kind "into many a situation the eyes of reality could hardly assess
(fire, p. 145)." In a sense, dreams are the Navigator's prophetic tools.
The unconscious mind notes and stores all the pieces of "extra-real in-
formation" it comes into contact with during the course of a day, and
then later that night they are "served in the dream as the ingredients of
a scenario which would look to test and explore a hundred possible ave-
nues of that subterranean future which had been offered so many curious
and sometimes threatening intimations in the previous day (fire, p. 145)."

According to this scheme, the Navigator works back and forth across
several levels of conscious and unconscious experience, creating his own
personal sense of reality as he goes. It follows that the Navigator
could, therefore, see any given event from at least three points of view
simultaneously if he chose to: in terms of its relationship to the con-
scious mind's urge toward ego-gratification, in terms of its relationship
to the unconscious mind's fantasies, and in terms of the dream's proph-
ecies--or in terms of past needs, present experiences, or possible future
predicaments. However logical or illogical this scheme might seem, it

does, Aquarius thinks, give new importance to the role of dreams in the

317

human psyche, greater importance, at any rate, than the old Freudian con-
cept of wish fulfillment gives them:

It gave dignity to the dream and to the dreamer. The dreamer
was no longer consoling himself. Rather he was exploring the
depths of his own ability to perceive crisis and react to it;
he was exploring ultimate modes of existence in sex and in
violence, in catastrophe and in death. So the real substance
of a dream was a submersion into dread. One tested the ability
of the psyche to bear anxiety as one submerged into deeper and
deeper plumbings of the unknowable until one reached a point
where the adventurer in oneself could descend no longer, panic
was present--one was exploded out of the dream. But a dangerous
shoal had at least been located. (Fire, p. 146.)

Certainly Aquarius is preoccupied throughout the book with the prob-
lem of finding some means of approaching Apollo 11 which will enable him
to gratify his own ego; the Navigator is undoubtedly a kind of guide who
directs the reader through a world which he himself has constructed in
order to reach certain conclusions about the meaning of the moonshot.
Aquarius sees that the Apollo 11 project does many of the things dreams
do;

Even to think of the dream as a set of simulations which explore

into dread is to open some obvious comparisons with the trip of

Apollo 11 to the moon. For it is in the nature of our lives to

explore for meaning not only in the duties and surprises of a

working day, but at night in the alleys of the unconscious (where

revelations of terror beyond the terror we already know suggest

the very perils of our souls), what force resides then in the

parallel thought that our voyage to the moon was finally an

exploration by the century itself into the possible consequences

of its worship of technology, as if, indeed, the literal moon

trip was a giant species of simulation to reveal some secret in

the buried tendencies of our history. (Fire, p. 146.)

The psychology of the dream is like the psychology of other forms
of dangerous exploration. To give oneself over to the dream is to jeop-
ardize one's sense ofself--particularly if the dream is a technological
one, one whose fundamental premises are built on ideas such as inter-

changeability, standardization, repetition, mechanization, and the mini-

mization of human error. Sleep is the closest thing to death in man's

318

experience, and dreams give shape to sleep; thus, in confronting one's
dreams one must necessarily confront the dread of one's annihilation.

If the dreamer keeps his nerve in the face of this dread, the act of
dreaming can be as potentially heroic as Hemingway's constant confront-
ations with death were. However, if one refuses to confront one's dread,
or refuses to admit that one is dreaming--which in a sense is the att-
itude NASA's cold rationality promotes--then there is the very real dan-
ger that one will simply become lost in one's dreams and learn nothing
from them. The essence of the dream is to learn how one will react to
one's fear; this is what gives a dream its existential meaning; this is
also what gives the dreamer his dignity. But a dream without fear is
like a life without dignity. It is destructive rather than creative;
and so the question of whether Apollo 11 is a life-giving or a life-des-

troying dream recurs throughout Of a Fire on the Moon.

 

Once we understand that Aquarius's one assumption is that the moon-
shot is in fact a dream, it then becomes extremely important to define
and separate what in the dream is potentially creative from what in it
is potentially destructive. In other words, giving up one's most fund-
amentally human quality, one's ego, is no light matter. If what one
receives in return is more important than one's sense of self, then the
loss of ego is justified; but if what one receives is not as important
as this sense of self, the loss of the ego is a tragedy. This is all
the truer when what is at stake is not simply an individual person, but
rather a whole society. The Apollo 11 dream, if it is to mean anything,
must ennoble the collective dreamer; if it does not, then collective man-
kind has entered the dream and given itself over to a sort of psychic

death, all to no purpose.

319

Aquarius suggests that a good deal of what can be decided about the
value of the Apollo 11 dream can be measured by analyzing the style with
which the dream is entered by the dreamer-~and in this case the dreamers
are of course the astronauts themselves. When Aquarius watches, as was
noted earlier, the astronauts prepare for their mission, he finds it dif-
ficult to forgive them for their stolid refusal to assume heroic propor-
tions:

The real heroism, he thought, was to understand, and because one

understood, be even more full of fear at the enormity of what

one understood, yet at that moment continue to be ready for the

feat one had decided it was essential to perform. (fire, p.

101.)

According to Aquarius, this sort of acceptance of fear was implicit in

Hemingway's bravery, as well as in the bravery of Julien Sorel when he

kissed Madame de Renal in The Red and the Black, James Dean in Rebel

 

Without a Cause, Joe Namath when he mocked the Baltimore Colts, and Cas-

 

sius Clay when he taunted Sonny Liston. Yet it seems wholly absent in
Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, almost as if the astronauts "proceeded on
the paradoxical principle that fear once deposed by knowledge would make
bravery redundant (Fire, p. 101)."

Yet if the astronauts' style is analyzed from another perspective,
it is not without humanity or heroism at all; precisely the opposite.
Seen from within the topography of the technological dream inside their
capsule, the astronauts are in the most intimate contact with the dread-
ful mysteris of death:

Yes, there was the moon before them, as visible finally as lands

of the horizon in the endless twilight nights of a northern sum-

mer, the satellite of the earth, a body mysterious beyond measure,

unique in the solar system, a moon whose properties and dimen-
sions resisted all categories of classification between planet

and satellite, that moon whose origins remained a mystery, whose

human features were shaped--no one could prove quite how they
had been shaped. . . . It was an eerie sight, eerie as a presence,

320

eerie as a strange and desert shore emerged across a dream
of sky and glassed-up surface of waters. How to row? How
to breathe? The blue and desert shore approached across the
impalpable space, cathedrals of light bent around the rim of
its edge. (Fire, pp. 250-51.)

From within their orbiting capsule, the astronauts see death on a scale
practically beyond imaginable dimension. The moon is a land of "holes
and torture pots and scars and weals and welds of molten magma (BiBe,

p. 251)," a dead land which has been "punched—out, eviscerated, quartered,
twisted, shucked, "where there are craters an inch deep, craters a mile
deep, craters so huge that the Grand Canyon could exist in one as a small
sub-crater. It is a place where one confronts one's dread, a place where
there are scoops and "pocks and cracks and scums of wrinkling on the
plain (fire, p. 252)." Altogether it is a land to put one in fear for
one's mortal soul-~even if one is an astronaut. So viewed from the
dream-like world of the journey itself, the astronauts are not mechan-
ically self-controlled as they seem to the earth-bound Aquarius. Rather,
they are three very extraordinary men, men with consuming ambition and
vision:

All astronauts were brave men and all astronauts lived with
death: landing on the moon, however, might require a special
sensibility. While a man could get killed undergoing a routine
check-out on the pod, while a man was certainly in danger going
out into space for a walk, where the crew of Apollo 8 had stepped
right over to the unknown when they had gone behind the moon,
still none of that was equal to landing on the moon! A man ready
to do that would need not nerves of steel but some sense of in-
timacy with death, conceivably some sense of death as a pale
ancestor one had met before and known for years, or failing that,
a sense of tradition so profound, a faith so great, that the

moon could reside in some outlying yard of that faith. A more
ordinary astronaut, no matter how brave, might be dislodged from
normal command of his nerve by the physical dimensions of the
event.

Finally, there had to be motivation beyond measure, some need
to succeed which would keep a man pointed to his target, locked
into his target, ready to dare the very explosion of his flesh
before he would give up his destination. It would have to be a
motivation powerful enough to take him through training, public

321

exposure, in human tension, and the dread weight of being res-
ponsible for NASA's effort even ten years. (Fire, p. 289.)

In other words, in addition to being intellectually capable of mastering
the complexities of their mission, the astronauts must have both the emo-
tional strength to bear the de-humanization forced on them by the tech-
nological world they have chosen to function in, and the spiritual
strength to perform efficiently even in the face of their own dread.
After all, the astronauts gre_heroes of a new kind. They have been able
to develop within themselves a psychology which enables them to stand
with one foot in the world of technology and the other in the world of
man; they have learned to translate human terms into mechanical terms
without suffering from the confrontations inherent in the translations.
However, it is only when the Apollo mission is thus understood in
the dream, do the conflicts between the rationalism of technology and
the anti-rationalism of the human mind come together. And it is also in
this dream that the connection has been discovered between the men on
the moon and the society which sent them there. What makes Aquarius
most outraged is "the complacent assumption that the universe was no
majestic mansion of architectonics out there between evil and nobility,
or strife on a darkling plain, but rather an ultimately benign field of
investigation. . . (Birg, pp. 101-2)." Aquarius' profoundest intuition
is of "a charged and libidinous universe (Birg, p. 201)," a universe he
compares to a complex and recalcitrant lock whose "key was metaphor
rather than measure (B133, p. 413)." As has been shown in the preceding
chapters, Mailer's position in this respect is quite different from some
of the European existentialists' who see the extra-mental world as neu-
tral, gratuitous, mindless or even antagonistic, like the forehead of

the White Whale. And his own existential cosmology has been consistently

322

evolving with the basic assumption that the universe can be the "majestic
mansion of architectonics out there between evil and nobility, or strife
on a darkling plain," surely not blank or lacking meaning. So Aquarius
in this book still aches for and craves interrelatedness, meaning in
reality. The fact that "men would now dare to walk on an ancient and
alien terrain where no life breathed and beneath the ground no bodies
were dead (fire, p. 35)" certainly stimulates Aquarius to cosmological
sepculations. At the beginning, "he hardly knew whether the Space Pro-
gram was the noblest expression of the Twentieth Century or the quintes-
sential statement of our fundamental insanity (51:2, p. 20)." Later,
the questions he poses for himself are:

God was, for instance, at war with Devil. Certainly the Devil

had a most detailed vision of existence very much opposed to

His own. In any case the war had gone on for so long that nearly

everything human was inextricably tangled. Heroism cohabited

with technology. Was the Space Program admirable or abominable?

Did God voyage out for NASA, or was the Devil our line of sight

to the stars? (fife, p. 75.)

Throughout the book Aquarius is trying to answer these questions.
However, the further one looks into Apollo 11, the more perplexing the
questions become: "like a dive into a dream, explorations of these ques-
tions. . . only open into deeper questions (B152, p. 84)." Aquarius'
feeling persists even into the later parts of the book, and near the end
we find him still unsure of whether "Apollo 11 was the noblest expression
of a technological age, or the best evidence of its utter insanity (Biyg,
p. 337)." Furthermore, at the end of the book, in perhaps the largest
explication of his belief in a God who "wrestled for the soul of man in
some greased arena with the Devil (fire, p. 411)," Aquarius sets himself

a series of questions which serve to sum up Mailer's theories and doubts

developed both in this book and in some of his preceding works:

323

. . . he had brooded again and again, on that simple conception
of God as an embattled vision which had terrified him from the
hour he first encountered the thought around one of the bends

of marijuana fifteen years ago. Every other one of his notions
had followed from that, for if God were a vision of existence

at war with other visions in the universe, and we were the
instruments of His endeavor just so much as the conflicting

cells of our body were the imperfect instrument of our own will,
then what now was the condition of God? Was He trapped in the
wound of nature, severed from our existence as completely as the
once exquisite balances of the shattered ecology? had that

vision He wished to carry across the universe depended altogether
upon human mind and flesh in sensuous communication with nature?
had the savage lived in a set of communions with the invisible
messages of nature which we had pulverized with our amplifiers?
These days Aquarius carried Frazer's Golden Bough_on long trips
by plane. (Fire, pp. 409-10.)

 

Three linked strands of belief run through all of these speculations:
First and foremost, Mailer sees the universe as process, a cosmic dia-
lectic with the final synthesis unwritten; second an existential insis-
tence on free will and beyond that--the belief that the destiny of man
and God are mutually dependent. I'The moral consequences of this," says
iailer, "are not only staggering, but they're thrilling, because moral
experience is intensified rather than diminished (BBB, p. 351)." Fin-
ally, there is a pronounced awareness of evil which is associated both
with the imperfections of men and God and the action of a powerful, wily
and insidious Devil.

Ultimately there are no truly satisfactory answers possible to any
of those questions, but in Part 111 just a provisional answer emerges
in the comparison of the dream itself to the realities Aquarius faces
upon his return to Provincetown. When he comes home to write about
Apollo 11, Aquarius cannot help but make certain comparisons between
the quality of the experience he has just witnessed and that of life in
Provincetown. At first he feels that the people he knows in Province-

town are much more spontaneous, more imaginatively alive, and in many

ways more admirable than anyone in NASA. Yet they are also more jaded,
more spiritually exhausted, more hopeless, and in some ways much more
superficial than the technicians. In Provincetown, everywhere Aquarius
looks things are dying: marriages are falling apart, his friends stay
“stoned out of the very head of sensation (Fire, p. 383)" most of the
time, they lose themselves in drunken bombast, become offensive; they
seem in some sense to be groping painfully for some means of bringing
meaning to the emptiness of their lives, or that failing, they look for
something to help them laugh at their own misery. As Aquarius thinks
about this situation, he discovers that he can distinguish between his
friends in Provincetown and the technicians in Florida and Houston only
in terms of their relative nihilism. His friends make a pathetic army:
an abominable army. A debauch. And he hated his good friend
Eddie Bonetti for this, hated him for drinking at the post.
"You've been drunk all summer," he felt like saying to him, "and
they have taken the moon." Yes, there was a wild nihilism in
his own army: the people were regurgitating the horrors of the
centuries, and into the air, while the curse reentered their
seed through every additive in every corporate food. And on the
other side, heroes or monsters, the Wasps had put their nihilism
into the laser and computer, they were out to savage or save the
rest of the world, and were they God's intended? Looking at his
drunken own, Aquarius did not know. (Fire, p. 386.)
Thus, only the directions of two sides' nihilisms differ. The techno-
logues direct their nihilism into their machines, while the artists and
writers Aquarius knows in Provincetown direct their nihilism into a vac-
uum, which is perhaps to say inwards, where it feeds on itself. No one
can say which is worse, least of all Aquarius, who after all, is writing
out of his own deSpair at the overwhelming sense of finality which per-
vades every aspect of the latter half of the twentieth century. Only

one thing is certain: the technicians at NASA have a dream, a dream which

in spite of their own soul-deadening rationality, their facelessness and

325

their worship of mechanical detail, raises them somehow beyond themselves
in a way the Provincetown bohemians do not understand.

Perhaps the most telling contrast between the Provincetown nihil-
ists and their NASA counterparts is in the ceremony with which the people
end that summer. There is a mock-burial. Some of Aquarius' friends had
bought a car for the summer, but it died before Labor Day, and as a large
festive crowd gathers, a hole is dug, elegies are read, and the useless
machine is half buried in a standing position on the beach. The image
is ironically reminiscent of Aquarius' first view of the Saturn V stand-
ing on the launching pad at Cape Kennedy; but whereas the moon rocket
was almost phallic-~suggestive of impregnation and impending birth—-the
automobile suggests precisely the opposite; sterility, and the end of
possibility. Thus, the end of the summer, the end of Aquarius' marriage,
the deaths of Hemingway, Monroe, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, the
end of heroism as Aquarius once knew it; all these are somehow implicit
in the ritual on the Provincetown beach. Yet the question persists.

Has what mankind sacrificed to journey into the technologically-inspired
dream of conquering the moon been worth it? Moreover, are the alterna-
tives to submerging the self in that dream valid?

Part of the answer occurs to Aquarius later, as he stands looking
at a piece of moon rock in Houston. Perhaps, he says, it is finally im-
possible to tell whether technology represents the death of all that is
best in mankind or the birth of some new, even more noble kind of human-
ity. But he stands before the rock, Aquarius knows that he must "in
some part applaud the feat and honor the astronauts because the expedi-
tion to the moon was finally a venture which might help to disclose the

nature of the Lord and the Lucifer who warred for us (Fire, p. 412)."

326

In other words, to reach out into mystery as NASA had done, even though
the consequences might destroy the very fabric of the world's psyche, is
preferable to singing pointless hymns to dead automobiles; because it
implies a direct confrontation with death rather than a passive, cynical
acceptance of it. And it is also because the mission does have the ir-
reducable quality of heroism which dignifies everyone connected with
Apollo 11 in spite of their individual limitations.

Just as the dream of landing a man on the moon is more important
than the mechanical dramatization of the dream, it is the idea of the
rock at the end of the book which is important, not its physical exis-
tence behind several layers of glass in Houston. The moon rock has a
distinctly mystical aura. In making this realization Aquarius becomes
once again capable of feeling the stirrings of his ego, as if having
submerging himself in the dream and then come back out of it--and hav-
ing in the dialectic process located some of the dangerous shoals of
self-annihilation--he has finally assimilated his subject and once
again discovered who he is:

He saw the lunar piece through not one glass but two, rock in a
hermetically tight glass bell on the other side of another glass
with still another hermetic seal. Yet she was not two feet away
from him, this rock to which he instinctively gave gender as she
—-and she_was gray. . . gray as a dark cinder. . . just a gray
rock with craters the size of a pin and craters the size of a
pencil point, and even craters large as a ladybug. . . and maybe
it was just the constant sore in his heart as the blood pumped
through to be cleared of love, but he liked the moon rock, and
thought-~his vanity finally unquenchable--that she liked him.
Yes. Was she very old, three billion years or more? Yet she was
young, she had just been transported here. . . there was some-
thing familiar as the ages of the bone in the sweet and modest
presence of this moon rock, modest as a newborn calf, and so he
had his sign, sentimental beyond measure, his poor dull senses
had something they could trust. . . and child of the century,
Nijinsky of ambivalence, hanging man Aquarius, four times married
and lost, moved out of MSC with the memory of the moon, new
mistress. . . and knew he could live with the thought of a visit.
(Fire, pp. 413-14.)

327

Thus the synthesis Aquarius has finally derived from his thesis and

antithesis in Of a Fire on the Moon is more than Mailer the existential-

 

ist's invocation at the end of The Armies of the Night, but rather a

 

surprising hopefulness. So long, says Aquarius, as there are mysteries
as tantalizing as the mystery in the hieroglyphics on that tiny moon
rock, so long as it remains possible for man to find himself by working
his way through his dreams, and so long as he can still seek out the met-
aphorical mistress of his own imagination, the heroic life is still pos-
sible for him to create-~even in the hermetically sealed world of tech-
nology. About this book, no one has made more laconic and judicious
remarks than Robert Lucid did in his anthology of Mailer's work to 1970,

The Long Patrol: "For years, Mailer has written of the cultural effects

 

of technology, but for the first time here, he tries to cut into the
cultural origins of technology, to illuminate it from inside. Nothing
like it has ever been attempted by a serious American writer."24 I

certainly agree with him.

8.
9.

10.

11.
12.
13.

14.
15.

16.
17.

Notes to Chapter Seven

"Like many another vain, empty, and bullying body of our time, I
have been running for President these last ten years in the privacy
of my mind, and it occurs to me that I am less close now than when
I began (BBB, p. 15).”

Norman Mailer, Existential Errands (Boston: Little, Brown and Co.,
1972), p. ix.

 

Existential Battles, p. 103.

 

Paul Carrol, "Playboy Interview," in Norman Mailer: The Man and His

 

Work, p. 261.
Ibid., p. 263.

Existential Errands, p. x.

 

Norman Mailer, "Up the Family Tree," Partisan Review, 35 (Spring
1968), p. 240.

 

Ibid., p. 241.

The Armies of the Night, p. 241. Hereafter all references will be
cited in the text.

 

H. J. Blackham, ed., Reality, Man and Existence: Essential Works
of Existentialism (NewTYork: Bantam BoOk, 1971), p. 25.

 

 

The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer, p. 249.

 

Ibid., p. 250.

Norman Mailer, The Prisoner of Sex (New York: A Signet Book, 1971),
p. 167.

 

Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work, p. 286.

 

Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicagg_(New York: A Signet
Book, 1968), p. 140.

 

Jean Wahl, A Short History of Existentialism, p. 4.

 

Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work, p. 281; Presidential Papers,
p. 39.

 

 

328

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.
24.

329

Alfred Kazin, "The Trouble He's Seen," Review of The Armies of the
Night, The New York Times Book Review, May 5, 1968, p. 1.

 

 

Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon (New York: A Signet Book,
1971), p. 138. Hereafter all references are to this edition and
will be cited in the text.

 

Raymon A. Schroth, "Mailer on the Moon," Commonweal, (May 7, 1971),
p. 216.

 

For further understanding of their similarities, see Gordon 0.
Taylor's detailed analysis, "Of Adams and Aquarius," American
Literature, XLVI (March, 1974), pp. 64-82.

 

The early book-length discussions of Mailer, such as Leeds' Ihe_
Structured Vision of Norman Mailer_and Kaufmann's Norman Mailer:
The Countdown, are too early to consider this book. None of the
recent books on Mailer, such as Poirier's Mailer (1972), Solota-
roff's Down Mailer's Way (1974) Radford's Norman Mailer: A Critical

 

 

 

 

 

Study (1975) and Adams1 Existential Battles (1976) have a full
chapter or section on this book. The only in-depth study is
Thomas Werge's essay, "An Apocalyptic Voyage: God, Satan, and the
American Tradition in Norman Mailer's Of A Fire on the Moon,"
Review of Politics, XXXIV (October, 1972), pp. 108-128. But
Werge has entirely ignored Mailer's existentialism in his essay.

 

 

 

John P. Sisk,"Aquarius Rising," Commentary, (May, 1971), p. 84.

 

Robert F. Lucid, ed., The Long Patrol: 25 Years of Writing from
the Work of Norman Mailer (New York: World'Publishing Co., 1971),
p. 699.

 

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

Conclusion: The American Existentialist

Hero in Retrospect

At the outset of his literary career, Mailer based his search for
a hero on an enquiry he made into two fundamental questions concerning
human life: Does the individual create society, by choosing the manner
of his behavior in complete spontaniety and freedom of choice? Or is
it society that creates the individual and determines his mode of
behavior? These questions are the questions that have been asked and
answered by Romanticists, American Transcendentalists, Existentialists
and Marxists. It is in answering these questions that the American
Transcendentalists are closely related to the European existentialists.
Despite the differences in their beliefs of the Absolute, both the
Transcendentalists and the existentialists by giving an affirmative
answer to the first question insist on the uniqueness and importance
of the individual, the insufficiency of science to explain the mystery
of life, and the necessity for rebellion against the tyranny of social
conventions and political domination. They all believe that human
existence has its infinite potentiality and that every individual has
the obligation to live up to the best that is in him.

It is in elaborating on his own answer to the first question that
Mailer finds himself both a Transcendentalist and existentialist. Mailer
is a Transcendentalist without Emerson's moral Optimism, for God and

330

331
the Devil are engaged in an existential war whose end result is still
unknown. Mailer is an existentialist without Sartre's feeling of the
irredeemable absurdity of one's life in the world, for he still accepts
the romantic notion that man is "more creative than murderous," that
he is "roughly more good than evil (ADV, p. 336)." If one follows the
"rebellious imperatives of the self," a better world will result even
though the world at the present appears chaotic, meaningless, hopeless.
It is on the basis of this notion Mailer has analyzed the American
heroic tradition, and he is convinced that his hero quest has its his-
torical significance. Mailer differs from European existentialists
in that he is not fully convinced that the isolated individual's
struggle with the alien forces the world around him is entirely sense-
less and tragic. Sartre's philosophy has become the most typical of
this kind of existentialism and has exerted the greatest influence
over modern literature since World War II. Mailer believes that the
Sartrean trend in America should be averted. Sartre and his followers,
"alienated beyond alienation from their unconscious," and so cut off

from its "enonnous teleological sense,I can only begin with the premise
of Sartre's Roguentin that "really there is nothing, nothing, absolutely
no reason for existing."1 Thus choice becomes meaningless, hOpeless,
and purposeless. 1

However, choice for Mailer is the most forward edge of the quest,
existential because it is a foray of the unknown strategic value in the
war between God and the Devil, yet absolutely necessary because the
alternative is entropy. Choice and movement are never purposeless

because they provide definition. Mailer believes it is crucial to

allow all thoughts, emotions, desires, fears to come to the surface.

332

And the law of life demands that “one must grow or else pay more for

“2 If society stifles an individual,

remaining the same (BB, p. 294).
smothers him in conformity, then he cannot act in any moral way. Stul-
tified by the homogenization of technological society, man's first
impulse should be to escape-~escape first, assertion of self first,
change first--then morality, then self-discipline, then harmony, com-
munity, love. This is the basic argument of "The White Negro," Mailer's
l957 essay which uses the American Negro's experience as a model of how
to retain one's individuality and ability to grow in an increasingly
totalitarian society. The hipster, or American existentialist, by
acting is at least in motion and so accumUlating a body of experience

to react to later. To be an American existentialist Mailer says, one
must be able to feel oneself-~one must know one's desires, one's rages,
one's anguish, one must be aware of the character of one's frustration
and know what would satisfy it (BBB, p. 3l5)."

Nevertheless, before Mailer was able to formulate his American
existentialist vision in the image of the "White Negro" and as he found
out that "the underlying illness of the twentieth century is the war
between being and nothing,"3 he believes that man's problem is not his

ability to choose good but his inability to choose at all. For instance,

all the characters in The Naked and the Dead, dominated by their Bad

 

Faith in one sense or another, are unable to choose. As was pointed out
in Chapter Two, Mailer's "totalitarianism" is almost exactly equivalent
to Sartre's "Bad Faith." In Mailer's search for a hero, one thing is
definitely certain: From the start, he made it very clear what kind

of character he would unequivocally reject as his ideal of a hero even

before he had had any precise idea as to what his hero would be like

333
in the future. None of the major characters in The Naked and the Dead
was meant to be a hero. They are all products of their environments,
non-heroes. Mistaking Nietzsche's "the will to power" for "the drive
for power," General Cummings is predominantly obsessed with the values
of fascism while Lieutenant Hearn, though intelligent and physically
strong, has no real conviction of any kind to support him. His tradi-
tional liberalism is an ineffective counter to the kind of reactionary
vision that Cummings represents. Mailer's increasing fascination with
Sergeant Croft might have brought him closest to emerging as the only
character capable of acting on a heroic scale. But when Mailer has
finally had Croft defeated by the hornets he steps on in his climb to
the summit of Mt. Anaka, it becomes clear again that Mailer does not
want to have anything coming of Croft's ambition just as nothing comes
of Cummings' power morality under the totalitarian system.

If Mailer's first novel is in some ways an existential novel, it
demOnstrates that the individual's pursuit of his own Soul is impossible.
In his effort to find some meanings in life which sustain him each fails
because he cannot find any pattern in society that will make sense out
of his struggle. The tightly organized military structure gives no
chance to develop oneself. The war also has a metaphoric meaning, which
is related to Mailer's idea of the war between God and the Devil, between
life and death and between creativity and destruction. But none of the
major characters in the story perceive this.

The bleak situation in Barbary Shore is no better than that of

 

The Naked and the Dead. But the scene is shifted to the native ground

 

of America in a boardinghouse in New York. In this ideology-ridden

novel, Mailer continues to develop the backgrounds for shaping his ideas

334

of an American existentialist hero and the need of him. Obviously,
Mailer at this point hadn't found a form to adequately express the
individual's search for a personal identity. Nor had his quest for a
hero yet arrived at the point at which the hero might fully emerge.

Therefore, Barbary Shore is another novel without a hero. Interwoven

 

in the sexual relationships, Guinevere is at the center. Wife of the
ex—Stalinist agent McLeod, slave of the F.B.I. man Hollingsworth,
willing recipient of Lannie's Lesbian affection, Guinevere resists
only narrator Mike Lovett's attempts at seduction. She is Mailer's
symbol for America at the socio-cultural level; her tawdriness, greed,
sexual fantasizing, and Hollywood-shaped mind are expressions of the
perversions and cultural degeneration of the country. Hollingsworth,
the symbol of the new state, is drawn in detail to expose the bureau-
cratic organizations whose goals are the same as were General Cummings's.
By understanding him, we will understand America of his time: the
apparent prosperity, tranquility, and national purposefulness is a mask
for society's real condition of apathy, confusion, and the giving over
of individual control to the nearly invisible but powerfully coercive
forces.

McLeod's answer to these coercive forces is ”revolutionary social-

ism. Yet McLeod's impotence and self-betraying character all indicate
that "the rational concepts of socialism” were inadequate for dealing
with present realities. It is Lovett the narrator who anticipates

the later hipster in a certain way, because he has to find his way in
"that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or

planned intention (BBB, p. 3l3)." But unlike the hipster, Lovett is

not endowed with that comnitment to the needs of the deeper instinctive

335
self, which Mailer later came to see as elementally important for a
combative personal stance by which one might successfully counter the
"collective condition of slow death by conformity (BBB, p. 3l2)."

However, starting with Barbary Shore for his pursuit of a hero,

 

Mailer was moving his novelistic frame of inquiry from the external to
the internal, from social and economical considerations of man and
society to an individual consideration, from uncommitted passive con-
templation to dramatic engagement as a source of growth. Most impor-
tantly, a movement is indicated--away from rationalistic determinations
of man's nature in the context of history to the more perplexing and
morally disturbing exploration of the instinctive and the unconscious.

In his third novel, The Deer Park, Mailer for the first time found a

 

fictional expression for his American existentialist vision and a
character as an acceptable existentialist hero he had been seeking. In

The Deer Park, the Desert D'Or setting is presented as the favorite

 

resort of the movie industry's more successful people, and here their
inverted work-play lives take on an even more brilliant intensity and
sharper focus through its clear and super—heated desert air, than they
would, had the setting been Hollywood itself. Mailer's shifting context
from the politics and larger historical current to sex and the flow of
individual psychic history does not mean that Mailer had given up in
this novfl all claims on public authority, for sex will be linked
existentially and seen as "intertranslatable" with other areas of life
such as art and politics.

Sergius is an immeasurably better narrator than Lovett. In the
first fifty pages of the novel, Sergius has introduced us practically

to every character in the story, providing short capsules of their

336

background and giving us carefully chosen facts of their interaction,
their intercourse-~carnal and social--while all the time establishing
the pastel-colored and plastic environment of Desert D'Or. SergiUs
pries open the affair of Elena and Eitel and get at the heart of Faye's
hipster ethics. By permitting Sergius to scan the thoughts of Eitel
and then Faye, and examine the most private aspects of their sensibili-
ties and their sex lives, Mailer is demonstrating that his view of
character, indeed his whole world picture, has changed.

What Sergius is to find through his observation of this frustrating
and finally defeated Hollywood affair (and also through his own affair
with Lulu) is, ironically, the "real" world that he was hoping this world
would be an escape from. And this is what Hollywood more generally
becomes in the novel, an image of American society at an impasse. Mailer
believes it is at the very point of stagnation that his hero of Opposi-
tion or defiance should make his first appearance. Marion Faye is the
first introduction into Mailer's fiction of a form of the hipster model
of ”The White Negro." Faye is sensitive to the self-deception and
corruption of the world in which he has grown up. He finds that the
God of modern society is evil, evil in fact because of the evil of
society. Upon his discovery of evil in such a manner, Faye decides to
commithimself to evil. He does this because he believes that society
is full of hypocrisy and therefore must be purged, as he must purge
himself of society's taint by using evil to fight evil. Here, Mailer
intends us to understand that Faye's commitment to evil, like the
hipster's, is only a means for discovering the good. It cannot be an
end in itself. And his nihilistic vision is directed both explicitly

and implicitly to damn the ideals of sensibility of which Eitel is the

337
representative. He is able to succeed in a way that Eitel does not
in purging himself of debilitating emotions.

Sergius also shows great interest in Eitel's affair because he
finds that Eitel's crisis is roughly parallel to his own and Eitel
represents "the distillate of the best values of the past by which
Sergius has been fathered and orphaned. . . ." Thus, "the question of
his potential for rebirth and self-renewal--has crucial moral signifi-
cance.“4 Yet, Eitel is in one sense another portrait by Mailer of the
failed traditional liberal hero, a victim of his own lack of commitment
and self-serving guilt. Eitel does use Elena sexually to regenerate
his lost respect for himself. But both his old debilitating habits and
his own ironic intelligence smother his desire to commit himself to
love. His cynical intelligence puts himself at such a distance from his
own instincts that he cannot feel any emotion strongly. What Sergius
has learned from Eitel is not from his action but from his theory of
life--the courage to live by the imperatives of his inStinctive self.
If Sergius is looking toward Eitel as a possible heroic model, the
foil for the values he has represented and tries in his later life to
recapture is Faye. From Faye, Sergius learns that "if one is to change
one's habits one must go back to the source of their creation" where one
"has a chance to act as he has never acted before." And "in giving
expression to the buried infant in himself" one may finally be able
"to free himself to remake a bit of his nervous system (BBB, p. 320)."

In BeeB_BarB, Sergius is gradually regenerated but through an
alternative route to the cul-de-sac which Eitel has allowed himself to
be drawn into. Sergius's regeneration is reminiscent by contrast of

Hearn's unwillingness or inability to let any ultimate issue penetrate

338
the mask of protective habits and stances he calls his integrity, which
is finally seen as a disease he cannot fight his way through. Sergius,

as he begins writing The Deer Park, discovers he is stronger, understands

 

a little more, and is able to ”to keep in some permanent form those
parts of myself which were better than me." And he is also ready to
blow "the small trumpet of (his) defiance" "against the walls of every
power that exists (BB, p. 3l8)." If Faye is the earliest version of
Mailer's Anerican existentialist hero, Sergius is the hero-in-training
in the novel but becomes a full-grown hero in the story of "The Time of
Her Time." In Beer_BgBB, Mailer's existentialist ideas, as far as they
had been developed at this time, are distributed over all its major
characters, and this includes Eitel, Elena, Sergius, and Faye. This is
so, simply because all the elements of Mailer's emerging ideology are not
yet completely absorbed into its fictional contexts. But through this
novel of transition Mailer has developed his American existentialist
vision to the stage of full maturity. 1

According to existentialists such as Kierkegaard, Heidegger and
Sartre, the indispensable starting for the fonnation of an authentic
existential personal vision or philosophy is the intuitive recognition
of the contingency, absurdity, and separateness from man of raw being,.-
for the "In-itself." Moreover, this intuitively received radical dis-
covery, while it is conscious and rational event, is not to be seen as
the result of an empirical process of measuring and weighing alternatives:
it is entirely intuitive and so also implies the validity of intuitive
perception. In certain ways Mailer's account of his change-over to a
"psychic outlaw“ is similar to the classic existential pattern of this

intuitive recognition. We know that his psychic conversion came as the

339

result of a long formative process, but Mailer makes it seem to have
taken shape suddenly for him. After Rinehart contracted to publish

The Deer Park and then broke the contract, and after eight more pub-

 

lishers refused it, Mailer began to come to a new realization of himself.

I was out of fashion and that was the score; that was all the
score; the publishing habits of the past were going to be no
help for my Deer Park. And so as the language of sentiment
would have it, something broke in me, but I do not know if it
was so much a loving heart, as a cyst of the weak, the unreal,
and the needy, and B_Bas finally open to my_anger. I turned
within my psyche I can almost believe, for I felt something
shift to murder in me. I finally had the simple sense to
understand that if I wanted my work to travel further than
others, the life of my talent depended on fighting a little
more, and looking for help a little less. But I deny the
sequence in putting it this way, for it took me years to come
to this fine point. All I felt then was that I was an outlaw,
a psychic outlaw, and I like it, I like it a good night better
than trying to be a gentleman, and with a set of emotions
accelerating one on the other, I mined down deep into the
murderous message of marijuana, the smoke of the assassins,
and for the first time in my life I knew what it was to make
your kicks. (Italics, mine.) (BBB, pp. 2l6-l7.)

 

One important difference to be noted between Mailer's account of his
own conversion to a position which he described as existential and the
view which is consistent among the European existentialists, is that
each has a different emotion accompanying the first illumination. For
the Europeans it is anguish, but for Mailer it is anger. This suggests
that in the development of his existential views he has been drawing on
more non—rational sources for their definition and validation than the
most representative European existentialists have. Moreover, as alien-
ated from certain social realities as Mailer presents himself in the
quotation, he does not seem to be making the kind of radical division
between the world of society and ultimate being, between "being-in—itself"
and "being-in-the midst—of—the-world," as did Heidegger and Sartre, as a

requisite for "authentic" existential awareness. Also worth noting here

340

is the suggestion that violence may be a source of creativity and
self—generation. This is how Mailer has all existential ideas put
together in his essay “The White Negro," as a sort of manifesto for
his Anerican existentialism. Since in Chapter Three, I made a detailed
study of this essay, I have no intention to repeat myself again. But
I do want to emphasize what Mailer himself emphasized about his American
existentialism, which is in a way significantly related to his personal
experience:

Hip is an American existentialism, profoundly different from

French existentialism because Hip is based on a mysticism of

the flesh, and its origins can be traced back into all the

undercurrents and underworlds of American life. . . . Unlike

the rationality of French existentialism, which has its points

of inauguration in the work of Sartre, Hip is an American

phenomenon, and it has come into being without an intellectual

mentor. It is a language to describe states of being which is

as yet without its philosophical dictionary. (BBB, pp. 292-93.)

Mailer further insisted that the hipster has a particular function.
The hipster may not think of himself as a political man, but to Mailer
he is the authentic revolutionary of his time:

. it may well be that the rise of the hipster represents

the first wind of a second revolution in this century, moving

not forward towards action and more rational equitable dis-

tribution, but backward towards being and the secrets of human

energy, not forward to the collectivity which was totalitarian

in the proof but backward to the nihilism of creative adven-

tures, a revolution admittedly impossible to conceive even in

its outlines. (BBB, p. 335.)
Living in a world as Mailer did in the Fifties, political action was no
longer a meaningful possibility. Mailer came to the conclusion that
neither the society he lived in nor his own tortured ego was the real
villain. The enemy was reason itself, the intellect. As he said, the
Russian Revolution failed because it was a product of the scientific

narcissism we inherited from the nineteenth century," an expression of

"rational mania that consciously could stifle instinct." A true

341
political radical had to rebel against reason in the name of the in-
stincts. Hip, by restoring us to an immediate relation with our senses,
made our actions meaningful agains.

In this connection, we can also see that existence becomes pur-
posive for the American existentialist far beyond a narrow self-
gratifying sense, for he exists to "make a better world." And also
because of the existential condition of God, the American existential-
ist's moral action is significantly heightened, for God himself is
capable of being changed by our actions. Both the last quotation and
this idea are spelled out not in the essay itself, but are added as
a postscript. Here is how Mailer later synthesized his concepts of
Hip and God:

I think Hip is particularly illumined by one notion so central

and so shattering that its religious resonances and reverbera-

tions are going to dominate this coming century. And I think
there is one single burning pinpoint of the vision in Hip:

it's that God is in danger of dying. In my limited knowledge

of theology: this never really has been expressed before. I

believe Hip conceives of Man's fate being tied up with God's

fate. God is no longer powerful. The moral consequences of

this are not only staggering, but they're thrilling, because

moral experience is intensified rather than diminished. (BBB,

pp. 350-5l.)

Of course, the real problem is whether the hipster ever exists at
all, whether he is, as Unamuno would say, a man of flesh and bone or
whether he is a bloodless abstraction. Lawrence Goldman believes that
”As Mailer defines him, the hipster does not exist, that he never
existed."5 Perhaps Mailer never expected that the hipster would exist
in life in America even though his creation was based on the American
Negro. Mailer is celebrating the hipster only as a tentative model for

speculation on the requisites of the existential personality. It is

important to see this, because not only does Mailer not intend that

342
the "hipster" model be seen as the only possible expression of his
American existentialist vision, but also that he should not be confused
with what is commonly brought to mind by the term "beat" or “beatnik"
(or the beat's successor, the hippie). Stephen Rojack, his first fully
realized fictional American existentialist hero is far from being like
either type. An American Dream_is the fictional point at which Mailer's
notions of the existential requisites for heroism are first given a
relatively complete embodiment in a single character. It is in this
novel that Rojack's actions and words become much more than rhetorical
gesture, and this is because the world he moves in is the first instance
in Mailer's fiction of a pulsing fictional embodiment of his American
existentialist conception of the conditions of modern American life.

Any study of An American Dregrg must deal with the questions of how

 

effectively Mailer has used his theories for fictional purposes and how
adequately the novel has been meant to present Rojack as the hero, and
finally how well does the;novel serve Mailer's purpose of a psychic
analysis of American life in the mid-Sixties.

For Mailer, the American dream can only be recovered by a return to
more basic, a more primitive conception of life. As he says over and
over again in The Presidential Papers, America must discover the vital-
ity at the center of existence, the sense of uncertainty about the
outcome of the struggle between life and death, the sense of the
continual dialectic between meaningfulness and absurdity. America
must, in other words, recognize that the life of its soul is in jeopardy
and that it will not be saved by economics-as-usual or politics-as-
usual. America desperately needs an existentialist hero who will

revitalize its consciousness. Kennedy came as close to any to being

343

the existentialist hero that Mailer was seeking in reality. However,
the event of the Kennedy assassination destroyed all Mailer's hope of
finding another hero in real life to lead America in Kennedy's style.
Turning to fiction, Mailer created Rojack, the hero who was the closest
image that Mailer could possibly make to resemble Kennedy in the fic-
tional world. The themes which An American Dream deals with, and it is
obvious and necessary that it deals with these if it is about the
Kennedy assassination, are death, the magic of power, the greed of
American financial wealth, the fear and cowardice of the American
Establishment, the complex interrelationships between love and hate,
the role of the police in the society, and the American hero.

As Mailer indicates in An American Dream, the American Dream is the

 

dream of power, the will to dominate. But the dream is a Faustian
dream and demands a price,namely a commitment to the Devil which means
in Mailer's metaphysics a commitment to destruction and the death of
nature and the self, especially the death of the potential of the soul
for Mailer's idea of eternal life. There is an alternative to power
over nature, however; it is power over the self, especially the psychic
power to discover God and the mysteries of the universe that come from
releasing the essential soul of man trapped within his body, trapped
there by the accumulated repressions that make for a totalitarian
society. So the novel details the conflict in America between God
and the Devil, a conflict which takes place both within each American
and within the society at large.

This novel has also absorbed Mailer's later develOpment on the con-
cept of death. Death does not mean only self-destruction and the victory

of the Devil. Death, if it is the right kind of death, can also release

344
great potential, great understanding. The fact that the Kennedy
assassination is the subject of the novel simply bears out Mailer's

understanding of violence through his fiction and non-fiction. From

 

The Naked and the Degd_on, he has recognized the violence at the core
of the American psyche; he has seen that in America violence and death
impart a magical power to those who engage in it and control it. Men
like Croft and Cummings were unable to understand the significance of
violence and death even though they felt its power. Marion Faye, in
Deer Park, on the other hand, was closer to recognizing that violence
and death catapulted man into a new dimension of time where man became
sensitive to the inner workings of his body, became alive to his soul,
came closer to understanding the interrelationships among men as well
as the fears and sickness of the society. Faye, however, saw death as
a means of eliminating life, of destroying its ugliness and viciousness.
He is the hipster pushed to the extreme, to nihilism. He is an example
that demonstrates that Mailer had himself not yet found the meaning of

death. In An American Dream, Mailer comes to understand the creative

 

power of death; he comes to argue that death gives life and that the
American preoccupation with death and violence serves as a clue to her
power and the essence of her life. Rojack has had his initiation into
life as a result of his intimate experience with death, and this
initiation becomes the essence of his psychological existence. It is
apparent from a close reading of An American Dream that Mailer has put
to work all existential ideas about the soul and the struggle between
life and death and God and the Devil in his novel. One of the successes
of the novel is that it clarifies some of his earlier theories in his

non-fiction prose work and shows how they actually work by putting

345
them in a fictional setting.
However, just as Mailer heroes are not heroes of a fixture, so are
his existential ideas not presented in a rigid system without any pos-
sibility of evolving or extending. In terms of style, Mailer has in

Bhy Are We in Vietnam? developed an organic style to reflect the further

 

evolution of his existential vision embodied in the new hero, D. J., who
is no longer the hipster of opposition or defiance but a hero who not
only fails to make contact with God but also falls inescapably into

evil. His sharp cynical intelligence reminds one of Eitel in his younger
age. D. J.'s obscene language does cut "through the pretensions of
everything he finds obscene in American society;"6 but it also reflects
that he is a hero who has been more inspired by the Devil than God. At
the end of the novel that fact that D. J. deliberately returns to camp

to fulfill the beast's will to "go forth and kill" raises the uncertain-
ty about the nature of Mailer's God, or, more significantly, about the
state that his God is in. One further wonders whether D. J. had a chance
to survive in the moral chaos that has created and resulted from the
Vietnam war.

In Why Are We in Vietnam?, Mailer has assimilated his excremental

 

vision, primarily illuminated in "The Metaphysics of the Belly," into a
fictional context. According to the new development of Mailer's vision,
if the world is really the province of the Devil, as he only suggested
in An American Dream, then it is a place filled with excrement and man
himself is anally oriented. Then it is consistent to state that man's
self-expression comes through the anus and that the spirit of the
society is found in excrement. A further connection is made between

such an excremental vision and the corporation, particularly the

346

corporation as the function of technology, and technology as the result
of an age obsessed with electricity and computers. 0. J. himself has
a mind like a computer--"my mental connections are faster than anything
afoot (Vietnam, pp. 22-23)"--and conceives of himself as the Disc Jockey
to the world, the person who communicates with mankind through elec-
tricity. Thus he has particular insight into the nature of the corpor-
ate society which is also built on electricity. His view of God is
linked with his view of corporate society, for he believes that God's
link with man is through a tiny transitorized tape recorder which He
inserts in man's anus at the beginning of each man's creation-~God is
making an "operation in the bowels of Creation (Vietnam, p. 24)." Everyi
thing which man ever thinks is recorded in God's files; then when God
wants to know about a particular person, He simply presses a button and
the recording emits one beep; this is the sum and total of the
individual and his life.

D. J., however, offers the hypothesis that his cOmmunication with
God might be based on false information, that he is, in other words,
feeding the tape records false information in order to trick God. And
he is doing this, furthermore, because he is not sure whether God is
really God or really the Devil pretending to be God. He is, if his role
is to save mankind, setting out to confuse a fake God (a God who is
really the Devil), and in doing so not presenting a recording of his
own soul but rather presenting a recording of the corporate soul of
American society. In fact D. J.'s exploration leads him to the insights
which give him his understanding of the American soul, particularly the
corporate soul. And it is the corporate soul of America which denies

God. D. J. explains this at the end of the novel. The corporate soul

347
is identified with greed, and thus with excrement and Satan. And due
to this greed, American society is kept in hatred and frustration.

But the problem which D. J. discovers about America is more com-
plex than this, for he has his own problem in his search for the soul
of God. In his search for the beauty that represents the truth of the
form of his soul, D. J. becomes acutley aware of dread and death and
the very ambiguity of God himself. The novel progresses by a series
of confrontations between D. J. and frustration and death. There is
the frustration he experiences in his love for his father, his mother,
and for Tex. There is the death he confronts with his father, who is
the agent of death as well as, at a different time, the ally in the
face of death. And there is the death that he faces with Tex in the
Brooks Range. Finally, D. J. is made impotent to judge and act
courageously, and will become a senseless killer by joining the Vietnam
war.

Mailer's answer to the question Why Are We in Vietnam? is, then,

 

that Americans are in Vietnam because of their frustration, because of
their fear of death, because they have forsaken God and sold their souls
to the Devil, because they have sublimated their natural impulses and
have as a consequence turned into killers. If D. J. is still a hero, he
will not be Mailer's American existentialist hero but a European existen-'
tial tragic hero. Richard Lehan defines the European tragic hero as one

who

does not reaffirm his identity through a tragic fall. Rather
his tragic quest usually allows no noble form of self-
fulfillment or higher return to the community, and often
leads a form of self-destruction. The fate of the hero is
really consistent with existential theories of absurdity and
society.7

348

D. J. certainly discovers “no noble form of self-fulfillment" because
he lives in a world of frustration, dread and death. Nor does he find
any higher principles upon his return to the community, because they do
not exist. The act—-going to Vietnam--which he finally takes is "a
form of self-destruction.“ D. J. is not Mailer's American existential-
ist hero in the sense that Mailer is not willing to accept the credo of
the European existentialists who, like Sisyphus, say that man achieves
his humanity by continuing to live although he knows he will be defeated.
With D. J. leaving for Vietnam, Rojack exiled to the jungles of
Central America and the hipster only as a model of abstraction, Mailer
has not created another American existentialist hero for ten years in

fiction since the time of Bhy Are We in Vietnam? (l967). With the deaths

 

of Kennedy and Hemingway, Mailer has not yet found another public fig-

ure whose life style could embody his existentialist thoughts. In these
years, Mailer the existentialist has become more and more tied up with
Mailer the artist. Instead of looking for a hero in the outside world,
Mailer has been searching for the heroic in himself. With the ideas and
concepts of a mature American existentialist and the talentand aesthetic
energy of a fully developed writer, Mailer finds himself more qualified
than ever as the hero he has been seeking for more than a whole decade.
There might be various reasons, such as financial or psychological reasons
for his change to new literary experiment. Almost all hiswritings after

the Vietnam novel, such as The Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege‘

 

 

of Chicagg, Of a Fire on the Moon, The Prisoner of Sex, and St. George

 

and the Godfather, were produced with Norman Mailer the American
existentialist as the hero. Unlike his five novels, these five journal-

istic works present various aspects of the same hero and share common

349

themes and narrative techniques.

Besides earning him the reputation of ”the best New Journalist in
America," these books bring an ample chance for Mailer to develop him-
self as the hero and apply his thoughts to the public events so that
he may have his "immediate say on contemporary matters." As to his
artistic talent displayed in his journalism, Michael L. Johnson has
thus observed:

Mailer's journalism, . . . is frequently poetic, and that

poetic quality sharpens the edge of his observations and

speculationg, giving them the vitality of a dawning con-

sciousness.
Indeed, few works of nonfiction record, as vividly as Mailer's do, what

it is really like to be present at momentous events. Certainly Of a

Fire on the Moon will someday be much more widely-known than it is

 

today, because it captures like no other contemporary report the para-
doxes inherent in a particular time, in the particular society, at the

moment men first walked on the face of the moon. Likewise, The Armies

 

of the Night will continue to be a significant sociological document,

 

an impressive, brilliantly executed work of art, and valuable record
of the creative processes by which events themselves are tranSlated
into history.

However, in his search for a hero, Mailer has both failed and
suceeded. His search has failed in the sense that it is almost en-
tirely impossible for him to find a hero in reality who might be guided
by his existentialist thoughts to avert the dehumanizing trend of
America. President Kennedy would hardly have ever noticed his Breei:

dential Papers had he not been assassinated then. The fundamental

 

problem with Mailer's existential politics lies in its impracticability

350
in a democratic country like United States. Mailer's own failure in
running for New York mayoralty also indicates the infeasibility of his
political theory in reality. Despite his genuine moral concerns and
his significant contributions to literature, Mailer has failed to come

to grips with American politics on the pragmatic level. Lawrence

Goldman's review of Presidential Papers seems to be fairly justified

 

in this sense:

The Presidential Papers contain some tough-minded unpopular
statements about American politics, and some brilliant in-
sights into the cultural process, but the book is not really
successful and Mailer ends by amusing those he wants to attack.
He appears as a harmless oddity, a kind of left wing court
jester.9

For the same reason, Mailer's proposal of the hipster as a solution to
the political and social ills is a myth, which results in no practical
functions.

Nonetheless, it should be pointed out immediately that Mailer has
indisputably succeeded in creating his existentialist heroes in fiction.
After seeing all the ineffectiveness of his attacks on American politics,
Mailer has finally come to the realization that "I'm probably better as
a writer than a man of action (BB, p. 22l)." He is exactly the kind of
writer that he thinks an American writer should be:

The writer, particularly the American writer, is not usually—-

if he is interesting--the quiet master of his craft; he is

rather a being who ventured into the jungle of his unconscious

to bring back a sense of order or a sense of chaos; he passes

through ambushes in his sleep; and if he is ambitious, he must

be ready to engage the congealed hostility of the world. If

a writer is really good enough and bold enough he will, by logic

of society, write himself out onto the end of a limb which the

world will saw off. He dOes not go necessarily to his death,

but he must dare it. (BB, p. l08.)

In other words, this writer must be a believer of Mailer's American

existentialism. In the literary world, Mailer seeks maximum growth for

351

his heroes. He has whole-heartedly applied his courage, honesty toward
his mission to create heroes of his vein. His vision of modern exis-
tence has gone far beyond the EurOpean existentialism to assert
positive values for the individual's authentic life. The truth of the
hipster is the truth of Opposition. The importance of the individual

is always emphasized as against the mass. By observing the law of
growth, the hipster is able to grow beyond his violence and become
Aquarius, an American existentialist hero with emotions mellowed and
insights further deepened. Mailer's personal theology of an embattled
God has been one of his major resources for such a change. Mailer's
art cannot be said to adhere strictly to either a EurOpean existential
or an American transcendental cosmology. His cosmology is uniquely

his own. His radical imagination has always been probing for new
metaphors for his heroes. Any judgment of Mailer's literary achieve-
ment in the future should be based on the group of heroes he has created
and the existential ideas they have presented in their respective social

contexts.

Notes to Chapter Eight

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (New York: New Directions, l964), p. ll2.

This line, which might be called the pith of Mailer's ethics, first
appeared in Deer Park, p. 294. It is repeated twice in Advertise-
ments, first in 'The White Negro" (p. 323), and then in "Advertise-
ments for Myself on the Way Out" (p. 476). Mailer reprints the
statement from Deer Park in "The Big Bite," sguire, 58(November,
l962), l34, and then reprints the column in Presidential Papers,

p. lO4.. In both of these last two instances he adds, "I think

the line is true. I think it is biologically true. And I think
its application is more ferocious in America than anywhere I know."

 

Stephen Marcus, "The Paris Review Interview," Norman Mailer: A
Collection of Critical Essays, p. 36.

 

 

Richard Foster, p. 15.

Lawrence Goldman, "The Political Vision of Norman Mailer," Studies
on the Left, 4(Summer, l964), l35.

 

John W. Aldridge, "From Vietnam to Obscenity," Norman Mailer: The
Man and His Work, p. l84.

 

 

Richard Lehan, "Existentialism in Recent American Fiction: The
Demonic Quest," in Recent American Fiction: Some Critical Views,
edited by Joseph J. Waldmeir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., l963),
p. 64.

 

Michael L. Johnson, "Journalist: Norman Mailer," in Will the Real
Norman Mailer Please Stand Up, edited by Laura Adams (Port ’
Washington, N. Y.: Kennikat Press, l974), p. l77.

 

352

A Selected Bibliography _

Primary Source;

 

Works of Norman Mailer: Editions Used in This Study
The Naked and the Dead. New York: A Signet Book, l948.

 

Barbary Shore. New York: A Signet Book, l95l.

 

The Deer Park. New York: A Berkley Medallion Book, l955, l970.

 

Advertisements for Myself. A Berkley Medallion Book, T959, l970.

 

The Presidential Papers. New York: Bantam Books, l964.

 

An American Dream. New York: A Dell Book, l965, l974.

 

Cannibals and Christians. New York: A Dell Book, l966, l967.

Bhy Are We in Vietnam?. New York: A Berkley Medallion Book, l967.

 

The Idol and the Octopus. New York: A Dell Book, l968.

The Armies of the Night. New York: A Signet Book, l968.

Miami and the Siege of Chicagg, New York: A Signet Book, l968.
Of A Fire on the Moon. New York: A Signet Book, l970.

The Prisoner of Sex. New York: A Signet Book, l97l.
Existential Errands. New York: Little, Brown, l972.

St. George and the Godfather. New York: A Signet Book, l972.

Secondary Sources

 

Books

Adams, Laura, ed. Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Bp, Port
Washington, N. Y.: Kennikat Press, T974.

353

354

. Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer. Athens,
Ohio: Ohio University Press, l975.

Aldridge, John W. In Search of Heresy, New York: McGraw-Hill, l956.

 

Time to Murder and Create. New York: David McKay Co., l966.

 

 

Barnes, H. E. An Existentialist Ethics. New York: Knopf, l967.

 

Barrett, William. Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosoph .
Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, l958, l962.

Berdyaev, Nicolas. The Fate of Man in the Modern World. Ann Arbor,
Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, l935, l963.

 

Blackham, H. J. Six Existentialist Thinkers. New York: Harper
Torchbooks, l959.

 

, ed. Reality, Man and Existence: Essential Works of Existen-
tialism. New York: Bantam Philosophy, 197l.

Braudy, Leo, ed. Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, l972.

 

Breisach, Ernst. Introduction to Modern Existentialism. New York:
Grove Press, l962.

 

Brown, Norman 0. Life against Death: The Psychoanelytical Meanigg
of History, Middletown, Conn.: Wesley University Press, l959,
. I977. '

 

 

Bryant, Jerry H. Thepren Decision: The Contemporary American Novel
and Its Intellectual Background. New York: The Free Press,’l970.

 

 

Chase, Richard. Herman Melville: A Critical Study, New York:
Macmillan Co., l949.

 

. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday Anchor Books, l957.

 

 

Flaherty, Joe. Managing Mailer. New York: Coward McCann, l969.

 

Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University
of Minnesota Press, l968.

Galloway, David D. The Absurd Hero in American Fiction. Austin, Texas
Press, l966.

 

Geismar, Maxwell. American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1958.

355

Gilmour, Robert S. and Robert 8. Lamb. Political Alienation in
Contemporary America. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975.

 

Grimsley, Ronald. Existentialist Thought. Cardiff, Wales: University
of Wales Press, l960.

 

Gross, Theodore L. The Heroic Ideal in American Literature. New
York: The Free Press, l97l.

Harper, Howard M., Jr. Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Salinger,
Mailer, Baldwin, and Updike. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University
of North CaroTina Press, l967.

 

Harris, Charles B. Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd.
New Haven, Conn.: College University Press, l97l.

 

Hassan, Ihab. Radical Innocence: Studies in Contemporary American
Novel. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, l96l.

 

. Contemporary American Literature, l945-l972: An Introduction.
New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1973.

 

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by J. Macquarrie and
E. S. Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, l962.

 

Heilbroner, Robert L. An Inquiry into the Human Prospect. New York:
Norton, l974.

 

Heinemann, F. H. Existentialism and the Modern Predicament. New York:
Harper Torchbooks, l958. ‘

 

Hicks, Granville. Literary Horizons: A Quarter Century of America
Fiction. New York: New York University Press, l970.

 

Horton, Rod W. and Herbert W. Edwards. Backgrounds of American Literary
Thought. New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, l967.

 

Hutschnecker, Arnold A. The Drive for Power. New York: Bantam Books,
l976.

 

Jaspers, Karl. The Way to Wisdom. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, l95l.

Josephson, Mary, ed. Man Alone: Alienation in Modern Society, New
York: A Laurel Edition, l973.

 

Kaufman, Arnold S. The Radical Liberal--The New Politics: Theory and
Practice. New York: A Clarion Book, l968.

Kaufmann, Donald L. Norman Mailer: The Countdown. Carbondale, Ill.:
Illinois University Press, l969.

356

Kaufmann, Walter, ed. Existentialism from DoStoevsKy to Sartre.
Cleveland and New York: Meridian, l956.

. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. New York:
Meridian Books, l965.

Kierkegaard, Soren. ConcludingyOnscientific PostscripB, Translated
by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie. Princeton, N. J.:
Princeton University Press, l94l.

. Stages on Life's Way, Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University
Press, l945.

 

Laing, R. D. The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and
Madness. New York: Tavistock,'l960.

 

Lavrin, Janko. Nietzsche: A Biographical Introduction. London:
Studio Vista Limited, l97l.

 

Leeds, Barry H. The Structure Vision of Norman Mailer. New York:
New York University Press, l969.

 

Lehan, Richard. A Dangerous Crossing: French Literary Existentialism
and the Modern American Novel. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern
Illinois University Press, l973.

 

 

Lester, Julius. Search for the New Land: History as Subjective
Brperience. New York: The Dial Press, l969.

 

Lucid, Robert F., ed. The Long Patrol: 25 Years of Writing from the
Work of Norman Mailer. New York: World Publishing, l97l.

 

 

, ed. Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work. Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, l97l.

 

Macmurray, John. The Self as Agent. New York: Humanities, l957.

 

McLuhan, Marshall. Understandihg_Media: The Extension of Man. New
York: McGraw-Hill, l964.

 

Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, l964.

 

An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, l969.

 

4

May, Rollo. Love and Will. New York: A Laurel Edition, l969, l974.

 

Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. Garden City: Doubleday, l970.

 

Molina, Fernando. Existentialism as Philosophy, Englewood Cliffs, N. J.:
Prentice-Hall, l962.

 

Olson, Robert G. An.Introduction to Existentialism. New York: Dover
Publications, l962.

 

357
Poirier, Richard. Mailer. London: William Collins Co., 1972.

Radford, Jean. Norman Mailer: A Critical Study, London: The
Macmillan Press, l975.

Reich, Wilhelm. The Function of the Orgasm. Translated by Theodore
P. Wolfe. New York: Bantam Books, l942, l967.

 

Rideout, waiter B. The Radical Novel in the United States, l900-l954.
New York: Hill and Wang, l956.

Salter, William M. Nietzsche the Thinker. New York: Frederick Ungar
Publishing Co., l968.

 

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E.
Barnes. New York: The Philosophical Library, l956.

 

Schulz, Max F. Radical Sophistication: Studies in Contemporary
Jewish/American Novelists. Athens, Ohio: Ohio UniverSity Press,
l969.

 

 

Scott, Nathan A., Jr. Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow,
Trilling. Notre Dame, Ind.: University Oi Notre Dame Press,
l973.

 

Shin, Roger L., ed. Restless Adventure: Essays on Contemporary
Expressions of Existentialism. New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, l968.

 

 

Solomon, Robert C., ed. Existentialism. New York: The Modern Library,
l974.

 

Solotaroff, Robert. Down Mailer's Wey, Urbana, Ill.: University of
Illinois Press, l974.

 

Spatz, Jonas. Hollywood in Fiction: Some Versions of the American
Myth. The Hague: Mouton, l969.

 

Stern, Alfred. Sartre: His Philosophyyend Existential Peychoanalysis.
New York: Delacorte Press, l967.

 

Tanner, Tony. City of Words; American Fiction, l950-l970. New York:
Harper and Row, l97l.

 

Wahl, Jean. A Short History of Existentialism. Translated by Forrest

Bglgiams and Stanley Maron. New York: The Philosophical Library,

Waldmeir, Joseph. American Novels of the Second World War. The Hague:
Mouton, l969.

 

Weinberg, Helen. The New Novel in America: The Kafkan Mode in Con-
temporary Fiction. Ithaca; N. Y.: CornelT'University,71970.

 

 

358

Widmar, Kingsley. The Literary Rebel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, l965.

 

Yablonsky, Lewis. Robopaths: People as MaChines. Baltimore: Penguin
Books, l972.

 

Articles

Adams, Laura. "Existential Aesthetics: Interview with Norman Mailer."
Partisan Review, XLII(l975), l92-2l4.

 

Aldridge, John W. "From Vietnam to Obscenity." Harper's Magazine,
February, l968, pp. 9l-92, l69-94.

 

Alter, Robert. "The Real and Imaginary Worlds of Norman Mailer."
Midstream, January, l969, pp. 24-35.

Bersani, Leo. "The Interpretation of Dream." Partisan Review, XXXII
(l965), 603-608.

 

Breslow, Paul. "The Hipster and the Radical." Studies on the Left,
l(Spring, l960), l02—5.

 

Brown, C. H. "Rise of the New Journalism." Current, June, l972, pp. 3l-
38.

Bryant, Jerry H. "The Last of the Social Protest Writers." Arizona
Buarterly, l9(Winter, l963), 3l5-25.

Burg, David F. "The Hero of The Naked and the Dead." Modern Fiction
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Carroll, Paul. I'Playboy Interview: Norman Mailer." Playboy, January,
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Cowan, Michael. "The Americanness of Norman Mailer," in Norman Mailer:
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Davis Robert G. "Norman Mailer and the Trap of Egotism." Story, 33
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Dickstein, Morris. "A Trip to Inner and Outer Space." New York Times
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Dupee, F. N. "The American Norman Mailer." Commentary, February, l960,
pp. l28-32.

 

Epstein, Joseph. "Norman X: The Literary Man's Cassius Clay." The New
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Finholt, Richard D. "'Otherwise How Explain?‘ Norman Mailer's New
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359

Gilman, William H. "The Heroic in American Literature: An Essay in
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"Mailer' s Lunar Bits and Pieces," Modern Fiction Studies, XVII,

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Little,Brown, 1962, pp. 246-50.

 

 

. "The Trouble He's Seen." The New York Times Book Review, May
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Mackey, Louis H. "Soren Kierkegaard: The Poetry of Inwardness, in
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"Mailer for Mayor." Time, June 13, l969, pp. 2l-22.

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Maslow, Abraham. "Psychological Data and Value Theory," in New Knowledge
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Maxwell, Robert. "Personal Reactions tora Presidential Candidate."
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Merideth, Robert. "The 45-Second Piss: A Left Critique of Norman Mailer
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Muste, John M. "Norman Mailer and John Dos Passos: The Question of
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36 -7 .

 

Newman, Paul B. "Mailer: The Jew as Existentialist." North American
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360

Oates, Joyce Carol. "Out of the Machine." Atlantic, July, l97l, pp.
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Pearce, Richard. "Norman Mailer's Bhy Are We in Vietnam?: A Radical
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Philips, William. "Writing About Sex." Partisan ReView, 24(Fall, l967),
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Rahv, Philip. "A Review on An American Dream." The New York Review of
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"Mailer and His Gods." Commonweal, 90(May 9, l969), 226—29.

 

 

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. “The Rolling Stone Interview Part II: Sympathy for the
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Tracy, R. "Review of Cannibals and Christians."' Southern Review,
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29l.

 

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