https://projectmailer.net/api.php?action=feedcontributions&feedformat=atom&user=CDucharme 2026-05-30T08:27:57Z User contributions MediaWiki 1.43.3 https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/Norman_Mailer:_Stupidity_Brings_Out_Violence_in_Me&diff=11774 2020-09-28T01:13:52Z

<p>CDucharme: Missing bold and link to an empty page</p> <hr /> <div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:&lt;span style=&quot;font-size:22px;&quot;&gt;{{BASEPAGENAME}}/&lt;/span&gt;{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}<br /> {{MR02}}<br /> {{byline |last=Grobel |first=Lawrence |abstract=A veteran interviewer of several decades explores a range of issues in his interview with Norman Mailer, including morality, personal development, the experience of being a writer, the challenges of success, fiction vs. nonfiction, American writers, and a number of other topics. |note=This interview originally appeared in ''Endangered Species: Writers Talk About Their Craft, Their Visions, Their Lives'' (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001). |url=https://prmlr.us/mr08grob}}<br /> {{dc|dc=W|hat can one say about Norman {{NM}}}} that he probably hasn’t already said about himself? I grew up on Mailer. His great journalism in ''Esquire''; his incredible gift of metaphor; his surehandedness when it came to writing about taboos, superstitions, and excrement; his knuckleheaded foray into the brave new world of women’s lib. And his supreme self-confidence, focusing so superbly on himself in a book he audaciously and precisely titled ''[[Advertisements for Myself]]'' and later in ''[[Pieces and Pontifications]]''. And, of course, his fiction, which, until recently (and even still ...) he always believed would earn him a Nobel Prize, those purely Mailer novels beginning with ''[[The Naked and the Dead]]'' when he was just 25, and then ''[[Barbary Shore]]'', ''[[The Deer Park]]'', ''[[An American Dream]]'', ''[[Why Are We in Vietnam?]]'', ''[[The Executioner’s Song]]'' (history as novel), ''[[Ancient Evenings]]'', ''[[Tough Guys Don’t Dance]]'', ''[[Harlot’s Ghost]]'', ''[[The Gospel According to the Son]]''.<br /> <br /> Of all the interviews in this book, this one needed the least editing. With Mailer, conversation flows and you can chart his own comfort and discomfort zones. I had prepared many more questions than I had time to ask and he did insist that a portion of our talk concentrate on the novel he had then wanted to promote, ''Ancient Evenings''. That wasn’t a problem for me, I read and enjoyed that long, often daring novel, and admired how he managed to get so many of his Maileresque themes into the narrative.<br /> <br /> The Brooklyn born, Harvard educated National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning larger-than-life father of eight and co-founder of the ''Village Voice'' has survived six marriages, public feuds with [[w:Gore Vidal|Gore Vidal]], [[w:William Styron|William Styron]], and leaders of the Women’s Movement, two [[w:New York City: the 51st State|New York mayoral campaigns]], and a Mike Tyson-like battle with [[w:Rip Torn|Rip Torn]] biting open a piece of the actor’s ear during the making of Mailer’s movie ''[[w:Maidstone (film)|Maidstone]]'', which he wrote and directed. He’s been at the forefront of anti-war demonstrations, he’s covered such icons as [[w:John F. Kennedy|John F. Kennedy]], [[w:Marilyn Monroe|Marilyn Monroe]], [[w:Pablo Picasso|Pablo Picasso]], [[w:Muhammad Ali|Muhammad Ali]], and Madonna, has poked his nose into the mysterious lives of [[w:Lee Harvey Oswald|Lee Harvey Oswald]] and Jesus Christ, and spent seventeen days under observation in Bellevue for [[w:Stabbing of Adele Morales by Norman Mailer|stabbing his second wife]] at a party.<br /> <br /> He’s been described as both a radical and a puritan; as pugnacious and gentle; as anti-establishment and part of the establishment; as a fool and a serious writer. His early success led to his alienation, which he has called a 20th century condition. He believed from the very start that a writer of the largest dimension can alter the nerves and marrow of a nation and was determined to be that kind of writer. He’s also called himself one of the most wicked spirits in American life. As far back as 1954 [[Lipton’s Journal|he claimed that marijuana]] was more important to him than any love affair he ever had. He called drugs a “spiritual form of gambling,” experimented with LSD and said he tasted the essence of his own death, and wrote that a man must drink until he locates the truth. As for sex, he believes that masturbation cripples and leads to insanity, considers fellatio a weakness, raises the orgasm to the ultimate act of self-realization, defines great sex as that which makes you more religious, and gives the nod to [[w:William Burroughs|William Burroughs]] for changing the course of American literature with one sentence: “I see God in my asshole in the flashbulb of orgasm.” Civilization will enter Hell, he’s suggested, when no more good novels are written.<br /> <br /> {{* * *}}<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Whenever there’s a brief introduction about you what’s usually included is that you ran for mayor of New York twice, stabbed your wife, and won two Pulitzer Prizes.<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': That’s because there was a worm of a publisher with a hard-on who put out an ad in the ''New York Times'' listing my achievements and stuck wife stabber in the middle of ’em. Since then it’s been open season.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': How would you prefer to be introduced?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': The inimitable Norman Mailer [''chuckles''].<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': You’ve said that you don’t consider yourself moral at all, but as a man who lives in an embattled relationship to morality. What do you mean by that?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Morality is always on my mind. I’m always saying to myself: Am I doing the right thing or the wrong thing? I may often decide on the latter and still go ahead and do it. But there are people who are free of morality, they just never question their acts—they’re animals.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Are you usually aware when you’re doing wrong?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': No. Wrong is often a matter of context. As that great remarker [[w:Sherwood Anderson|Sherwood Anderson]] said, “There is the truth of passion, the truth of virginity, the truth of violence, the truth of gentleness...” he goes on to list all the truths there are. There’s a moment in one’s life when it’s right to be one thing or another. But you have to get into the nature of authenticity, which is a complex philosophical matter. There’s no way to go near these questions without diving deep into philosophy.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Another thing you’ve said is that you’re so rarely true to your own code that it’s hard to maintain self-respect. What is that code?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': My code years ago used to be never take any crap from anyone. My god, I’d get into eighty fights a day if I were to take no crap at all. So you finally decide that there are probably worse things in the world than taking a little unintentional bullshit from time to time. If it comes your way without truly ill intention, then ignore it. That’s just one aspect of the code. I used to have much more of a macho code than I do now. I would take every dare that came my way. But you get to the point where finally, every time you’ve made a moral decision—that you mustn’t stand up when “The Star Spangled Banner” is being played because we’re at war in Vietnam and it’s an immoral war—you recognize after a while that you’re not going to go to any public place where there’s a chance they’ll play “The Star Spangled Banner” because it takes too much out of you sitting down when 3,000 people are standing up. So it’s a terribly demanding code. It doesn’t mean you think the code is wrong, you just decide the code is more of a man than you are.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': When you say it’s hard to maintain your self-respect, do you find that you often don’t respect yourself because of that?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Most of us have an on-going professional life where we’re not looking to walk around with a vast amount of self-respect; I just want to walk around with enough so I’m not truly depressed. Once you get too down on yourself it’s hard to do anything, it’s hard to get out of it, and there’s a pit in depression. So you try to keep enough self-respect so you’re viable.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Have you fulfilled your own idea of yourself?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Half. That half’s enough to keep you going.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': [[w:José Torres|José Torres]] said that you have the kind of immense ego of a fighter, that you don’t like people to be too comfortable when you’re around. Why?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I love to keep complacent people off balance. I can’t bear their complacency. Stupidity brings out violence in me, because I consider stupidity a choice. There’s a great difference between people who are stupid and people who are dumb. People who are dumb have been injured and there’s something soft and tender about their brain. If it’s permanent, it’s touching, it’s pathetic. People who are stupid made one wise decision in their lives, because if you’re stupid and you remain stupid, people have to come to you, have to deal with you; you’re the center of a great many energy transactions that you haven’t earned. If you can take the abuse, it’s a way of life. But it’s a way of life that poisons everything around you. So stupid people bring out my most unpleasant reactions and emotions. I will needle stupid people to the best of my ability.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Are there a lot of stupid writers?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Most writers are stupid at their level. You can be one of the world’s greatest writers and still be stupid in that you’re not as good as you want to be. I’m sure [[w:Dostoevsky|Dostoevsky]] thought himself stupid because he wasn’t able to write the Life of the Great Sinner. And that probably was an act of cowardice.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Do you, then, like to needle writers?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Less than I used to, because when I was younger it was a great deal of fun giving them a hard time. But I’ve recognized over the years that we may be an endangered species, so I’m a little gentler with other writers now.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': How old were you when you started writing?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Seven or eight. Two short stories. Then I wrote a really short novel about going to the moon, or Mars, when I was eleven. I had a genial, mad scientist on this spaceship called Dr. Hoor. It was a takeoff on Buck Rogers, Dr. Huer. I didn’t write again until I got to Harvard.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Did your mother save those early writings?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Yeah, yeah. It’s a wonder my mother didn’t save my fingernails.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': What kind of woman is your mother? There are those who say that the foundation of your ego is really based upon your mother. Someone made a comment that of all your wives, the real Mrs. Mailer is your mother.<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': The person who made that comment is an ex-wife, and she was looking to make a rotten remark. No, I never wanted to be married to my mother. She’s fine as a mother, but I wouldn’t have wanted her as a wife because she’s a very opinionated woman. Strong minded and narrow minded. We’ve had many arguments over the years. I got one thing from her that not everybody gets from their mothers: I had an undivided, uncritical loyalty. It kept on, looking back on it, to almost comical proportions. To this day, if I were to shoot up some housing development with a tommy gun and slaughter twenty people and they came to my mother with this news, she would say: “What could they have possibly done to Norman to make him act that way?” In that sense there was this unquestioning loyalty and it does give you an ego source. It’s a mother-fed ego, which produces all kinds of problems when you get out in the world and start knocking around. Half the Jewish men on earth suffer and are benefited by that kind of ego that they get from their mothers.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': And what did you get from your father?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': He was a classy gent and a bit of a gambler. He was a dapper fellow with marvelous manners. He had trouble with jobs because he was a dreamer. He was a bit, not much, of a writer. When he’d write me a letter he’d spend eight pages of a twelve-page letter telling me about his difficulty in writing to his son who was a writer. That sort of thing. Terribly courtly man. Exact opposite of my mother.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': You didn’t enjoy high school and felt deprived for thirty years afterwards. Why was high school so bad for you?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': High school’s that place, that country, where you get laid for the first time; you have marvelous memories and you go around with a girl, you go to the prom, dance with her. I went to a boy’s high school, there were no girls there. I was a year-and-a-half ahead of my class, as far as age went. I graduated when I was sixteen-and-a-half. So I didn’t have a high school life and I think it is a form of deprivation. If I’d had a happier high school life I might not have been a writer, so you take what you get.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Were you competitive as a teenager?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Moderately competitive, not highly. I wasn’t that good in anything. I never sunk to ''[[w:Marty (film)|Marty]]''’s level—us dogs must stick together—but I was always looking for some girl to say, “You’re fantastic, you’re wonderful, you’re marvelous.” They never did.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': When did girls start telling you that?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Not until I was in college and writing. And it wasn’t that dramatic. Probably after ''The Naked and the Dead'' came out is when it started. <br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': You achieved huge success at 25 with that novel. Did you mishandle it?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Yeah, but I don’t brood on it. There’s no way in the world I ever could have handled it well. If you were to be made manager of a big league baseball team tomorrow, you wouldn’t expect to do that well for a while, would you? It would be almost impossible; you’d have to make huge errors. I went from obscurity into being a well-known author overnight. I wasn’t even an average 25-year-old when it happened.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': In describing how you came to know the officers you wrote about in ''The Naked and the Dead'', you said you generally operate on hate, which is the best aid to analysis. That still hold?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': We can get into that, but it’s tricky. If you feel the kind of hate that just burns a red haze in front of your eyes, you’ll do anything. If you’ve got a quiet anger—that is, without getting pious or pompous, a righteous anger—you feel that something is unjust in the scheme of things, that can fuel a lot of very good writing. In fact, most good writing is done with a critical edge. There are many more good critics around than there are good fiction writers. The reason is that a critic can get into something he doesn’t like and what someone else is doing and he can do it with a firm sense of self-righteousness. Which is why critics are keeping literary standards alive. And they can write well, so anger definitely is a tool; it’s that grindstone that just sharpens the cutting edge or your instrument. But too much anger just wipes you out. Since you can’t really control it, to keep that nice balance, a lot of it is luck. When you get in a period of your life where you’re full of energy and you’ve got an anger that’s usable, then you can write well. I was very angry at the Army when I got out. And that anger was immensely useful for writing ''The Naked and the Dead'', because it wasn’t just a crazy anger. It was a true anger. The book is true and was kind of funny as a result. It had its separation from what was going on. I also had the good literary instinct to pick on officers even though I hated officers. There couldn’t have been a simpler enlisted man than I was. I just hated all officers when I was in the Army. But by the time I got out I had enough sense to pick an officer who was halfway sympathetic, and that kept the book from being a parody. You can never do good work in writing if the hate takes over, it’s gotta be balanced by irony, at least. Or detachment.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': After that initial success, did you feel that the critics were going to be out to get you for the next few books, or do you feel the criticism of those books were deserved?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I’ve always been an optimist. I had no idea that they were waiting for the second book. I used to joke about it, “Well, I guess the reviews won’t be as good as ''The Naked and the Dead'',” shifting uncomfortably as I just did. It gave me a huge reputation I didn’t know what to do with. It was only three years later when I began to realize what it is to lose your reputation—not to be taken seriously. I began to sense that people were saying, “Poor Norman, he wrote one book, ''The Naked and the Dead'', and he’ll never write another like it.” Then my true anger began to come out.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Did that anger stay with you throughout your next novel, ''The Deer Park'', or did it last until your next big success, which was with nonfiction?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': That anger stayed with me for many years. It was all uphill after the first book. I wrote ''The Deer Park'', which was a damn good book, one of my two or three best novels, and that got slaughtered. There were eighteen major reviews at that time, seven were favorable, eleven unfavorable—that’s enough so you don’t forget.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Did all that early criticism propel you to write more and more?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I wasn’t prolific in those years. My powers to be prolific are in direct response to needing money. [[w:Balzac|Balzac]] was immensely prolific. [[w:Émile Zola|Zola]] was. [[w:Dickens|Dickens]]. They earned their living. It helps if you have to earn your living from your pen; you discover that you can push yourself. It’s analogous to what athletes do very often, where they’ll go through hideous procedures, they’ll eat steroids in order to get more strength in their muscles; they’re into all sorts of things that are, ultimately, damaging, not only to their bodies but to their souls. But they’ll do it in order to set records, because they’ve gotten into a set where they truly want to break that old record, whether it’s theirs or someone else’s. We do the same thing as writers. You can force yourself to write much more than you want to write. And yet the writing will not necessarily deteriorate. People think you’re going to end up a bad writer if you do that. You won’t end up a bad writer, you may end up with a bad liver, or with a shortened life, but you go for transcendence too. Sometimes working much harder than one wants to work can liberate energy. It doesn’t always defeat it.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Many critics consider you a better nonfiction than fiction writer.<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': They could be right, they could be wrong. I couldn’t care less. I think that I’m good at fiction, but there’s no reason they have to share my opinion. The only important piece of nonfiction that I wrote was ''[[The Armies of the Night]]''. ''[[Miami and the Siege of Chicago]]'' is a good piece of reportage. ''[[Of a Fire on the Moon]]'' is a very good book. ''[[Marilyn]]'' is a good biography, but tainted to a degree. Where’s all the great nonfiction? Mohammed Ali is interesting. The novels are much better. The critics very often have these opinions but they don’t stop and make a count. You need a body count on books.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Which of your books do you think you’ll be remembered for?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I can go through them in order. ''The Naked and the Dead'', ''The Deer Park'', ''An American Dream'', ''The Armies of the Night'', ''Marilyn'', ''Why Are We In Vietnam?'', ''The Executioner’s Song'', and ''Ancient Evenings''. Those will probably be the ones.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Is it true you need to make $350,000 a year just to break even? <br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': That’s right, yes. With inflation the figure’s gone from $200,000 to $350,000 over the last ten years.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Do you consider yourself a rich man?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': No, I’m certainly not. I live on a reasonable scale. I own my own apartment and a car, but that’s all. I don’t have houses. Money’s always a problem; we really live from month to month.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': In the past you looked forward to writing about the inner states of men like Hitler and Napoleon, Lenin and Castro. Yet you wound up with Marilyn Monroe, Mohammed Ali, Gary Gilmore. What happened along the way?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': How about Ramsey II? He’s kind of the equal of Alexander, Hitler and Napoleon. He’s a man of immense proportions who saw himself as a god. I could still write about Napoleon if I was willing to do the research. It doesn’t appeal to me. As you get older you realize that to do truly good work on any given subject you’ve got to put in the hours, the years. The amount of research it would take to do something good about Napoleon gives me pause. But the psychology of Napoleon doesn’t. I feel I understand him to a degree. Now, you can be wrong about it. I thought I understood Gary Gilmore very well, that’s why I began that book. But as I began to do the research I came to the conclusion I didn’t understand him at all. So, you can start with the premise that you’re on top of it and discover you’re not.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': In the end, did you feel you understood Gilmore?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': He was a very complex man to me. On the one hand he was virtually a mediocrity and disappointing. His mind was not that remarkable; he had a lot of ordinary ideas and small-minded prejudices. But he was at least as complex as I was and that was curious and humbling. The thought of people being so simple that you can comprehend them and deal with them is depressing. If all of us are complex, it will be that much harder for machines to take us over.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': You believe that in Hemingway’s time there were great writers like Faulkner, Steinbeck, Wolfe, Fitzgerald, and, of course, Hemingway. But that’s not true today. Why not?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': We’re getting to questions that are too large to answer. It’s probably because of the prevailing currents of the age. Hemingway and Faulkner between them captured profound elements in the American soul. At that time, reading was the most profound way to deepen your knowledge of existence. So writers were respected more. They were more important. We’re moving from writing into electronic circuitry, television, computers. Print, as such, is going to disappear. It’s a long way from going away, but there is a point where the act of reading a book may become a rare luxury, equal to eating Russian caviar. People now read off word processors on screens where not only are the letters abominable but the image is full of flickering. If you could normally read a hundred pages without stopping, will you be able to read ten or fifteen under those conditions? It’s as if the very sensuous qualities of reading are being taken away from us. In other words, reading’s become an effort, equal to, say, having a pair of uncomfortable plastic earphones on, the sort they give you in an airplane, where it hurts your ears and your head and the sound’s not very good. So you’ve got to work for the movie that you’re seeing.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Of the writers in your time, who are the most important?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': [[w:Borges|Borges]] and [[w:Gabriel García Márquez|Marquez]]. After that, take your pick, there are about forty of us. I say forty because I don’t know enough about foreign writers. I’m thinking ten American writers and I’m concealing my ignorance by hiding behind thirty writers from other countries.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': In the early stages of your career you were obsessed with being the number one writer in America. Have you rethought that?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': You could have writers who are first in the people’s mind but I don’t know if that has any literary value. If you had an election tomorrow there would probably be five of us who would be in contention, and you could have a runoff. The results wouldn’t matter because each of us would walk away thinking, “I was the best.” I don’t think it’s important.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Is it important for you, though? To drive yourself?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': So long as there’s no election, I don’t give a damn. It’s not important anymore. If there was an election and somebody else won, I’d be annoyed.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': How envious have you been of other writers?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': By now I don’t think I’m envious at all. When I was younger I would fight feelings of envy at times. But I’ve never felt envious so much about writers as I have about freedom. Since I’ve been married all my life, I’ve always envied the great freedom that certain men friends of mine would have.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': But each time you’ve divorced you’ve gotten married again. <br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': That’s right. Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': You’ve admitted envy for [[w:Truman Capote|Truman Capote]]’s ability to get invited to the right parties.<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': That was 20 years ago, when I wanted to get invited to those parties, because I could have written about them. Those parties had a wonderful feeling they don’t possess now. When you’re young is the time you should go to parties like that. Truman went to those parties at the right time.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': What’s your opinion of Capote?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Very, very talented man. I was misquoted in a magazine story that bothered me a great deal, had me saying that he was through.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': That his life was wrecked.<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I felt very bad about it, because what happened is the reporter led me down the garden path. She said, “Wouldn’t you say that Truman is through?” And I said, “Off the record, I’ll tell you that even if I thought he was through I would never say it, because I don’t have the right to sit in judgment on another writer and decide they’re through. People said I was through when I wasn’t. I used to laugh inside. But they had no right to say it about me, and I have no right to say it about anyone else.” She said, “But what do you really think?” I said, “If you push me I’ll say that I don’t think he’s through.” Well, she was reading all these qualifications and in her mind she decided the bottom line was that he was through, so she put the words in my mouth. I never said it. No, I don’t think he’s through, I think he’s not well and is going through a very tough time. We never know when we’re going to get out of our troubles. He may not, but he might. The bits of ''[[w:Answered Prayers|Answered Prayers]]'' that he’s published have been interesting.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Think he’ll ever finish it?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I don’t know how much of it he’s done. And I don’t know what kind of shape he’s in.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': What do you think of [[w:James A. Michener|James A. Michener]]’s remark that if Capote ever finishes it, ''Answered Prayers'' will be the book most remembered fifty years from now?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': It’s a remark. But authors’ remarks are never terribly interesting. We’re all self-serving in our subtle ways. As are politicians. Authors’ theories are the same as politicians’ theories. Writers advance those theories that are best for their own latest work.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Let me give you Capote’s remark about your ''Ancient Evenings'', spoken before it was published. He said it couldn’t possibly be a good book because you’re only good at writing about what you know, and you didn’t know anything about ancient Egypt, anymore then you knew about Gary Gilmore.<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Truman’s very upset about ''The Executioner’s Song''. He feels that I should have made a pilgrimage and gotten down on my knees and said, “Oh great Cardinal Capote, do I have your blessing? May I proceed to write a book about a killer?” And I didn’t. He went around saying that I never gave any credit to his ''[[w:In Cold Blood|In Cold Blood]]''. Well, I just thought that book was so famous that you didn’t have to give credit to it. I reread ''In Cold Blood'' after I finished ''The Executioner’s Song'' and it’s a very good novel, as much of a novel as ''The Executioner’s Song''. Maybe more. It’s very nicely written and it may end up being a classic because it is remarkable. But I don’t know what he’s talking about, it just struck me as a dumb remark. Truman is canny as hell but he’s not the brightest guy in the world.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': You and Truman Capote share a dislike for [[w:Gore Vidal|Gore Vidal]]. Why?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I don’t want to get into it. We had a feud that went on for a few years and I don’t care whether we ever make friends again.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Would you agree with Vidal that we live in a time where the personality of the writer is everything and what he writes is nothing?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': No. There’s a tendency in that direction but it’s a vastly over-exaggerated remark.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Vidal has called you a messiah without hope of Paradise and with no precise mission. How does that strike you?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': As twelve years old.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': You’ve come to blows with Vidal, haven’t you?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': No. I knocked a heavy cocktail glass out of his hand and that was the end of the fight.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Didn’t you head-butt him?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': That’s not a fight, that’s just head-butting.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': You’ve butted heads with Hemingway’s son Gregory. Was that your way of connecting with his old man?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I head-butt with a lot of people. People have the wrong idea about it. It isn’t that you head-butt and somebody drops. For me, it’s a touch of affection. You just butt heads once lightly.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Is it always lightly?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': No, not always. It wasn’t lightly with Vidal that time. But it’s always fair for one writer to butt another in the head. Writers have hard heads. The hardest heads you’ll ever encounter will be a writer’s head. It’s just like an erect phallus. All there.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': During the making of your film ''[[w:Maidstone (film)|Maidstone]]'', you punched out a young actor and bit open [[w:Rip Torn|Rip Torn]]’s ear. Are you aware of what you’re doing at such times?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': No, it’s just all-fanciful, like a dream. [''Laughs'']<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Were you trying to put yourself in a situation where Rip Torn might kill you on camera? Were you in that kind of frame of mind?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': We don’t have enough time to talk about the making of ''Maidstone''. A comparatively complex set of notions went into it.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Then let me ask you, why are violent men always religious?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I don’t know if they’re always religious, but they tend to be. Violence is one of the existential states. So very often in a violent act you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. It’s different from the way that it seems in the movies or in books. It’s indefinable. Anyone who’s been in an automobile accident knows how the moments before the accident have some exceptional time changes. I once got hit by a car many years ago and it was an extraordinary experience. I bounced off a couple of rocks and ended up wrapped around a tree, but it all took place very slowly.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Were you knocked unconscious?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': No, but it was odd. It was a sports car, and it just bruised my hip. But it’s just so different from the normal and the given that it leaves you with an echo that has a touch of the cosmos in it.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': For decades you’ve been pushing violence as existential, hip, and heroic. Is the criminal, in your mind, the true artist?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': No, most criminals are not very interesting guys.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': You once told [[w:Mike Wallace|Mike Wallace]] that violence and creativity have a twin-like relation. Do you still believe that?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I think it’s still true. That’s part of the problem: if you cut all the violence out of society, you also cut out all the creativity. In fact, that’s just what we’re doing now: working for a law and order society that will not have any violence in the streets. At the same time things are getting less and less creative. I’ve never taken myself so seriously as to speak of Mailer’s Law of this or that, but I finally have one. It’s Mailer’s Law of Architectural Precedence in American Universities. Go to any university in the country and you have no problem determining the order in which the buildings were erected on that campus. The more atrocious the architecture, the newer the building. If the building next to you is less atrocious than the one you’re in, it was built before. The oldest building on the campus is invariably the nicest. That says something about creativity going out of life. It also says something about violence going out of life, because there’s a tendency in American life to become more and more safe.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Do you think American life is safer now than in the past?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': No, of course not. Because it can’t be done. It’s a vain, false enterprise. A pious enterprise. We’re doing it as a cover, which politicians talk about all the time, in their efforts to legislate it. Concomitant with the growth of technology there’s a sort of spiritual software that accompanies technology, and that is control over our lives. You push a button delicately here and a button delicately there to adjust the situation. Those people detest violence because they keep breaking up the patterns, and the control. More than half the people in this country opt completely for control of their lives. What they don’t control is their death, and that drives ’em right up the wall. One big reason why I’m so obsessed with Egypt and decided to write ''Ancient Evenings'' is precisely that I wanted to write about a culture that gave great preface to death, that lived for it, prepared for it, dwelt within it, in which virtually all of one’s acts in one’s life were steered toward one’s death. It seemed to me that this is much more profound than what we have now. That’s why people have such extraordinary reactions to ''Ancient Evenings'', they love it or they detest it. Because people, without exception, who hate it are people who love a lot of control and high tech in their lives and don’t like to talk or think about death.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': In ''Ancient Evenings'' you’ve written that none fear death more than the most clever of the scribes. Being the most clever of scribes, do you fear death?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I’m not the most clever of the scribes at all. I don’t consider myself clever. I consider myself rather dumb, simpleminded, when it comes to cleverness.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': In other words, you don’t fear death? <br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': No, not particularly.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Have you ever envisioned your own death?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': No, I don’t think about it a great deal, because the one thing I’m sure of is that it won’t be what I’m expecting. I’m not much on Hindu philosophy, but there’s one notion from the Hindus I do like a great deal: never worry about something you can’t effect.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Do you still reflect much on the horror of modern life?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': We’re in danger of a nuclear war until we get to a point where the sustenance of existence is almost entirely leeched out. About the time that we live with too many people on earth, all living in high-rise buildings, all utterly colorless, dull, and oppressive, and every building put up is as ugly as the one before, and when we drive we breathe nothing but polluted fumes on superhighways and there’s smog everywhere, and all the palm trees are wilted as they are in Mexico City, and the rivers are filthy, and everything is flat an dull, and sex is merely an extension of herpes, etc., etc., and people are dying of AIDS all over the place—at that point, the nuclear bomb is going to seem welcome to people. Because at least it’ll be their last shot at transcendence. We’ll all go up together in that great white light. And at that point, we’re in danger.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Is this your vision of the future?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': No, it’s a possible vision of the future. I don’t think it’s that automatic. If it were, why would I bother to talk about these matters?<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': You’ve predicted an extraordinary holocaust where we may all die off in a mysterious fashion.<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I meant that metaphorically. One doesn’t want to be prophetic about these matters at all. We have intimations of such horror with AIDS, for instance, where people are dying because their immunological faculties are atrophying or not functioning.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': You’ve used the metaphor of cancer to describe our nation. Are we a cancerous nation?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Things are going to have to happen. There are going to have to be positive ideas emerging. I can offer you a simple few. One of my most fundamental beliefs is that the government has the right to tax people, but we have a right to say what we’re taxed on. I’d like to see all sorts of referendums. I’d love to lead the crusade to tax the hell out of plastic. It would make it too expensive for them to make that crap any more. So it would tend to disappear. Where plastic was indispensable it would still remain, because people would just pay the tax on it. If the only decent fishing rods or skis would be made out of plastic, we can pay a little more.<br /> <br /> Another thing I’d absolutely be for is, we’re just surrounded with meretriciousness and mendacity in every aspect of our immediate life. So I’d opt for taking away the tax deduction from advertising and let those businesses that need to advertise pay for the privilege, because what they’re selling is not their product but a pile of horseshit. They’re attaching values that have nothing to do with the product. It’s attached to the entertainment that they give you on TV, which is mediocre entertainment at best. So why should that go into the price of a product? Why do we need to have the three major automobile manufacturers all advertising like crazy when we know they’re all equally mediocre? Does it really matter? Is there any American who doesn’t know that Ford, Chrysler and General Motors products are all on the same level every year? That finally you’re gonna pick it for the paint job? Why do you have to have a helicopter drop a car on top of a mountain peak? The millions that are spent on that, for what? To increase the price of the product? So, take away the tax deductions in advertising. You say that’ll put a lot of people out of work? Well, great. They’ll have to scuffle.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Are these among the stupid people?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I wouldn’t say the media people are the stupid people, they’re the clever people. It’ll be hard times for a few of the clever people.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Regarding yourself, you said you might be one of the most wicked spirits in American life today. Are you?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I was preening. That day I had feathers and I was fluffin’ ’em. <br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': [[w:Oriana Fallaci|Oriana Fallaci]] wrote that the taint of insanity has been following you for years. Is there any truth in that?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': No, but that’s Oriana Fallaci, making a story.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': In 1942 you worked for a while in a state mental institution in Boston. Some years later, after you stabbed your second wife, you wound up in a mental institution in Bellevue for a while. Did you feel in any way that you<br /> came full circle from that experience?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': No. I mean, I thought of it. Once could not think of the fact that one worked in a mental hospital earlier on the other side, as an attendant. That may have been of some help for me to get out of that place after seventeen days.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Because?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': When I worked as an attendant, I learned one thing: don’t make the guards pay attention to you. The less attention the guards pay to you, the better your chances of getting out are.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Were you crazy at that time?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Let’s say I was highly strung and let it go at that.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': I don’t think you’re going to answer me, but why did you stab your wife?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': You made your try. Why do you want to get into something that personal?<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': It’s a subject that you really haven’t discussed, except in a poem you wrote, where you said, “So long as you use the knife ...”<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': A knife.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': “... a knife, there’s some love left.”<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': The poem was written after the fact. <br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': I know it was.<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': It’s not a lively topic of conversation for me.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': The doctor who treated your wife, [[w:Adele Morales|Adele]], said you were having an acute paranoid breakdown with delusional thinking and that you were both homicidal and suicidal.<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Well, since I didn’t kill anybody after that and I didn’t commit suicide nor have a mental breakdown, my guess is that he wasn’t too accurate.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': But you later wrote that had you not done that act you might have been dead in a few years yourself.<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Yes.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Have you ever contemplated suicide?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': No, I never have.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': When a movie is made of your life, whom would you like to play you?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Larry Grobel.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': You’re getting angry with me now.<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': No. Edgy.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Okay. You blamed early success as the reason for the breakup of your first marriage ....<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I’m not getting angry, I’m getting offended. You want to discuss my life. I’m not going to give away my life. My life is my material. I would give you my life no more than I would give you my mate. That belongs to me, not to an interviewer.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Let’s stay then with your work. What you do is often based on your need for money. The need for money is because you have to support a number of ex-wives. [[w:Germaine Greer|Germaine Greer]] called you an alimony slave.<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I wonder how Germaine Greer came up with that? That was one of her bright days, huh?<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Have your marriages influenced your career? <br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Of course they have. A marriage is a culture.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': You’ve said that there isn’t a man alive who doesn’t have a profound animosity for women.<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I also don’t think there’s a woman alive who doesn’t have a profound animosity for men. But that’s half of it. I would continue that remark by saying that there’s not a man alive who doesn’t have a profound need and love for women. That’s part of the human condition. One of my favorite remarks is that the only time you ever do anything with great energy is when the best and worst motives in you are both involved at the same time. Or let’s say the most love-filled and the most hate-filled motives reengaged at the same moment. Lust is a perfect example of that. When one feels and makes lust for a woman, it’s precisely because the love we feel for her and the hate we feel for her at both being fully expressed. And those would-be sexual relations really come from just one side or another of oneself being expressed.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Do you regret saying on TV in the early seventies that women should be kept in cages?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I said it in jest on a show with [[w:Orson Welles|Orson Welles]]. One of the troubles with the media is that they are horrendously humorless. They might as well be human walking computers, because whatever you say, it’s always assumed that you said it in a deadly earnest voice. We were chatting. He said, “Norman, you wrote recently that women are low, sloppy beasts.” This was all pre-[[w:Women's liberation movement|woman’s lib]]. And I said, “The rest of that quote is that they’re goddesses.” What I was trying to get into was the fundamental male viewpoint towards women: on the one hand we see them as goddesses, on the other hand, as low, sloppy beasts. And he said, “Beasts?” I started thinking of a few fights I’d had with the ex-wife and began to laugh. And I said, “Oh come on, Orson, women should be kept in cages.” If I had known what that remark was gonna cost, I’d of really bitten right through my lip before I ever said it. It was a stupid remark in terms of its cost. A moment’s fun which I’m paying for ever since.<br /> <br /> There’s a wonderful remark that a fellow once made with respect to ''Women and Their Elegance''. It was that a woman got married to a man who’s much beneath her, so she went to a family party and the head of the family looked at her and said, “Thirty days of pleasure and thirty years at the wrong end of the table.” That remark is equal to the one that I made.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': There’s another remark you made: that it’s very dangerous to stick it up a woman’s ass, it tends to make them more promiscuous.<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Yeah, that was a rule of thumb remark. [''Laughs''] A pole vaulter’s remark.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Is it any wonder that when the Woman’s Movement started you were singled out as a great male chauvinist?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer'': I was singled out because I was the last man in America to realize how big and powerful a movement that was. I saw all these men running for cover and paying this great respect to woman and I’m such a fool, I said, “What are they doing that for?”<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Why do you feel that masturbation cripples people and leads to insanity?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Why do you ask me a question when you know the answer? <br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Because not everyone who may read this will have read what you’ve written.<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': The tendency of masturbation is insanity. In the same way that the tendency of driving 90 mph in a slow speed zone is a crash up. It doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. But you can’t cheat life—which is about the only remark I made that I still hang on to. There’s no [[w:objective correlative|objective correlative]] in masturbation. It encourages one’s fantasy life in the weakest fashion possible. The tendency for masturbation nine times out of ten is to push people further and further into loneliness and into a fundamental sense of defeat about not getting what they really want sexually.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': But can’t that also be a release for them?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': It’s a release, in the sense it keeps them from something worse happening to them. But to see masturbation as something marvelous and part of a healthy sex life is dubious in the extreme.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': You don’t write as much about masturbation as you do other sexual acts, including [[w:Sodomy|buggery]].<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Buggery was much more common in ancient times than it is now. The Romans talked about it all the time. The Greeks lived with buggery; it was sort of a staple for them. It’s my guess that in the Middle Ages you didn’t have an extraordinary amount of buggery because it was a form of contraception between men and women. And people lived much closer to excrement in those days. The smell was everywhere in the air. I had the experience once of being in Japan after the war and people lived very close to the excrement of animals and to their own excrement. American soldiers were far more horrified by the fact that the Japanese would carry their human excrement in these honey pots through the cities or use them in gardens than they were at seeing battlefields with fifty dead soldiers. We seem to have separated ourselves from excrement a long time ago. It may be that you can’t build a modern, technological civilization without keeping the shit out of the machines. But in ancient times that’s the heart and core of it. You can’t conceive of life in those days without a lot of buggery and a lot of living in and around excrement all the time.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': In ''Ancient Evenings'' you have the chief charioteer getting buggered in a cave by the pharaoh, first in the ass, then in the mouth. Was this a way a pharaoh behaved?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': It’s the way pharaohs did behave. That was the toughest moment in the writing, because I felt as if I was crossing my own Rubicon at that point. I thought the book demanded it. I had an instinct that this was the great hinge of the book, because the charioteer was a very strong man. When he’s buggered by his pharaoh it changes his life entirely. It dominates not only that life, but also his remaining three lives, because he was born three times. He never comes out from under the shadow of that buggery. I feel it works well as a symbol of power and what power means. Power is buggery. People say that the sex drives in ''Ancient Evenings'' exhibit power relationships; I don’t think it’s true. There is more love there than you’d expect. The queen, Nefertiti, does bare the charioteer’s child, which is only explainable in that she had enough love for him that she didn’t abort the child or destroy it when it was born.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': In the book, the moment of reincarnation comes through the sex act.<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': It’s not proper reincarnation. He has himself reborn directly into the belly of his woman. As he dies, so his seed enters her belly and he’s reborn. That’s not true reincarnation. I always felt reincarnation means that you die and then some cosmic agent looks you over and decides your next life. In other words, there is a moment of truth, where your life is judged and you’re sent out to improve the condition of the cosmos by the trials and joys you’re going to have in your next existence.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Is that what you think will happen to you after you die? <br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I think reincarnation is the natural way to do it.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': What would you like to come back as?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I don’t have a clue. I feel great modesty before the Lord. I wouldn’t dream of saying what I’d come back as, that’s about the fastest way I know of not getting it. I think the Lord takes one look at you and that’s it. I have a working joke on this: since I’ve contemplated these matters, I find that I’m killing cockroaches less and less often.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Do you literally believe in God?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': It’s much simpler than not to accept Him or Her.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Her?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I learned my lesson. I’ll make my peace with the women libbers yet.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Is it true that your publisher was worried that they wouldn’t make their money back on ''Ancient Evenings'' so they put you under the gun to write another, shorter novel?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Is that the general interpretation of it?<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': It’s the interpretation I’ve given.<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': You’re clever. Yeah, they want me to do a short book because their feeling is that their chances of doing well with a short book are fine. I expect they’re right. But why do we have to have this evil interpretation of it? I’m not under the gun. I agreed. I wanted to do a short book (''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'') after I finished ''Ancient Evenings''.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': ''Ancient Evenings'' is the first of your planned trilogy. Do you think you’ll write the next two books?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I hope I will. I’ve got two huge books to do, one about a spaceship in the future and one about modern times. But it’s not automatic. Maybe I’ll do it and maybe I won’t. ''Ancient Evenings'' was written to stand by itself, it does not need the other two to fulfill it.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': How has ''Ancient Evenings'' been received?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': It made me a prophet for too little. I said I was going to get the very best and the very worst reviews I’d ever gotten and that’s been true. On the one hand I’ve been called the best writer in America, on the other hand, two reviewers used the same word, disaster.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': After the dust settles, will it rank among your most important work?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I think it will. If you work eleven years on a book and you take yourself seriously, as I do, how could I possibly not think it’s my best book? I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am. I think it is my best because I know what went into it. It’s a very difficult book to get a hold of and seize and control. The prevailing mode in American letters is for high-tech writing. Writing that has a sheer command of the surface.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': [[w:Tom Wolfe|Tom Wolfe]]?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': He’s a very good example of that. But any number of writers are admired for their ability to capture the surface of things. They do it with skill and wit and irony. Irony is terribly important and crucial to modern writing. The kind of books that we like best are books where we’re on top of three-quarter’s of the book, because we know and recognize it, we’re comfortable with it, and one-quarter of it is new enough to give us pleasure. That’s a very good working mixture. With ''Ancient Evenings'' you’ve got a novel that’s brand new, there isn’t anything familiar, there’s nothing in psychology we can count on, because it’s a profoundly different psychology from our own. It owes nothing to Freud. Or to the Judeo-Christian tradition. As a result it’s a book that inspires an awful lot of irritability in people who like to be in command of what they’re reading. For some people it’s impossibly long, dull and boring. For others it’s rich, fabulous and sensuous. There is a fundamental division of opinions.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Why are good novels so painful to read?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': That’s an excellent question. Name me any great novel you’ve ever read that didn’t bore you in part while reading it the first time. A great novel has a consciousness that’s new first. And any time we undergo that, we get bored because we have to withdraw and digest this new consciousness before we can go back to it. I’ve been bored in part by ''[[w:Moby Dick|Moby Dick]]'', ''[[w:The Red and the Black|The Red and the Black]]'', ''[[w:Anna Karenina|Anna Karenina]]'', ''[[w:The Scarlet Letter|The Scarlet Letter]]''.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Your editor compared you to Picasso in terms of your range, your refusal to age or to lose energy. Is that an agreeable comparison for you?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': It’s a little on the grand side. Picasso’s a great artist who made huge changes in the word. There are two kinds of artist. There’s the artist who essentially has an identity, and we turn to that artist to feel the resonance of that particular identity. Matisse, Renoir, Cézanne, to a lesser extent Van Gogh. We know what we’re going to get when we look at their work. But with Picasso, he was interested in throwing away his own identity in order to find a new one. Style for him was not something that was attached to his identity; style was a cutting edge with which he attacked the nature of reality. So he went through a whole series of phases and changes. I find literary style is that for me. But don’t trust what I say because it’s self-serving, as all writers’ remarks are. The negative aspect of that is, “He can’t write good any more so his new style is a departure.” Take your pick.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Any other artists or writers you wouldn’t mind being compared with?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I don’t know. I could say no. Yes. Maybe.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': What about Gabriel Garcia Marquez?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Oh, Marquez is wonderful. He may be a great writer, but we’re not at all alike. I’ve read ''[[w:One Hundred Years of Solitude|One Hundred Years of Solitude]]'' after I was halfway into ''Ancient Evenings'' and I was getting blissful when I read it. I thought, God, this guy covers family with ten people in it and they go through twenty years and he does it all in five or ten pages. In ten pages I’m lucky to get around one bend of the Nile. He writes very quickly about a great many things, he has that gift. If I have a gift it is in the opposite direction. I want to catch the slow movement of that Nile.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Marquez won the Nobel Prize. The opening of your ''[[The Prisoner of Sex]]'' dealt with your obsession with winning that prize. What would it mean to you now if you got it?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': I fully expect not to get it. It’s the kind of thing that’s not going to come my way.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Honestly?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': Well, there’s always a shot at it. But one of the things it depends on is your popularity in your own country with the most respected academics in the country. From what I’ve gathered, the Swedish Academy listens carefully to the literary curators of a country. I don’t think my stock would be particularly high with them.<br /> <br /> '''Grobel''': Do you feel that you’ve succeeded in creating a revolution in the consciousness of our times, as you once declared it was your ambition to do?<br /> <br /> '''Mailer''': If we can use an image from buggery, I think I’ve gotten halfway up.<br /> <br /> {{Review}}<br /> {{DEFAULTSORT:Norman Mailer: Stupidity Brings Out Violence in Me}}<br /> [[Category:Interviews (MR)]]</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/%22Their_Humor_Annoyed_Him%22:_Cavalier_Wit_and_Sympathy_for_the_Devil_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest&diff=11658 2020-09-22T20:27:04Z

<p>CDucharme: Full article edit</p> <hr /> <div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:&lt;span style=&quot;font-size:22px;&gt;{{BASEPAGENAME}}/&lt;/span&gt;&quot;Their Humor Annoyed Him&quot;: Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in ''The Castle in the Forest''}}<br /> {{MR12}}<br /> {{Byline|last=Whalen-Bridge|first=John|abstract=Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omniscience of third person. Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to the ''Castle''’s cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably alone.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08whal}}<br /> {{cquote|Himmler subscribed to the theory that the best human possibilities lie close to the worst.}}<br /> <br /> {{dc|dc=T|here is a joke about attorneys}} that goes like this: lots of people were on a boat, which sank in shark-infested waters. It was horrible. The sharks were tearing all the passengers to pieces as they tried to make it to shore. All the passengers were dying. Except one passenger, who was an attorney. He swam right to the shore. As he was shaking himself off, the bewildered people on the beach asked him, “How come the sharks did not eat you?” He said: “Professional courtesy, I suppose.” We don’t like attorneys, such a joke conveys, because they are not like us. They are like sharks, and we are like people. We laugh at the joke, if we do, to commune in our fantasy-rejection of lawyerly cruelty. But Mailer’s last novel, ''The Castle in the Forest'', is organized around a very different sort of humor. Instead of laughing at lawyers to confirm our fantasy that we ourselves are not sharks, Mailer shocks readers, methodically and skillfully, with the knowledge that they are intimately involved with so much of what they—we, I should say—resoundingly reject. The undertow of laughter in this novel won’t necessarily drag you out to sea, but it will make you ask if you share qualities with what is being held up for laughter and judgment.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s narrator in ''The Castle in the Forest'' speaks with courtesy and intelligence.{{efn|Both Steven Poole in his ''New Statesman'' review, “[https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2007/02/norman-mailer-hitler-novel Sympathy for the Devil]” (19 February 2007) and John Freeman in his ''Independent'' review “[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/sympathy-for-the-devil-norman-mailer-on-his-satanic-new-novel-434647.html Sympathy for the Devil: Norman Mailer on His Satanic New Novel]” (2 February 2007) connect Mailer’s novel and the Rolling Stones’ song in their titles. The Jagger/Richards song, which first appeared on the 1968 album ''Beggers Banquet'', is a dramatic monologue in which Lucifer brags about his achievements, insists on commonalities between himself and his listeners, and demands courtesy if met: he is a “man of wealth and taste,” after all. All criminals are cops, all sinners are saints, and we all killed the Kennedys.}} He calls himself “Dieter” (though it is not clear what he means to “deter”), and he has been a witness to the formation of Adolf Hitler. Dieter explains to the reader that he has been a functionary in the Third Reich, but he has been—long before he came to work for Himmler—part of the Devil’s bureaucracy, with young “Adi” as his most important case. In this way, Mailer manages to bring together the bureaucratic “banality” of evil with the attractions and powers of evil that the word banality cannot subsume.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s final novel (2007) is a concatenation of aesthetic shocks that tells of the formation of Adolf Hitler’s character, beginning with the incestuous influences of his grandfather (about the identity of whom there has been much historical speculation), and continuing through his schooling. Ron Rosenbaum’s ''Explaining Hitler'' can fruitfully be read as a companion-text to Mailer’s novel; its central question is “When and how did Hitler become ''Hitler''?” Mailer’s novel affirms the idea that Hitler developed sociopathic tendencies by his early teens and that these were the foundation for the subsequent obsession with eliminationist anti-Semitism that would come later—but this evolution in Hitler’s darkness is not central to Mailer’s novel. Mailer builds a Hitler to explain a person attracted to murder and deceit, but anti-Semitism is not the driving force of the life Mailer imagines. Mailer does not at all exclude the idea that everything in the novel is tuned toward the Holocaust. The title “The Castle in the Forest,” Dieter tells readers in the final pages, is the translation of a death camp called “''Schlossimwald''” by those inmates who would not, even in the face of ultimate pain and evil, surrender their sense of irony.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=465}} That ''irony'' would remain a prized possession under such circumstances will shock some readers, since the phenomena of Hitler and the Holocaust are for many the very limit of irony. In the Rortyean, postmodern, and thoroughly ironic world in which we live, the Holocaust cannot be reduced to a contingent phenomena whose meaning is entirely dependent upon the subject position of the perceiver. Such a way of thinking will earn a comparison with Holocaust deniers. Mailer not only concludes with an homage to ironic camp inmates but also has Dieter-the-demon tell us that the Devil (whom he calls “the Maestro”) is a connoisseur of irony: “All this was uttered by the Maestro with characteristic irony. We never know how serious he might be when he speaks to our mind’s ear. (His voice is a cornucopia of humors.)&quot;{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=78}} Mailer might even be describing himself in this passage.<br /> <br /> A ''New York Times'' article paused to note that a number of recent novels had the odd feature of including bibliographies. The bibliography of ''The Castle in the Forest'' is rich with entries on bee-keeping. Readers of the novel know it is a richly over-determined metaphor, combining elements of modulated brutality and great technical skill. Bee-keeping is perhaps the central metaphor of the novel, and Mailer’s bibliography lists half-a-dozen or so specialist books on the subject. Bee-keeping signifies social order, but order as understood from an awful height, that of humans looking down on potentially profitable insects, or that of God looking down on mischievous creation. The bees themselves are ruthless at maintaining order, and they eliminate all threats to the hive without hesitation. Mailer’s Alois Hitler is presented as a dedicated bee-keeper, and the narrator Dieter—while perhaps disingenuously or even seductively warning readers not to make too much of such events!—presents several scenes in which hives are gassed or burned. Readers might wonder how exactly they could ever make “too much” of such a parallel.<br /> <br /> As important as bee-keeping is to Mailer’s larger narrative loops, it competes in the reader’s imagination with a theme that is given equal air-time but which etches the memory more ruthlessly moment for moment and image for image: transgressive sex. Mailer stays true to his fascination with the idea that God and the Devil partake in human lives through dreams and sex acts. The reader must consider a Freudian primal scene in which young Adolf witnesses Alois and Klara in the sixty-nine position, and witnessing the fictional event makes the reader equal, in some imaginative sense, to demons like Dieter who enter minds and bodies in the most intimate situations imaginable.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omniscience of third person. By “epistemological realism,” I mean that we can only experience our own minds directly, unless we have supernormal powers, and furthermore we can only draw inferences about other minds.{{efn|I am not using “epistemological realism” in the standard way, which refers specifically to the form of objectivism in which objects exist independently of one’s own mind in support of a correspondence theory of truth. Such objects would then, presumably, be available for apprehension by subjects from various perspectives, ameliorating the ways in which contemporary, post-Nietzschean perspectivism subverts assertions about an objective world. Mailer’s attraction to what I’m calling “epistemological realism,” on the other hand, finds ways of conflating first- and third-person perspectives—such as by resorting to the epistolary novel in the omega manuscript of ''Harlot’s Ghost'' to ensure that all perceptions are grounded in the first-person-singular perspective—precisely because Mailer’s fictions do not construct worlds out of a comfortable, objectivist epistemological realism.}} So first-person-singular narration is as close as fiction can get to what an individual person without telepathic skills can really know. Yet our success in the world depends entirely on having confidence in inferences drawn about other minds, and to develop this confidence we need to develop exactly the sort of imagination found in a convincing social novel. But in ''The Castle in the Forest'', Mailer’s narrator is a demon from hell who takes pride in his work; the associative connection Mailer develops at length does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that all human knowing is damned, but we are privy, as it were, to the intrusions of devils much, much more than we are, in Mailer’s fictional rendition, to the mind-intrusions of angels.<br /> <br /> What are we to make of a carefully wrought fictional scene in which the Hitlers, before young Adi even comes into the world, adventure past ordinary naughty sex into pedal-to-the-metal analingus? In foregrounding sex acts of this sort in a book purportedly about radical evil, Mailer risks being discussed in terms of radical eccentricity.{{efn|Ron Rosenbaum, author of ''Explaining Hitler'',, warns Mailer against pursuing, in a rumored sequel to ''The Castle in the Forest'', a sexual explanation of Hitler’s evil. See his essay “The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer” for a convincing admonition about the limits of psycho-sexual explanations of Hitler.}} Or, one could say that approaching radical evil through sexual obscenity is artistically obscene. However we put it, the novel intentionally jars the reader just as much as ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), and the central narrative device of ''that'' novel was an act of fellatio between two ghosts in a tomb. Here is the sex act between Alois and Klara that Mailer’s young Hitler witnesses: <br /> <br /> We may remember that the last time we saw Alois, he was burying his nose and lips in Klara’s vulva, his tongue as long and demonic as a devil’s phallus. (Be it said: we are not without our contributions to these arts.) Alois was certainly being aided by us. Never before had he given himself so completely to this exercise, and quickly he had become good at it, and so quickly that no explanation is possible unless we are given credit as well. (Which is why we speak of the Evil One when joining in the act—we do have the power to pass these lubricious gifts to men and women even when we are not attempting to convert them into clients.){{sfn|Mailer|1983|p=98}}<br /> <br /> What shall we make of this? One possible response will be to link Mailer’s use of the Holocaust with that of Sylvia Plath.{{efn|See Gubar for a discussion of attacks on Plath for reducing the Holocaust to a metaphor.}} One could say each author uses the pain of others to provide historical ballast to pain that is really individual. It would be the height of egotism to use the deaths of six million in order to hide the idiosyncrasy of one’s pain or the eccentricity of one’s ideas.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. He consistently presented himself as an author with an important vision, one worthy of “the mind of Joyce” or Melville, since the mid-1950s, and critics debated whether he ever wrote his ''Ulysses'' or ''Moby Dick''. Mailer’s personal ambition, however, was never in question.<br /> <br /> The cosmological vision has been reiterated in all of Mailer’s major works, including ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (1991), and ''The Gospel according to the Son'' (1997).{{efn|See Lennon’s “Mailer’s Cosmology” for a discussion of Mailer’s cosmological foundation, which is relatively stable across the decades from the mid-Sixties through Mailer’s final work.}} In each of these novel’s (if we allow for ''The Executioner’s Song'' as a “nonfiction novel”), the struggle between divine forces explains the relation between apparently insignificant actors in ways that factor out what Mailer calls “the Absurd.” The divinity potential of quotidian existence is the binding material in Mailer’s cosmos, with “divinity” meaning extraordinary, magical, and foundational. The experience of the divine overlaps with the extraordinary in the manner of aesthetic wonder, and this commonality allows Mailer to find God in the aesthetic aspects of sexual experience, but the divine must be more than ''merely'' extraordinary. The experience of divinity, which some people achieve and many do not, transcends ordinary experience, meaning that, in Mailer’s Romantic articulation, there is a hierarchy of knowing, and that only some (heroic) persons are able to glimpse the magical foundations of being. Such a vision requires huge risks, which explains why many would prefer not to see what Mailer’s heroic seers may encounter, and those who take such risks are not necessarily good people.<br /> <br /> In ''Ancient Evenings'', which was composed during the Carter presidency, the weak, vacillating pharaoh Ramses IX must decide whether or not to trust the protagonist Menenhetet, a figure who has earned scorn in his attempts to accumulate visionary power through experiments with scatological ceremonies and incest. In this novel Mailer stages his idea that we must make “bargains with evil” into a historical setting that could be called “Before Good and Evil.” Mailer’s setting predates the monotheistic moral codes that undergird our language of morality, thus showing the Eurocentric view to be, in Chakrabarty’s terms, “provincial.” This incarnation of the Mailer vision is, then, radically Manichean, since the Egyptian gods are not centered by a transcendent notion of the Good, against which an evil force defines itself. One could, through cosmological backformation, interpret the theomachy between Osiris and Set as a war between good and evil. In any event, the nature of goodness is never really in question. Artistically modulated growth—a middle way between stagnation and the uncontrolled growth of cancer—has always been the sign of health in Mailer’s universe. Mailer’s praise of Osiris resonates exactly with the adaptations of John Dewey’s “live creature.”<br /> <br /> The existential mystery animating Mailer’s visions has to do not with the existence of good and evil but rather with knowing which is which. Rosenbaum gives a name to the tendency to ground our moral awareness in a false absolute: ''argumentum ad Hitlerum''. When we can no longer endure uncertainties, when we have run out of negative capability, we appeal to Hitler to end the argument: ''Hitler'' was evil. The seduction of absolutist thinking, as Mailer shows in his Cold War articulation, is that we name the world in terms of Good and Evil and then proceed to identify our own actions and interests with the Good in self-interested and thus delusory ways: <br /> <br /> “There is no emotion on earth more powerful than anti-Americanism. To the rest of the world, America is the Garden of Eden. Unmitigated envy, the ugliest emotion of them all.”<br /> “Yessir.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=340}}<br /> <br /> As George Bush put it in the wake of the 9/11 (2001) attack on the World Trade Center, you are either with us or you are against us. You are either with God or the Devil. The tendency and aim of such a formulation is to make everyone into a “yes-man,” just like the CIA analyst in the quotation above who quickly says “Yessir” to Harlot, Mailer’s architect of American postwar paranoia. In ''The Gospel according to the Son'', Mailer resists the equal-and-opposite fallacy, ''argumentum ad Jesus'', in which one identifies self-with-Jesus-with-Goodness. Mailer despises the ways in which the Bush White House rolls together what Dieter of ''The Castle in the Forest'' calls “cheap patriotism” and “cheap prayer”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=386}}, but in ''The Gospel according to the Son'' Mailer wishes not to attack a “cheap” Jesus but to imagine an authentic one.{{efn|See ''Why Are We at War?'' if you doubt Mailer despises the mentality and policies of the Bush administration.}} Mailer’s authentic Jesus (as opposed to the authentic Jesus of mainstream Christians) is one who cannot know for sure what the effects of his actions will be. Though Jesus narrates his own gospel, Mailer denies us a text on which to build a fundamentalist worldview. Here is how Brian McDonald presents the narrative uncertainty in “Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the ‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel according to the Son”'': The story, Mailer’s Jesus reassures us, “is true,” but like a careful witness testifying under oath he is quick to add the caveat, “at least to all that I recall”{{sfn|Mailer|2006|p=2}}.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s critics ravaged him for presuming to write in the voice of Jesus, and Mailer clearly anticipates the charge when he has ''his'' Jesus say with nice condescension that the four synoptic gospels were good as far as they went, but they went too far. Mailer’s novelistic hubris, if it should be called that, is in presuming to know the views of God and the Devil and everything in between, but it is presumptuous of the critic to assume that Mailer is ever unaware of the effects of ego, as it is an important theme in all of the “epic” works here discussed:<br /> <br /> [W]hen one has become an overseer of death who holds the power to liquidate masses of people, one is also in great need of a very hard shell to the ego in order to feel no intimate horror over the price to one’s soul. Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification—patriotism! That is still the most dependable instrument for guiding the masses, although it may yet be replaced by revealed religion. We love fundamentalists. Their faith offers us every promise of developing into the final weapon of mass destruction.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=405-406}}<br /> <br /> Dieter provocatively ranks Hitler as a “statesmen,” thus restating the A. J. P. Taylor argument that Hitler would have been counted a great statesmen if only he had died at the right time, but the honorific word is inverted when we see, in context, that the necessary condition for being a statesman is an ego, a psychic callous to protect one’s sleep from meaningful knowledge of one’s actions.{{efn|Readers would be wrong to assume that Mailer is agreeing with A. J. P. Taylor. It is part of Dieter’s worldview and it is in his personal interest to defend the kind of egotism that is an insulation against subtle awareness of the feelings of others. Lest we think—as his typical detractors certainly would—that Mailer is defending egotism of this sort, we should recall the image of Ramses II after the Battle of Kadesh, the pharaoh taking care to heft every single amputated hand of the vanquished Hittite soldiers while the rest of the army enjoy the spoils of war in the most libidinal way. Mailer’s Ramses II is, in this one respect at least, the ethical antipode to contemporary leaders who, according to Dieter’s own political realism, must ''necessarily'' shield themselves from awareness of the consequences of their actions.}} When Dieter stirs in “patriotism” and fundamentalism, it becomes clear that Mailer’s Hitler has been used as a “cudgel” to beat George W. Bush, a president who has been most politely described as “incurious” regarding the facts of the world.{{efn|Cenk Uygur, a blogger from ''The Huffington Post'', has entitled his column on President Bush’s lack of curiosity “The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush.”}} “Cudgel,” in ''The Castle in the Forest'', is the name devils such as Dieter give to the Angels, who cause beings pain in their sleep when their actions are hateful rather than loving.<br /> <br /> Antithetical elements call attention to one another, reminding readers of nothing so much as the presence of the author himself. Think back to Mailer’s character Roth in ''The Naked and the Dead'', and of Stephen Richards Rojack walking the parapet in ''An American Dream''. Mailer’s writings are full of intentional impasses and voracious chasms. Readers who cannot make the leap will quickly fly from the page and declare Mailer unreadable. How are we to make the leap from the pure (if uncertain) speech of Jesus back to the vulva of Hitler’s mother? Mailer’s narratives are visionary landscapes designed to engulf some readers while allowing others the chance to develop in admittedly idiosyncratic ways—but it is a mindless response to note Mailer’s stylistic self-reference without noting the antipodal contextualization of his stylistic “egotism.”<br /> <br /> Mailer shows every awareness in his artful rendition of the Devil’s shaping hand that ''ego'' is one of the Devil’s most important tools, but then, most shockingly, he will put in a narrative turn that does nothing so much as foreground the author. Authorial egotism comes into the foreground of Hitler’s mind when he chooses among intellectual influences: <br /> <br /> He certainly rejected Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him. It was too personal—as if they were much too pleased with what they were saying. Not serious enough, Adolf decided. The other two, Kant and Schleiermacher, he simply could not read. After Jahn, his highest pleasure came from the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers. That had also been assigned to his class. Those were good stories, and deep!{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=377}}<br /> <br /> Adolf uses the stories of Grimm to terrorize his younger brother Edmund, whom Mailer imagines as Hitler’s first murder victim: in a variation of the killing of Abel, jealous Hitler intentionally passes Edmund the measles that will kill him. This passage is one of a dozen or so highly literate moments in ''The Castle in the Forest'' in which Mailer positively revels in the ironies that were once so properly shocking, those attaching to the apparent incongruity of Nazis who loved Beethoven.<br /> <br /> But not all writers and not all ironies are the same—it is not as if Mailer is inviting plague on all the literary houses. Mailer, if I read him rightly, mocks the rectitude with which we have sometimes allowed ourselves to think that literature as such was a proof of superior humanity, when much more is required. Hitler’s literary tastes give some hint of his taste for cruelty, as his sadistic use of the Grimm stories suggests, but even more important is his impatience with queer, unsettling humor, that of Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him? Mailer’s humor here is profound: he knows—has known since he meditated on the career of Henry Miller in the mid-1970s—that his own unsettling humor would “annoy” many of his readers. Merely to make oneself an antipode to Adolf is the laziest move imaginable, but this is not at all where Mailer leaves the matter. He goes on to reveal why Goethe and Schiller annoyed Adi: they reminded him too much that they exist.<br /> <br /> It cannot be said that this humor is inherently ethical. The freedom of humor (and it is this often disappointing freedom of the other to disappoint you that proves that the other is not a function of your own fantasy) has its horrible uses. Hitler’s ''literary'' torture of Edmund is one of the most grimly funny moments in a novel replete with dark humor. Young Adolf has been reading Edmund terrifying Grimm stories:<br /> <br /> “Do you want another story?”<br /> <br /> &quot;Maybe not.&quot;<br /> <br /> “This one is the best,” said Adolf.<br /> <br /> &quot;Is it truly the best?&quot;<br /> <br /> &quot;Yes&quot;<br /> <br /> “Then maybe I don’t want to hear it.”<br /> <br /> “It’s about a young man who is ordered to sleep with a corpse. In time to come you, too, may have to sleep next to a dead man.” At this point, Edmund shrieked. Then he fainted.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|379}}<br /> <br /> In genuinely frightening ways that inter-leaven the literary and the wicked, Mailer exacerbates our moral consciences; American literature has not been as darkly funny since Twain’s ''Letters from the Earth''. Twain’s and Mailer’s are good stories, and deep!<br /> <br /> Mailer’s laughter in ''The Castle in the Forest'' is not the raucous, adolescent laughter of America’s 1960s black humor fiction, a laughter that is always implicitly the laughter of an overly stable know-it-all ''we''.{{efn|One could say that Yossarian is a character who must act from isolation even when he crucially chooses to act for the sake of others, but I would still characterize the laughter aroused by the novel as more social. This we carried over quite smoothly<br /> from the novel to the film ''M*A*S*H'' and to the buddy-scenarios of the television version as well. Consider the narrative situation of ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'', Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo narrative: however iconoclastic and anarchic the voice of Raoul Duke, this road novel depends for it’s effects on internalizing the “we,” so Duke is accompanied by Dr. Gonzo, his Samoan attorney (who is based on Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Mexican-American political activist). If we look through ''Castle'' carefully, we will see that Mailer has, again and again, done without the protections of an imaginary men’s club.}} We laugh at the bureaucrats in ''Catch-22''. There’s an unsettling oddity to Mailer’s style, though, an awareness that, like Dieter’s, Mailer’s humor is both on the mark and a bit to one side of the main stream of events. Mailer does not pretend to be in the ethical center, and the rude, cruel, and invasive qualities of his “diabolical” narrative technique are, he will not let us forget, essential elements in our own conventional mind-set. The castle in Mailer’s forest, the redemptive beauty that makes the pain and failures of such unappreciated masterpieces as ''Ancient Evenings'' and ''The Castle in the Forest'' bearable, is always a repetition and ever-free variation of a cavalier wit. As it is in the moment in which Adolf tortures his brother with literature, Mailer’s humor is genuinely funny and, at exactly the same time, resoundingly grim. Put- ting his own idea that our best is often closest to our worst into the mouth of Himmler, Mailer turns into the pain of his own humor and allows—encourages, actually—the nasty identifications his harshest critics made of himself and his work, that he was violent and cruel and “patriarchal” in the sense in which patriarchy is a synonym for Fascism. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to this cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably ''alone''.{{efn|None of this article could have been written if I had not been told the joke about lawyers and sharks by Professor Winfried “the Hun” Schleiner of UC Davis twenty years ago.}}<br /> <br /> ===Notes===<br /> {{notelist}}<br /> <br /> ===Citations===<br /> {{Reflist|20em}}<br /> <br /> ===Works Cited===<br /> {{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br /> * {{cite journal |last=Adamowski |first=T. H. |title=Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer |url= |journal=University of Toronto Quarterly |volume=75 |issue=3 |date=Summer 2006 |pages=883–904 |access-date= |ref=harv}}<br /> * {{cite news |last=Bosman |first=Julie |date=December 6, 2006 |title=Literature: Do Novels Really Need Bibliographies? |url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061208122042/http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php |archive-date=December 8, 2006 |work=International Herald Tribune |location= |access-date=2020-09-10 |ref=harv}}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Chakrabarty |first=Dipesh |date=2007 |title=Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference |url= |location=Princeton, NJ |publisher=Princeton UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}} New edition with a new preface by the author.<br /> * {{cite journal |last=Gubar |first=Susan |title=Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries |url= |journal=The Yale Journal of Criticism |volume=14 |issue=1 |date=Spring 2001 |pages=191–215 |access-date= |ref=harv}}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |title=Mailer’s Cosmology |url= |journal=Modern Language Studies |volume=12 |issue=3 |date=1982 |pages=18-29 |ref=harv}}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1983 |title=Ancient Evenings |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dial |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman |authormask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |url= |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman| authormask=1 |date=2007 |title= Why Are We at War |url= |location= New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McCann|first=Sean|title=The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism|url= |journal=English Literary History|volume=67|issue=1|date=2000|pages=293–336|access-date= |ref=harv}}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McDonald|first=Brian|title=Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the 'Very Jewish Jesus' of Norman Mailer's ''The Gospel according to the Son|url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=78–90|access-date= |ref=harv}}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rorty|first=Richard|date=1989|title=Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity|url= |location=New York|publisher=Cambridge UP|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rosenbaum|first=Ron|date=March 6, 2007|title=The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer: What Will He Make of 'Hitler's Chappaquiddick'?|url=http://www.slate.com/id/2161302/|location= |publisher=Slate |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Taylor|first=A. J. P |date=1996|title=The Origins of the Second World War|url= |location=New York|publisher=Touchstone|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}<br /> * {{cite web |url= http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/the-incrediblyunbelieva_b_35882.html|title=The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush |last=Uygur|first=Cenk|date=December 8, 2006|website= |publisher= |access-date=1 August 2008|quote= |ref=harv}}<br /> {{Refend}}<br /> {{Review}}<br /> {{DEFAULTSORT:Their Humor Annoyed Him}}<br /> [[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:CDucharme/sandbox&diff=11650 2020-09-22T20:12:22Z

<p>CDucharme: Full article edit</p> <hr /> <div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:&lt;span style=&quot;font-size:22px;&gt;{{BASEPAGENAME}}/&lt;/span&gt;&quot;Their Humor Annoyed Him&quot;: Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in ''The Castle in the Forest''}}<br /> {{MR12}}<br /> {{Byline|last=Whalen-Bridge|first=John|abstract=Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omniscience of third person. Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to the ''Castle''’s cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably alone.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08whal}}<br /> {{cquote|Himmler subscribed to the theory that the best human possibilities lie close to the worst.}}<br /> <br /> {{dc|dc=T|here is a joke about attorneys}} that goes like this: lots of people were on a boat, which sank in shark-infested waters. It was horrible. The sharks were tearing all the passengers to pieces as they tried to make it to shore. All the passengers were dying. Except one passenger, who was an attorney. He swam right to the shore. As he was shaking himself off, the bewildered people on the beach asked him, “How come the sharks did not eat you?” He said: “Professional courtesy, I suppose.” We don’t like attorneys, such a joke conveys, because they are not like us. They are like sharks, and we are like people. We laugh at the joke, if we do, to commune in our fantasy-rejection of lawyerly cruelty. But Mailer’s last novel, ''The Castle in the Forest'', is organized around a very different sort of humor. Instead of laughing at lawyers to confirm our fantasy that we ourselves are not sharks, Mailer shocks readers, methodically and skillfully, with the knowledge that they are intimately involved with so much of what they—we, I should say—resoundingly reject. The undertow of laughter in this novel won’t necessarily drag you out to sea, but it will make you ask if you share qualities with what is being held up for laughter and judgment.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s narrator in ''The Castle in the Forest'' speaks with courtesy and intelligence.{{efn|Both Steven Poole in his ''New Statesman'' review, “[https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2007/02/norman-mailer-hitler-novel Sympathy for the Devil]” (19 February 2007) and John Freeman in his ''Independent'' review “[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/sympathy-for-the-devil-norman-mailer-on-his-satanic-new-novel-434647.html Sympathy for the Devil: Norman Mailer on His Satanic New Novel]” (2 February 2007) connect Mailer’s novel and the Rolling Stones’ song in their titles. The Jagger/Richards song, which first appeared on the 1968 album ''Beggers Banquet'', is a dramatic monologue in which Lucifer brags about his achievements, insists on commonalities between himself and his listeners, and demands courtesy if met: he is a “man of wealth and taste,” after all. All criminals are cops, all sinners are saints, and we all killed the Kennedys.}} He calls himself “Dieter” (though it is not clear what he means to “deter”), and he has been a witness to the formation of Adolf Hitler. Dieter explains to the reader that he has been a functionary in the Third Reich, but he has been—long before he came to work for Himmler—part of the Devil’s bureaucracy, with young “Adi” as his most important case. In this way, Mailer manages to bring together the bureaucratic “banality” of evil with the attractions and powers of evil that the word banality cannot subsume.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s final novel (2007) is a concatenation of aesthetic shocks that tells of the formation of Adolf Hitler’s character, beginning with the incestuous influences of his grandfather (about the identity of whom there has been much historical speculation), and continuing through his schooling. Ron Rosenbaum’s ''Explaining Hitler'' can fruitfully be read as a companion-text to Mailer’s novel; its central question is “When and how did Hitler become ''Hitler''?” Mailer’s novel affirms the idea that Hitler developed sociopathic tendencies by his early teens and that these were the foundation for the subsequent obsession with eliminationist anti-Semitism that would come later—but this evolution in Hitler’s darkness is not central to Mailer’s novel. Mailer builds a Hitler to explain a person attracted to murder and deceit, but anti-Semitism is not the driving force of the life Mailer imagines. Mailer does not at all exclude the idea that everything in the novel is tuned toward the Holocaust. The title “The Castle in the Forest,” Dieter tells readers in the final pages, is the translation of a death camp called “''Schlossimwald''” by those inmates who would not, even in the face of ultimate pain and evil, surrender their sense of irony.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=465}} That ''irony'' would remain a prized possession under such circumstances will shock some readers, since the phenomena of Hitler and the Holocaust are for many the very limit of irony. In the Rortyean, postmodern, and thoroughly ironic world in which we live, the Holocaust cannot be reduced to a contingent phenomena whose meaning is entirely dependent upon the subject position of the perceiver. Such a way of thinking will earn a comparison with Holocaust deniers. Mailer not only concludes with an homage to ironic camp inmates but also has Dieter-the-demon tell us that the Devil (whom he calls “the Maestro”) is a connoisseur of irony: “All this was uttered by the Maestro with characteristic irony. We never know how serious he might be when he speaks to our mind’s ear. (His voice is a cornucopia of humors.)&quot;{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=78}} Mailer might even be describing himself in this passage.<br /> <br /> A ''New York Times'' article paused to note that a number of recent novels had the odd feature of including bibliographies. The bibliography of ''The Castle in the Forest'' is rich with entries on bee-keeping. Readers of the novel know it is a richly over-determined metaphor, combining elements of modulated brutality and great technical skill. Bee-keeping is perhaps the central metaphor of the novel, and Mailer’s bibliography lists half-a-dozen or so specialist books on the subject. Bee-keeping signifies social order, but order as understood from an awful height, that of humans looking down on potentially profitable insects, or that of God looking down on mischievous creation. The bees themselves are ruthless at maintaining order, and they eliminate all threats to the hive without hesitation. Mailer’s Alois Hitler is presented as a dedicated bee-keeper, and the narrator Dieter—while perhaps disingenuously or even seductively warning readers not to make too much of such events!—presents several scenes in which hives are gassed or burned. Readers might wonder how exactly they could ever make “too much” of such a parallel.<br /> <br /> As important as bee-keeping is to Mailer’s larger narrative loops, it competes in the reader’s imagination with a theme that is given equal air-time but which etches the memory more ruthlessly moment for moment and image for image: transgressive sex. Mailer stays true to his fascination with the idea that God and the Devil partake in human lives through dreams and sex acts. The reader must consider a Freudian primal scene in which young Adolf witnesses Alois and Klara in the sixty-nine position, and witnessing the fictional event makes the reader equal, in some imaginative sense, to demons like Dieter who enter minds and bodies in the most intimate situations imaginable.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omniscience of third person. By “epistemological realism,” I mean that we can only experience our own minds directly, unless we have supernormal powers, and furthermore we can only draw inferences about other minds.{{efn|I am not using “epistemological realism” in the standard way, which refers specifically to the form of objectivism in which objects exist independently of one’s own mind in support of a correspondence theory of truth. Such objects would then, presumably, be available for apprehension by subjects from various perspectives, ameliorating the ways in<br /> which contemporary, post-Nietzschean perspectivism subverts assertions about an objective world. Mailer’s attraction to what I’m calling “epistemological realism,” on the other hand, finds ways of conflating first- and third-person perspectives—such as by resorting to the epistolary novel in the omega manuscript of ''Harlot’s Ghost'' to ensure that all perceptions are grounded in the first-person-singular perspective—precisely because Mailer’s fictions do not construct worlds out of a comfortable, objectivist epistemological realism.}} So first-person-singular narration is as close as fiction can get to what an individual person without telepathic skills can really know. Yet our success in the world depends entirely on having confidence in inferences drawn about other minds, and to develop this confidence we need to develop exactly the sort of imagination found in a convincing social novel. But in ''The Castle in the Forest'', Mailer’s narrator is a demon from hell who takes pride in his work; the associative connection Mailer develops at length does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that all human knowing is damned, but we are privy, as it were, to the intrusions of devils much, much more than we are, in Mailer’s fictional rendition, to the mind-intrusions of angels.<br /> <br /> What are we to make of a carefully wrought fictional scene in which the Hitlers, before young Adi even comes into the world, adventure past ordinary naughty sex into pedal-to-the-metal analingus? In foregrounding sex acts of this sort in a book purportedly about radical evil, Mailer risks being discussed in terms of radical eccentricity.{{efn|Ron Rosenbaum, author of ''Explaining Hitler'',, warns Mailer against pursuing, in a rumored sequel to ''The Castle in the Forest'', a sexual explanation of Hitler’s evil. See his essay “The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer” for a convincing admonition about the limits of psycho-sexual explanations of Hitler.}} Or, one could say that approaching radical evil through sexual obscenity is artistically obscene. However we put it, the novel intentionally jars the reader just as much as ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), and the central narrative device of ''that'' novel was an act of fellatio between two ghosts in a tomb. Here is the sex act between Alois and Klara that Mailer’s young Hitler witnesses: <br /> <br /> We may remember that the last time we saw Alois, he was burying his nose and lips in Klara’s vulva, his tongue as long and demonic as a devil’s phallus. (Be it said: we are not without our contributions to these arts.) Alois was certainly being aided by us. Never before had he given himself so completely to this exercise, and quickly he had become good at it, and so quickly that no explanation is possible unless we are given credit as well. (Which is why we speak of the Evil One when joining in the act—we do have the power to pass these lubricious gifts to men and women even when we are not attempting to convert them into clients.){{sfn|Mailer|1983|p=98}}<br /> <br /> What shall we make of this? One possible response will be to link Mailer’s use of the Holocaust with that of Sylvia Plath.{{efn|See Gubar for a discussion of attacks on Plath for reducing the Holocaust to a metaphor.}} One could say each author uses the pain of others to provide historical ballast to pain that is really individual. It would be the height of egotism to use the deaths of six million in order to hide the idiosyncrasy of one’s pain or the eccentricity of one’s ideas.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. He consistently presented himself as an author with an important vision, one worthy of “the mind of Joyce” or Melville, since the mid-1950s, and critics debated whether he ever wrote his ''Ulysses'' or ''Moby Dick''. Mailer’s personal ambition, however, was never in question.<br /> <br /> The cosmological vision has been reiterated in all of Mailer’s major works, including ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (1991), and ''The Gospel according to the Son'' (1997).{{efn|See Lennon’s “Mailer’s Cosmology” for a discussion of Mailer’s cosmological foundation, which is relatively stable across the decades from the mid-Sixties through Mailer’s final work.}} In each of these novel’s (if we allow for ''The Executioner’s Song'' as a “nonfiction novel”), the struggle between divine forces explains the relation between apparently insignificant actors in ways that factor out what Mailer calls “the Absurd.” The divinity potential of quotidian existence is the binding material in Mailer’s cosmos, with “divinity” meaning extraordinary, magical, and foundational. The experience of the divine overlaps with the extraordinary in the manner of aesthetic wonder, and this commonality allows Mailer to find God in the aesthetic aspects of sexual experience, but the divine must be more than ''merely'' extraordinary. The experience of divinity, which some people achieve and many do not, transcends ordinary experience, meaning that, in Mailer’s Romantic articulation, there is a hierarchy of knowing, and that only some (heroic) persons are able to glimpse the magical foundations of being. Such a vision requires huge risks, which explains why many would prefer not to see what Mailer’s heroic seers may encounter, and those who take such risks are not necessarily good people.<br /> <br /> In ''Ancient Evenings'', which was composed during the Carter presidency, the weak, vacillating pharaoh Ramses IX must decide whether or not to trust the protagonist Menenhetet, a figure who has earned scorn in his attempts to accumulate visionary power through experiments with scatological ceremonies and incest. In this novel Mailer stages his idea that we must make “bargains with evil” into a historical setting that could be called “Before Good and Evil.” Mailer’s setting predates the monotheistic moral codes that undergird our language of morality, thus showing the Eurocentric view to be, in Chakrabarty’s terms, “provincial.” This incarnation of the Mailer vision is, then, radically Manichean, since the Egyptian gods are not centered by a transcendent notion of the Good, against which an evil force defines itself. One could, through cosmological backformation, interpret the theomachy between Osiris and Set as a war between good and evil. In any event, the nature of goodness is never really in question. Artistically modulated growth—a middle way between stagnation and the uncontrolled growth of cancer—has always been the sign of health in Mailer’s universe. Mailer’s praise of Osiris resonates exactly with the adaptations of John Dewey’s “live creature.”<br /> <br /> The existential mystery animating Mailer’s visions has to do not with the existence of good and evil but rather with knowing which is which. Rosenbaum gives a name to the tendency to ground our moral awareness in a false absolute: ''argumentum ad Hitlerum''. When we can no longer endure uncertainties, when we have run out of negative capability, we appeal to Hitler to end the argument: ''Hitler'' was evil. The seduction of absolutist thinking, as Mailer shows in his Cold War articulation, is that we name the world in terms of Good and Evil and then proceed to identify our own actions and interests with the Good in self-interested and thus delusory ways: <br /> <br /> “There is no emotion on earth more powerful than anti-Americanism. To the rest of the world, America is the Garden of Eden. Unmitigated envy, the ugliest emotion of them all.”<br /> “Yessir.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=340}}<br /> <br /> As George Bush put it in the wake of the 9/11 (2001) attack on the World Trade Center, you are either with us or you are against us. You are either with God or the Devil. The tendency and aim of such a formulation is to make everyone into a “yes-man,” just like the CIA analyst in the quotation above who quickly says “Yessir” to Harlot, Mailer’s architect of American postwar paranoia. In ''The Gospel according to the Son'', Mailer resists the equal-and-opposite fallacy, ''argumentum ad Jesus'', in which one identifies self-with-Jesus-with-Goodness. Mailer despises the ways in which the Bush White House rolls together what Dieter of ''The Castle in the Forest'' calls “cheap patriotism” and “cheap prayer”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=386}}, but in ''The Gospel according to the Son'' Mailer wishes not to attack a “cheap” Jesus but to imagine an authentic one.{{efn|See ''Why Are We at War?'' if you doubt Mailer despises the mentality and policies of the Bush administration.}} Mailer’s authentic Jesus (as opposed to the authentic Jesus of mainstream Christians) is one who cannot know for sure what the effects of his actions will be. Though Jesus narrates his own gospel, Mailer denies us a text on which to build a fundamentalist worldview. Here is how Brian McDonald presents the narrative uncertainty in “Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the ‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel according to the Son”'': The story, Mailer’s Jesus reassures us, “is true,” but like a careful witness testifying under oath he is quick to add the caveat, “at least to all that I recall”{{sfn|Mailer|2006|p=2}}.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s critics ravaged him for presuming to write in the voice of Jesus, and Mailer clearly anticipates the charge when he has ''his'' Jesus say with nice condescension that the four synoptic gospels were good as far as they went, but they went too far. Mailer’s novelistic hubris, if it should be called that, is in presuming to know the views of God and the Devil and everything in between, but it is presumptuous of the critic to assume that Mailer is ever unaware of the effects of ego, as it is an important theme in all of the “epic” works here discussed:<br /> <br /> [W]hen one has become an overseer of death who holds the power to liquidate masses of people, one is also in great need of a very hard shell to the ego in order to feel no intimate horror over the price to one’s soul. Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification—patriotism! That is still the most dependable instrument for guiding the masses, although it may yet be replaced by revealed religion. We love fundamentalists. Their faith offers us every promise of developing into the final weapon of mass destruction.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=405-406}}<br /> <br /> Dieter provocatively ranks Hitler as a “statesmen,” thus restating the A. J. P. Taylor argument that Hitler would have been counted a great statesmen if only he had died at the right time, but the honorific word is inverted when we see, in context, that the necessary condition for being a statesman is an ego, a psychic callous to protect one’s sleep from meaningful knowledge of one’s actions.{{efn|Readers would be wrong to assume that Mailer is agreeing with A. J. P. Taylor. It is part of Dieter’s worldview and it is in his personal interest to defend the kind of egotism that is an insulation against subtle awareness of the feelings of others. Lest we think—as his typical detractors certainly would—that Mailer is defending egotism of this sort, we should recall the image of Ramses II after the Battle of Kadesh, the pharaoh taking care to heft every single amputated hand of the vanquished Hittite soldiers while the rest of the army enjoy the spoils of war in the most libidinal way. Mailer’s Ramses II is, in this one respect at least, the ethical antipode to contemporary leaders who, according to Dieter’s own political realism, must ''necessarily'' shield themselves from awareness of the consequences of their actions.}} When Dieter stirs in “patriotism” and fundamentalism, it becomes clear that Mailer’s Hitler has been used as a “cudgel” to beat George W. Bush, a president who has been most politely described as “incurious” regarding the facts of the world.{{efn|Cenk Uygur, a blogger from ''The Huffington Post'', has entitled his column on President Bush’s lack of curiosity “The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush.”}} “Cudgel,” in ''The Castle in the Forest'', is the name devils such as Dieter give to the Angels, who cause beings pain in their sleep when their actions are hateful rather than loving.<br /> <br /> Antithetical elements call attention to one another, reminding readers of nothing so much as the presence of the author himself. Think back to Mailer’s character Roth in ''The Naked and the Dead'', and of Stephen Richards Rojack walking the parapet in ''An American Dream''. Mailer’s writings are full of intentional impasses and voracious chasms. Readers who cannot make the leap will quickly fly from the page and declare Mailer unreadable. How are we to make the leap from the pure (if uncertain) speech of Jesus back to the vulva of Hitler’s mother? Mailer’s narratives are visionary landscapes designed to engulf some readers while allowing others the chance to develop in admittedly idiosyncratic ways—but it is a mindless response to note Mailer’s stylistic self-reference without noting the antipodal contextualization of his stylistic “egotism.”<br /> <br /> Mailer shows every awareness in his artful rendition of the Devil’s shaping hand that ''ego'' is one of the Devil’s most important tools, but then, most shockingly, he will put in a narrative turn that does nothing so much as foreground the author. Authorial egotism comes into the foreground of Hitler’s mind when he chooses among intellectual influences: <br /> <br /> He certainly rejected Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him. It was too personal—as if they were much too pleased with what they were saying. Not serious enough, Adolf decided. The other two, Kant and Schleiermacher, he simply could not read. After Jahn, his highest pleasure came from the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers. That had also been assigned to his class. Those were good stories, and deep!{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=377}}<br /> <br /> Adolf uses the stories of Grimm to terrorize his younger brother Edmund, whom Mailer imagines as Hitler’s first murder victim: in a variation of the killing of Abel, jealous Hitler intentionally passes Edmund the measles that will kill him. This passage is one of a dozen or so highly literate moments in ''The Castle in the Forest'' in which Mailer positively revels in the ironies that were once so properly shocking, those attaching to the apparent incongruity of Nazis who loved Beethoven.<br /> <br /> But not all writers and not all ironies are the same—it is not as if Mailer is inviting plague on all the literary houses. Mailer, if I read him rightly, mocks the rectitude with which we have sometimes allowed ourselves to think that literature as such was a proof of superior humanity, when much more is required. Hitler’s literary tastes give some hint of his taste for cruelty, as his sadistic use of the Grimm stories suggests, but even more important is his impatience with queer, unsettling humor, that of Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him? Mailer’s humor here is profound: he knows—has known since he meditated on the career of Henry Miller in the mid-1970s—that his own unsettling humor would “annoy” many of his readers. Merely to make oneself an antipode to Adolf is the laziest move imaginable, but this is not at all where Mailer leaves the matter. He goes on to reveal why Goethe and Schiller annoyed Adi: they reminded him too much that they exist.<br /> <br /> It cannot be said that this humor is inherently ethical. The freedom of humor (and it is this often disappointing freedom of the other to disappoint you that proves that the other is not a function of your own fantasy) has its horrible uses. Hitler’s ''literary'' torture of Edmund is one of the most grimly funny moments in a novel replete with dark humor. Young Adolf has been reading Edmund terrifying Grimm stories:<br /> <br /> “Do you want another story?”<br /> <br /> &quot;Maybe not.&quot;<br /> <br /> “This one is the best,” said Adolf.<br /> <br /> &quot;Is it truly the best?&quot;<br /> <br /> &quot;Yes&quot;<br /> <br /> “Then maybe I don’t want to hear it.”<br /> <br /> “It’s about a young man who is ordered to sleep with a corpse. In time to come you, too, may have to sleep next to a dead man.” At this point, Edmund shrieked. Then he fainted.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|379}}<br /> <br /> In genuinely frightening ways that inter-leaven the literary and the wicked, Mailer exacerbates our moral consciences; American literature has not been as darkly funny since Twain’s ''Letters from the Earth''. Twain’s and Mailer’s are good stories, and deep!<br /> <br /> Mailer’s laughter in ''The Castle in the Forest'' is not the raucous, adolescent laughter of America’s 1960s black humor fiction, a laughter that is always implicitly the laughter of an overly stable know-it-all ''we''.{{efn|One could say that Yossarian is a character who must act from isolation even when he crucially chooses to act for the sake of others, but I would still characterize the laughter aroused by the novel as more social. This we carried over quite smoothly<br /> from the novel to the film ''M*A*S*H'' and to the buddy-scenarios of the television version as well. Consider the narrative situation of ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'', Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo narrative: however iconoclastic and anarchic the voice of Raoul Duke, this road novel depends for it’s effects on internalizing the “we,” so Duke is accompanied by Dr. Gonzo, his Samoan attorney (who is based on Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Mexican-American political activist). If we look through ''Castle'' carefully, we will see that Mailer has, again and again, done without the protections of an imaginary men’s club.}} We laugh at the bureaucrats in ''Catch-22''. There’s an unsettling oddity to Mailer’s style, though, an awareness that, like Dieter’s, Mailer’s humor is both on the mark and a bit to one side of the main stream of events. Mailer does not pretend to be in the ethical center, and the rude, cruel, and invasive qualities of his “diabolical” narrative technique are, he will not let us forget, essential elements in our own conventional mind-set. The castle in Mailer’s forest, the redemptive beauty that makes the pain and failures of such unappreciated masterpieces as ''Ancient Evenings'' and ''The Castle in the Forest'' bearable, is always a repetition and ever-free variation of a cavalier wit. As it is in the moment in which Adolf tortures his brother with literature, Mailer’s humor is genuinely funny and, at exactly the same time, resoundingly grim. Put- ting his own idea that our best is often closest to our worst into the mouth of Himmler, Mailer turns into the pain of his own humor and allows—encourages, actually—the nasty identifications his harshest critics made of himself and his work, that he was violent and cruel and “patriarchal” in the sense in which patriarchy is a synonym for Fascism. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to this cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably ''alone''.{{efn|None of this article could have been written if I had not been told the joke about lawyers and sharks by Professor Winfried “the Hun” Schleiner of UC Davis twenty years ago.}}<br /> <br /> ===Notes===<br /> {{notelist}}<br /> <br /> ===Citations===<br /> {{Reflist|20em}}<br /> <br /> ===Works Cited===<br /> {{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br /> * {{cite journal |last=Adamowski |first=T. H. |title=Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer |url= |journal=University of Toronto Quarterly |volume=75 |issue=3 |date=Summer 2006 |pages=883–904 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite news |last=Bosman |first=Julie |date=December 6, 2006 |title=Literature: Do Novels Really Need Bibliographies? |url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061208122042/http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php |archive-date=December 8, 2006 |work=International Herald Tribune |location= |access-date=2020-09-10 |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Chakrabarty |first=Dipesh |date=2007 |title=Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference |url= |location=Princeton, NJ |publisher=Princeton UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} New edition with a new preface by the author.<br /> * {{cite journal |last=Gubar |first=Susan |title=Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries |url= |journal=The Yale Journal of Criticism |volume=14 |issue=1 |date=Spring 2001 |pages=191–215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |title=Mailer’s Cosmology |url= |journal=Modern Language Studies |volume=12 |issue=3 |date=1982 |pages=18-29 |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1983 |title=Ancient Evenings |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dial |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman |authormask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |url= |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman| authormask=1 |date=2007 |title= Why Are We at War |url= |location= New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McCann|first=Sean|title=The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism|url= |journal=English Literary History|volume=67|issue=1|date=2000|pages=293–336|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McDonald|first=Brian|title=Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the 'Very Jewish Jesus' of Norman Mailer's ''The Gospel according to the Son|url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=78–90|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rorty|first=Richard|date=1989|title=Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity|url= |location=New York|publisher=Cambridge UP|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rosenbaum|first=Ron|date=March 6, 2007|title=The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer: What Will He Make of 'Hitler's Chappaquiddick'?|url=http://www.slate.com/id/2161302/|location= |publisher=Slate |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Taylor|first=A. J. P |date=1996|title=The Origins of the Second World War|url= |location=New York|publisher=Touchstone|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite web |url= http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/the-incrediblyunbelieva_b_35882.html|title=The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush |last=Uygur|first=Cenk|date=December 8, 2006|website= |publisher= |access-date=1 August 2008|quote= |ref=harv }}<br /> {{Refend}}<br /> {{Review}}<br /> {{DEFAULTSORT:Their Humor Annoyed Him}}<br /> [[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:CDucharme/sandbox&diff=11617 2020-09-19T01:14:09Z

<p>CDucharme: </p> <hr /> <div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:&lt;span style=&quot;font-size:22px;&gt;{{BASEPAGENAME}}/&lt;/span&gt;&quot;Their Humor Annoyed Him&quot;: Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in ''The Castle in the Forest''}}<br /> {{MR12}}<br /> {{Byline|last=Whalen-Bridge|first=John|abstract=Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omniscience of third person. Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to the ''Castle''’s cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably alone.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08whal}}<br /> {{cquote|Himmler subscribed to the theory that the best human possibilities lie close to the worst.}}<br /> <br /> {{dc|dc=T|here is a joke about attorneys}} that goes like this: lots of people were on a boat, which sank in shark-infested waters. It was horrible. The sharks were tearing all the passengers to pieces as they tried to make it to shore. All the passengers were dying. Except one passenger, who was an attorney. He swam right to the shore. As he was shaking himself off, the bewildered people on the beach asked him, “How come the sharks did not eat you?” He said: “Professional courtesy, I suppose.” We don’t like attorneys, such a joke conveys, because they are not like us. They are like sharks, and we are like people. We laugh at the joke, if we do, to commune in our fantasy-rejection of lawyerly cruelty. But Mailer’s last novel, ''The Castle in the Forest'', is organized around a very different sort of humor. Instead of laughing at lawyers to confirm our fantasy that we ourselves are not sharks, Mailer shocks readers, methodically and skillfully, with the knowledge that they are intimately involved with so much of what they—we, I should say—resoundingly reject. The undertow of laughter in this novel won’t necessarily drag you out to sea, but it will make you ask if you share qualities with what is being held up for laughter and judgment.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s narrator in ''The Castle in the Forest'' speaks with courtesy and intelligence.{{efn|Both Steven Poole in his ''New Statesman'' review, “[https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2007/02/norman-mailer-hitler-novel Sympathy for the Devil]” (19 February 2007) and John Freeman in his ''Independent'' review “[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/sympathy-for-the-devil-norman-mailer-on-his-satanic-new-novel-434647.html Sympathy for the Devil: Norman Mailer on His Satanic New Novel]” (2 February 2007) connect Mailer’s novel and the Rolling Stones’ song in their titles. The Jagger/Richards song, which first appeared on the 1968 album ''Beggers Banquet'', is a dramatic monologue in which Lucifer brags about his achievements, insists on commonalities between himself and his listeners, and demands courtesy if met: he is a “man of wealth and taste,” after all. All criminals are cops, all sinners are saints, and we all killed the Kennedys.}} He calls himself “Dieter” (though it is not clear what he means to “deter”), and he has been a witness to the formation of Adolf Hitler. Dieter explains to the reader that he has been a functionary in the Third Reich, but he has been—long before he came to work for Himmler—part of the Devil’s bureaucracy, with young “Adi” as his most important case. In this way, Mailer manages to bring together the bureaucratic “banality” of evil with the attractions and powers of evil that the word banality cannot subsume.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s final novel (2007) is a concatenation of aesthetic shocks that tells of the formation of Adolf Hitler’s character, beginning with the incestuous influences of his grandfather (about the identity of whom there has been much historical speculation), and continuing through his schooling. Ron Rosenbaum’s ''Explaining Hitler'' can fruitfully be read as a companion-text to Mailer’s novel; its central question is “When and how did Hitler become Hitler?” Mailer’s novel affirms the idea that Hitler developed sociopathic tendencies by his early teens and that these were the foundation for the subsequent obsession with eliminationist anti-Semitism that would come later—but this evolution in Hitler’s darkness is not central to Mailer’s novel. Mailer builds a Hitler to explain a person attracted to murder and deceit, but anti-Semitism is not the driving force of the life Mailer imagines. Mailer does not at all exclude the idea that everything in the novel is tuned toward the Holocaust. The title “The Castle in the Forest,” Dieter tells readers in the final pages, is the translation of a death camp called “''Schlossimwald''” by those inmates who would not, even in the face of ultimate pain and evil, surrender their sense of irony.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=465}} That irony would remain a prized possession under such circumstances will shock some readers, since the phenomena of Hitler and the Holocaust are for many the very limit of irony. In the Rortyean, postmodern, and thoroughly ironic world in which we live, the Holocaust cannot be reduced to a contingent phenomena whose meaning is entirely dependent upon the subject position of the perceiver. Such a way of thinking will earn a comparison with Holocaust deniers. Mailer not only concludes with an homage to ironic camp inmates but also has Dieter-the-demon tell us that the Devil (whom he calls “the Maestro”) is a connoisseur of irony: “All this was uttered by the Maestro with characteristic irony. We never know how serious he might be when he speaks to our mind’s ear. (His voice is a cornucopia of humors.)&quot;{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=78}} Mailer might even be describing himself in this passage.<br /> <br /> A ''New York Times'' article paused to note that a number of recent novels had the odd feature of including bibliographies. The bibliography of ''The Castle in the Forest'' is rich with entries on bee-keeping. Readers of the novel know it is a richly over-determined metaphor, combining elements of modulated brutality and great technical skill. Bee-keeping is perhaps the central metaphor of the novel, and Mailer’s bibliography lists half-a-dozen or so specialist books on the subject. Bee-keeping signifies social order, but order as understood from an awful height, that of humans looking down on potentially profitable insects, or that of God looking down on mischievous creation. The bees themselves are ruthless at maintaining order, and they eliminate all threats to the hive without hesitation. Mailer’s Alois Hitler is presented as a dedicated bee-keeper, and the narrator Dieter—while perhaps disingenuously or even seductively warning readers not to make too much of such events!—presents several scenes in which hives are gassed or burned. Readers might wonder how exactly they could ever make “too much” of such a parallel.<br /> <br /> As important as bee-keeping is to Mailer’s larger narrative loops, it competes in the reader’s imagination with a theme that is given equal air-time but which etches the memory more ruthlessly moment for moment and image for image: transgressive sex. Mailer stays true to his fascination with the idea that God and the Devil partake in human lives through dreams and sex acts. The reader must consider a Freudian primal scene in which young Adolf witnesses Alois and Klara in the sixty-nine position, and witnessing the fictional event makes the reader equal, in some imaginative sense, to demons like Dieter who enter minds and bodies in the most intimate situations imaginable.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omni- science of third person. By “epistemological realism,” I mean that we can only experience our own minds directly, unless we have supernormal powers, and furthermore we can only draw inferences about other minds.{{efn|I am not using “epistemological realism” in the standard way, which refers specifically to the form of objectivism in which objects exist independently of one’s own mind in support of a correspondence theory of truth. Such objects would then, presumably, be available for apprehension by subjects from various perspectives, ameliorating the ways in<br /> which contemporary, post-Nietzschean perspectivism subverts assertions about an objective world. Mailer’s attraction to what I’m calling “epistemological realism,” on the other hand, finds ways of conflating first- and third-person perspectives—such as by resorting to the epistolary novel in the omega manuscript of ''Harlot’s Ghost'' to ensure that all perceptions are grounded in the first-person-singular perspective—precisely because Mailer’s fictions do not construct worlds out of a comfortable, objectivist epistemological realism.}} So first-person-singular narration is as close as fiction can get to what an individual person without telepathic skills can really know. Yet our success in the world depends entirely on having confidence in inferences drawn about other minds, and to develop this confidence we need to develop exactly the sort of imagination found in a convincing social novel. But in ''The Castle in the Forest'', Mailer’s narrator is a demon from hell who takes pride in his work; the associative connection Mailer develops at length does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that all human knowing is damned, but we are privy, as it were, to the intrusions of devils much, much more than we are, in Mailer’s fictional rendition, to the mind-intrusions of angels.<br /> <br /> What are we to make of a carefully wrought fictional scene in which the Hitlers, before young Adi even comes into the world, adventure past ordinary naughty sex into pedal-to-the-metal analingus? In foregrounding sex acts of this sort in a book purportedly about radical evil, Mailer risks being discussed in terms of radical eccentricity.{{efn|Ron Rosenbaum, author of ''Explaining Hitler'',, warns Mailer against pursuing, in a rumored sequel to ''The Castle in the Forest'', a sexual explanation of Hitler’s evil. See his essay “The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer” for a convincing admonition about the limits of psycho-sexual explanations of Hitler.}} Or, one could say that approaching radical evil through sexual obscenity is artistically obscene. However we put it, the novel intentionally jars the reader just as much as ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), and the central narrative device of ''that'' novel was an act of fellatio between two ghosts in a tomb. Here is the sex act between Alois and Klara that Mailer’s young Hitler witnesses: <br /> <br /> We may remember that the last time we saw Alois, he was burying his nose and lips in Klara’s vulva, his tongue as long and demonic as a devil’s phallus. (Be it said: we are not without our contributions to these arts.) Alois was certainly being aided by us. Never before had he given himself so completely to this exercise, and quickly he had become good at it, and so quickly that no explanation is possible unless we are given credit as well. (Which is why we speak of the Evil One when joining in the act—we do have the power to pass these lubricious gifts to men and women even when we are not attempting to convert them into clients.){{sfn|Mailer|1983|p=98}}<br /> <br /> What shall we make of this? One possible response will be to link Mailer’s use of the Holocaust with that of Sylvia Plath.{{efn|See Gubar for a discussion of attacks on Plath for reducing the Holocaust to a metaphor.}} One could say each author uses the pain of others to provide historical ballast to pain that is really individual. It would be the height of egotism to use the deaths of six million in order to hide the idiosyncrasy of one’s pain or the eccentricity of one’s ideas.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. He consistently presented himself as an author with an important vision, one worthy of “the mind of Joyce” or Melville, since the mid-1950s, and critics debated whether he ever wrote his ''Ulysses'' or ''Moby Dick''. Mailer’s personal ambition, however, was never in question.<br /> <br /> The cosmological vision has been reiterated in all of Mailer’s major works, including ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (1991), and ''The Gospel according to the Son'' (1997).{{efn|See Lennon’s “Mailer’s Cosmology” for a discussion of Mailer’s cosmological foundation, which is relatively stable across the decades from the mid-Sixties through Mailer’s final work.}} In each of these novel’s (if we allow for ''The Executioner’s Song'' as a “nonfiction novel”), the struggle between divine forces explains the relation between apparently insignificant actors in ways that factor out what Mailer calls “the Absurd.” The divinity potential of quotidian existence is the binding material in Mailer’s cosmos, with “divinity” meaning extraordinary, magical, and foundational. The experience of the divine overlaps with the extraordinary in the manner of aesthetic wonder, and this commonality allows Mailer to find God in the aesthetic aspects of sexual experience, but the divine must be more than ''merely'' extraordinary. The experience of divinity, which some people achieve and many do not, transcends ordinary experience, meaning that, in Mailer’s Romantic articulation, there is a hierarchy of knowing, and that only some (heroic) persons are able to glimpse the magical foundations of being. Such a vision requires huge risks, which explains why many would prefer not to see what Mailer’s heroic seers may encounter, and those who take such risks are not necessarily good people.<br /> <br /> In ''Ancient Evenings'', which was composed during the Carter presidency, the weak, vacillating pharaoh Ramses IX must decide whether or not to trust the protagonist Menenhetet, a figure who has earned scorn in his attempts to accumulate visionary power through experiments with scatological ceremonies and incest. In this novel Mailer stages his idea that we must make “bargains with evil” into a historical setting that could be called “Before Good and Evil.” Mailer’s setting predates the monotheistic moral codes that undergird our language of morality, thus showing the Eurocentric view to be, in Chakrabarty’s terms, “provincial.” This incarnation of the Mailer vision is, then, radically Manichean, since the Egyptian gods are not centered by a transcendent notion of the Good, against which an evil force defines itself. One could, through cosmological backformation, interpret the theomachy between Osiris and Set as a war between good and evil. In any event, the nature of goodness is never really in question. Artistically modulated growth—a middle way between stagnation and the uncontrolled growth of cancer—has always been the sign of health in Mailer’s universe. Mailer’s praise of Osiris resonates exactly with the adaptations of John Dewey’s “live creature.”<br /> <br /> The existential mystery animating Mailer’s visions has to do not with the existence of good and evil but rather with knowing which is which. Rosenbaum gives a name to the tendency to ground our moral awareness in a false absolute: ''argumentum ad Hitlerum''. When we can no longer endure uncer- tainties, when we have run out of negative capability, we appeal to Hitler to end the argument: ''Hitler'' was evil. The seduction of absolutist thinking, as Mailer shows in his Cold War articulation, is that we name the world in terms of Good and Evil and then proceed to identify our own actions and interests with the Good in self-interested and thus delusory ways: “There is no emotion on earth more powerful than anti-Americanism. To the rest of the world, America is the Garden of Eden. Unmitigated envy, the ugliest emotion of them all.”<br /> “Yessir.” (Harlot’s Ghost 340)<br /> <br /> As George Bush put it in the wake of the 9/11 (2001) attack on the World Trade Center, you are either with us or you are against us. You are either with God or the Devil. The tendency and aim of such a formulation is to make everyone into a “yes-man,” just like the CIA analyst in the quotation above who quickly says “Yessir” to Harlot, Mailer’s architect of American postwar paranoia. In The Gospel according to the Son, Mailer resists the equal-and-opposite fallacy, ''argumentum ad Jesus'', in which one identifies self-with-Jesus-with-Goodness. Mailer despises the ways in which the Bush White House rolls together what Dieter of The Castle in the Forest calls “cheap patriotism” and “cheap prayer”{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=386}} , but in ''The Gospel according to the Son'' Mailer wishes not to attack a “cheap” Jesus but to imagine an authentic one.{{efn|See ''Why Are We at War?'' if you doubt Mailer despises the mentality and policies of the Bush administration.}} Mailer’s authentic Jesus (as opposed to the authentic Jesus of mainstream Christians) is one who cannot know for sure what the effects of his actions will be. Though Jesus narrates his own gospel, Mailer denies us a text on which to build a fundamentalist worldview. Here is how Brian McDonald presents the narrative uncertainty in “Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the ‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel according to the Son”'': The story, Mailer’s Jesus reassures us, “is true,” but like a careful witness testifying under oath he is quick to add the caveat, “at least to all that I recall” (Gospel 2).<br /> <br /> Mailer’s critics ravaged him for presuming to write in the voice of Jesus, and Mailer clearly anticipates the charge when he has ''his'' Jesus say with nice condescension that the four synoptic gospels were good as far as they went, but they went too far. Mailer’s novelistic hubris, if it should be called that, is in presuming to know the views of God and the Devil and everything in between, but it is presumptuous of the critic to assume that Mailer is ever unaware of the effects of ego, as it is an important theme in all of the “epic” works here discussed:<br /> <br /> When one has become an overseer of death who holds the power to liquidate masses of people, one is also in great need of a very hard shell to the ego in order to feel no intimate horror over the price to one’s soul. Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification—patriotism! That is still the most dependable instrument for guiding the masses, although it may yet be replaced by revealed religion. We love fundamentalists. Their faith offers us every promise of developing into the final weapon of mass destruction.<br /> <br /> Dieter provocatively ranks Hitler as a “statesmen,” thus restating the A. J. P. Taylor argument that Hitler would have been counted a great statesmen if only he had died at the right time, but the honorific word is inverted when we see, in context, that the necessary condition for being a statesman is an ego, a psychic callous to protect one’s sleep from meaningful knowledge of one’s actions.{{efn|Readers would be wrong to assume that Mailer is agreeing with A. J. P. Taylor. It is part of Dieter’s worldview and it is in his personal interest to defend the kind of egotism that is an insulation against subtle awareness of the feelings of others. Lest we think—as his typical detractors certainly would—that Mailer is defending egotism of this sort, we should recall the image of Ramses II after the Battle of Kadesh, the pharaoh taking care to heft every single amputated hand of the vanquished Hittite soldiers while the rest of the army enjoy the spoils of war in the most libidinal way. Mailer’s Ramses II is, in this one respect at least, the ethical antipode to contemporary leaders who, according to Dieter’s own political realism, must ''necessarily'' shield themselves from awareness of the consequences of their actions.}} When Dieter stirs in “patriotism” and fundamentalism, it becomes clear that Mailer’s Hitler has been used as a “cudgel” to beat George W. Bush, a president who has been most politely described as “incurious” regarding the facts of the world.{{efn|Cenk Uygur, a blogger from ''The Huffington Post'', has entitled his column on President<br /> Bush’s lack of curiosity “The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush.”}} “Cudgel,” in ''The Castle in the Forest'', is the name devils such as Dieter give to the Angels, who cause beings pain in their sleep when their actions are hateful rather than loving.<br /> <br /> Antithetical elements call attention to one another, reminding readers of nothing so much as the presence of the author himself. Think back to Mailer’s character Roth in ''The Naked and the Dead'', and of Stephen Richards Rojack walking the parapet in ''An American Dream''. Mailer’s writings are full of intentional impasses and voracious chasms. Readers who cannot make the leap will quickly fly from the page and declare Mailer unreadable. How are we to make the leap from the pure (if uncertain) speech of Jesus back to the vulva of Hitler’s mother? Mailer’s narratives are visionary landscapes designed to engulf some readers while allowing others the chance to develop in admittedly idiosyncratic ways—but it is a mindless response to note Mailer’s stylistic self-reference without noting the antipodal contextualization of his stylistic “egotism.”<br /> <br /> Mailer shows every awareness in his artful rendition of the Devil’s shaping hand that ''ego'' is one of the Devil’s most important tools, but then, most shockingly, he will put in a narrative turn that does nothing so much as foreground the author. Authorial egotism comes into the foreground of Hitler’s mind when he chooses among intellectual influences: <br /> <br /> He certainly rejected Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him. It was too personal—as if they were much too pleased with what they were saying. Not serious enough, Adolf decided. The other two, Kant and Schleiermacher, he simply could not read. After Jahn, his highest pleasure came from the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers. That had also been assigned to his class. Those were good stories, and deep!{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=377}}<br /> <br /> Adolf uses the stories of Grimm to terrorize his younger brother Edmund, whom Mailer imagines as Hitler’s first murder victim: in a variation of the killing of Abel, jealous Hitler intentionally passes Edmund the measles that will kill him. This passage is one of a dozen or so highly literate moments in ''The Castle in the Forest'' in which Mailer positively revels in the ironies that were once so properly shocking, those attaching to the apparent incongruity of Nazis who loved Beethoven.<br /> <br /> But not all writers and not all ironies are the same—it is not as if Mailer is inviting plague on all the literary houses. Mailer, if I read him rightly, mocks the rectitude with which we have sometimes allowed ourselves to think that literature as such was a proof of superior humanity, when much more is required. Hitler’s literary tastes give some hint of his taste for cruelty, as his sadistic use of the Grimm stories suggests, but even more important is his impatience with queer, unsettling humor, that of Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him? Mailer’s humor here is profound: he knows—has known since he meditated on the career of Henry Miller in the mid-1970s—that his own unsettling humor would “annoy” many of his readers. Merely to make oneself an antipode to Adolf is the laziest move imaginable, but this is not at all where Mailer leaves the matter. He goes on to reveal why Goethe and Schiller annoyed Adi: they reminded him too much that they exist.<br /> <br /> It cannot be said that this humor is inherently ethical. The freedom of humor (and it is this often disappointing freedom of the other to disappoint you that proves that the other is not a function of your own fantasy) has its horrible uses. Hitler’s ''literary'' torture of Edmund is one of the most grimly funny moments in a novel replete with dark humor. Young Adolf has been reading Edmund terrifying Grimm stories:<br /> <br /> “Do you want another story?”<br /> &quot;Maybe not.&quot;<br /> “This one is the best,” said Adolf.<br /> &quot;Is it truly the best?&quot;<br /> &quot;Yes&quot;<br /> “Then maybe I don’t want to hear it.”<br /> “It’s about a young man who is ordered to sleep with a corpse.<br /> In time to come you, too, may have to sleep next to a dead man.” At this point, Edmund shrieked. Then he fainted.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|379}}<br /> <br /> In genuinely frightening ways that inter-leaven the literary and the wicked, Mailer exacerbates our moral consciences; American literature has not been as darkly funny since Twain’s ''Letters from the Earth''. Twain’s and Mailer’s are good stories, and deep!<br /> <br /> Mailer’s laughter in The Castle in the Forest is not the raucous, adolescent laughter of America’s 1960s black humor fiction, a laughter that is always implicitly the laughter of an overly stable know-it-all ''we''.{{efn|One could say that Yossarian is a character who must act from isolation even when he crucially chooses to act for the sake of others, but I would still characterize the laughter aroused by the novel as more social. This we carried over quite smoothly<br /> from the novel to the film ''M*A*S*H'' and to the buddy-scenarios of the television version as well. Consider the narrative situation of ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'', Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo narrative: however iconoclastic and anarchic the voice of Raoul Duke, this road novel depends for it’s effects on internalizing the “we,” so Duke is accompanied by Dr. Gonzo, his Samoan attorney (who is based on Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Mexican-American political activist). If we look through ''Castle'' carefully, we will see that Mailer has, again and again, done without the protections of an imaginary men’s club.}} We laugh at the bureaucrats in ''Catch-22''. There’s an unsettling oddity to Mailer’s style, though, an awareness that, like Dieter’s, Mailer’s humor is both on the mark and a bit to one side of the main stream of events. Mailer does not pretend to be in the ethical center, and the rude, cruel, and invasive qualities of his “diabolical” narrative technique are, he will not let us forget, essential elements in our own conventional mind-set. The castle in Mailer’s forest, the redemptive beauty that makes the pain and failures of such unappreciated masterpieces as Ancient Evenings and The Castle in the Forest bearable, is always a repetition and ever-free variation of a cavalier wit. As it is in the moment in which Adolf tortures his brother with literature, Mailer’s humor is genuinely funny and, at exactly the same time, resoundingly grim. Put- ting his own idea that our best is often closest to our worst into the mouth of Himmler, Mailer turns into the pain of his own humor and allows—encourages, actually—the nasty identifications his harshest critics made of himself and his work, that he was violent and cruel and “patriarchal” in the sense in which patriarchy is a synonym for Fascism. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to this cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably ''alone''.{{efn|None of this article could have been written if I had not been told the joke about lawyers and sharks by Professor Winfried “the Hun” Schleiner of UC Davis twenty years ago.}}<br /> <br /> ===Notes===<br /> {{notelist}}<br /> <br /> ===Citations===<br /> {{Reflist|20em}}<br /> <br /> ===Works Cited===<br /> {{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br /> * {{cite journal |last=Adamowski |first=T. H. |title=Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer |url= |journal=University of Toronto Quarterly |volume=75 |issue=3 |date=Summer 2006 |pages=883–904 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite news |last=Bosman |first=Julie |date=December 6, 2006 |title=Literature: Do Novels Really Need Bibliographies? |url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061208122042/http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php |archive-date=December 8, 2006 |work=International Herald Tribune |location= |access-date=2020-09-10 |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Chakrabarty |first=Dipesh |date=2007 |title=Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference |url= |location=Princeton, NJ |publisher=Princeton UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} New edition with a new preface by the author.<br /> * {{cite journal |last=Gubar |first=Susan |title=Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries |url= |journal=The Yale Journal of Criticism |volume=14 |issue=1 |date=Spring 2001 |pages=191–215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |title=Mailer’s Cosmology |url= |journal=Modern Language Studies |volume=12 |issue=3 |date=1982 |pages=18-29 |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1983 |title=Ancient Evenings |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dial |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman |authormask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |url= |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman| authormask=1 |date=2007 |title= Why Are We at War |url= |location= New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McCann|first=Sean|title=The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism|url= |journal=English Literary History|volume=67|issue=1|date=2000|pages=293–336|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McDonald|first=Brian|title=Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the 'Very Jewish Jesus' of Norman Mailer's ''The Gospel according to the Son|url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=78–90|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rorty|first=Richard|date=1989|title=Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity|url= |location=New York|publisher=Cambridge UP|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rosenbaum|first=Ron|date=March 6, 2007|title=The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer: What Will He Make of 'Hitler's Chappaquiddick'?|url=http://www.slate.com/id/2161302/|location= |publisher=Slate |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Taylor|first=A. J. P |date=1996|title=The Origins of the Second World War|url= |location=New York|publisher=Touchstone|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite web |url= http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/the-incrediblyunbelieva_b_35882.html|title=The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush |last=Uygur|first=Cenk|date=December 8, 2006|website= |publisher= |access-date=1 August 2008|quote= |ref=harv }}<br /> {{Refend}}<br /> {{Review}}<br /> {{DEFAULTSORT:Their Humor Annoyed Him}}<br /> [[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:CDucharme/sandbox&diff=11616 2020-09-19T01:12:31Z

<p>CDucharme: </p> <hr /> <div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:&lt;span style=&quot;font-size:22px;&gt;{{BASEPAGENAME}}/&lt;/span&gt;&quot;Their Humor Annoyed Him&quot;: Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in ''The Castle in the Forest''}}<br /> {{MR12}}<br /> {{Byline|last=Whalen-Bridge|first=John|abstract=Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omniscience of third person. Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to the ''Castle''’s cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably alone.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08whal}}<br /> {{cquote|Himmler subscribed to the theory that the best human possibilities lie close to the worst.}}<br /> <br /> {{dc|dc=T|here is a joke about attorneys}} that goes like this: lots of people were on a boat, which sank in shark-infested waters. It was horrible. The sharks were tearing all the passengers to pieces as they tried to make it to shore. All the passengers were dying. Except one passenger, who was an attorney. He swam right to the shore. As he was shaking himself off, the bewildered people on the beach asked him, “How come the sharks did not eat you?” He said: “Professional courtesy, I suppose.” We don’t like attorneys, such a joke conveys, because they are not like us. They are like sharks, and we are like people. We laugh at the joke, if we do, to commune in our fantasy-rejection of lawyerly cruelty. But Mailer’s last novel, ''The Castle in the Forest'', is organized around a very different sort of humor. Instead of laughing at lawyers to confirm our fantasy that we ourselves are not sharks, Mailer shocks readers, methodically and skillfully, with the knowledge that they are intimately involved with so much of what they—we, I should say—resoundingly reject. The undertow of laughter in this novel won’t necessarily drag you out to sea, but it will make you ask if you share qualities with what is being held up for laughter and judgment.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s narrator in ''The Castle in the Forest'' speaks with courtesy and intelligence.{{efn|Both Steven Poole in his ''New Statesman'' review, “[https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2007/02/norman-mailer-hitler-novel Sympathy for the Devil]” (19 February 2007) and John Freeman in his ''Independent'' review “[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/sympathy-for-the-devil-norman-mailer-on-his-satanic-new-novel-434647.html Sympathy for the Devil: Norman Mailer on His Satanic New Novel]” (2 February 2007) connect Mailer’s novel and the Rolling Stones’ song in their titles. The Jagger/Richards song, which first appeared on the 1968 album ''Beggers Banquet'', is a dramatic monologue in which Lucifer brags about his achievements, insists on commonalities between himself and his listeners, and demands courtesy if met: he is a “man of wealth and taste,” after all. All criminals are cops, all sinners are saints, and we all killed the Kennedys.}} He calls himself “Dieter” (though it is not clear what he means to “deter”), and he has been a witness to the formation of Adolf Hitler. Dieter explains to the reader that he has been a functionary in the Third Reich, but he has been—long before he came to work for Himmler—part of the Devil’s bureaucracy, with young “Adi” as his most important case. In this way, Mailer manages to bring together the bureaucratic “banality” of evil with the attractions and powers of evil that the word banality cannot subsume.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s final novel (2007) is a concatenation of aesthetic shocks that tells of the formation of Adolf Hitler’s character, beginning with the incestuous influences of his grandfather (about the identity of whom there has been much historical speculation), and continuing through his schooling. Ron Rosenbaum’s ''Explaining Hitler'' can fruitfully be read as a companion-text to Mailer’s novel; its central question is “When and how did Hitler become Hitler?” Mailer’s novel affirms the idea that Hitler developed sociopathic tendencies by his early teens and that these were the foundation for the subsequent obsession with eliminationist anti-Semitism that would come later—but this evolution in Hitler’s darkness is not central to Mailer’s novel. Mailer builds a Hitler to explain a person attracted to murder and deceit, but anti-Semitism is not the driving force of the life Mailer imagines. Mailer does not at all exclude the idea that everything in the novel is tuned toward the Holocaust. The title “The Castle in the Forest,” Dieter tells readers in the final pages, is the translation of a death camp called “''Schlossimwald''” by those inmates who would not, even in the face of ultimate pain and evil, surrender their sense of irony.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=465}} That irony would remain a prized possession under such circumstances will shock some readers, since the phenomena of Hitler and the Holocaust are for many the very limit of irony. In the Rortyean, postmodern, and thoroughly ironic world in which we live, the Holocaust cannot be reduced to a contingent phenomena whose meaning is entirely dependent upon the subject position of the perceiver. Such a way of thinking will earn a comparison with Holocaust deniers. Mailer not only concludes with an homage to ironic camp inmates but also has Dieter-the-demon tell us that the Devil (whom he calls “the Maestro”) is a connoisseur of irony: “All this was uttered by the Maestro with characteristic irony. We never know how serious he might be when he speaks to our mind’s ear. (His voice is a cornucopia of humors.)&quot;{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=78}} Mailer might even be describing himself in this passage.<br /> <br /> A ''New York Times'' article paused to note that a number of recent novels had the odd feature of including bibliographies. The bibliography of ''The Castle in the Forest'' is rich with entries on bee-keeping. Readers of the novel know it is a richly over-determined metaphor, combining elements of modulated brutality and great technical skill. Bee-keeping is perhaps the central metaphor of the novel, and Mailer’s bibliography lists half-a-dozen or so specialist books on the subject. Bee-keeping signifies social order, but order as understood from an awful height, that of humans looking down on potentially profitable insects, or that of God looking down on mischievous creation. The bees themselves are ruthless at maintaining order, and they eliminate all threats to the hive without hesitation. Mailer’s Alois Hitler is presented as a dedicated bee-keeper, and the narrator Dieter—while perhaps disingenuously or even seductively warning readers not to make too much of such events!—presents several scenes in which hives are gassed or burned. Readers might wonder how exactly they could ever make “too much” of such a parallel.<br /> <br /> As important as bee-keeping is to Mailer’s larger narrative loops, it competes in the reader’s imagination with a theme that is given equal air-time but which etches the memory more ruthlessly moment for moment and image for image: transgressive sex. Mailer stays true to his fascination with the idea that God and the Devil partake in human lives through dreams and sex acts. The reader must consider a Freudian primal scene in which young Adolf witnesses Alois and Klara in the sixty-nine position, and witnessing the fictional event makes the reader equal, in some imaginative sense, to demons like Dieter who enter minds and bodies in the most intimate situations imaginable.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omni- science of third person. By “epistemological realism,” I mean that we can only experience our own minds directly, unless we have supernormal powers, and furthermore we can only draw inferences about other minds.{{efn|I am not using “epistemological realism” in the standard way, which refers specifically to the form of objectivism in which objects exist independently of one’s own mind in support of a correspondence theory of truth. Such objects would then, presumably, be available for apprehension by subjects from various perspectives, ameliorating the ways in<br /> which contemporary, post-Nietzschean perspectivism subverts assertions about an objective world. Mailer’s attraction to what I’m calling “epistemological realism,” on the other hand, finds ways of conflating first- and third-person perspectives—such as by resorting to the epistolary novel in the omega manuscript of ''Harlot’s Ghost'' to ensure that all perceptions are grounded in the first-person-singular perspective—precisely because Mailer’s fictions do not construct worlds out of a comfortable, objectivist epistemological realism.}} So first-person-singular narration is as close as fiction can get to what an individual person without telepathic skills can really know. Yet our success in the world depends entirely on having confidence in inferences drawn about other minds, and to develop this confidence we need to develop exactly the sort of imagination found in a convincing social novel. But in ''The Castle in the Forest'', Mailer’s narrator is a demon from hell who takes pride in his work; the associative connection Mailer develops at length does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that all human knowing is damned, but we are privy, as it were, to the intrusions of devils much, much more than we are, in Mailer’s fictional rendition, to the mind-intrusions of angels.<br /> <br /> What are we to make of a carefully wrought fictional scene in which the Hitlers, before young Adi even comes into the world, adventure past ordinary naughty sex into pedal-to-the-metal analingus? In foregrounding sex acts of this sort in a book purportedly about radical evil, Mailer risks being discussed in terms of radical eccentricity.{{efn|Ron Rosenbaum, author of ''Explaining Hitler'',, warns Mailer against pursuing, in a rumored sequel to ''The Castle in the Forest'', a sexual explanation of Hitler’s evil. See his essay “The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer” for a convincing admonition about the limits of psycho-sexual explanations of Hitler.}} Or, one could say that approaching radical evil through sexual obscenity is artistically obscene. However we put it, the novel intentionally jars the reader just as much as ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), and the central narrative device of ''that'' novel was an act of fellatio between two ghosts in a tomb. Here is the sex act between Alois and Klara that Mailer’s young Hitler witnesses: <br /> <br /> We may remember that the last time we saw Alois, he was burying his nose and lips in Klara’s vulva, his tongue as long and demonic as a devil’s phallus. (Be it said: we are not without our contributions to these arts.) Alois was certainly being aided by us. Never before had he given himself so completely to this exercise, and quickly he had become good at it, and so quickly that no explanation is possible unless we are given credit as well. (Which is why we speak of the Evil One when joining in the act—we do have the power to pass these lubricious gifts to men and women even when we are not attempting to convert them into clients.){{sfn|Mailer|1983|p=98}}<br /> <br /> What shall we make of this? One possible response will be to link Mailer’s use of the Holocaust with that of Sylvia Plath.{{efn|See Gubar for a discussion of attacks on Plath for reducing the Holocaust to a metaphor.}} One could say each author uses the pain of others to provide historical ballast to pain that is really individual. It would be the height of egotism to use the deaths of six million in order to hide the idiosyncrasy of one’s pain or the eccentricity of one’s ideas.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. He consistently presented himself as an author with an important vision, one worthy of “the mind of Joyce” or Melville, since the mid-1950s, and critics debated whether he ever wrote his ''Ulysses'' or ''Moby Dick''. Mailer’s personal ambition, however, was never in question.<br /> <br /> The cosmological vision has been reiterated in all of Mailer’s major works, including ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (1991), and ''The Gospel according to the Son'' (1997).{{efn|See Lennon’s “Mailer’s Cosmology” for a discussion of Mailer’s cosmological foundation, which is relatively stable across the decades from the mid-Sixties through Mailer’s final work.}} In each of these novel’s (if we allow for ''The Executioner’s Song'' as a “nonfiction novel”), the struggle between divine forces explains the relation between apparently insignificant actors in ways that factor out what Mailer calls “the Absurd.” The divinity potential of quotidian existence is the binding material in Mailer’s cosmos, with “divinity” meaning extraordinary, magical, and foundational. The experience of the divine overlaps with the extraordinary in the manner of aesthetic wonder, and this commonality allows Mailer to find God in the aesthetic aspects of sexual experience, but the divine must be more than ''merely'' extraordinary. The experience of divinity, which some people achieve and many do not, transcends ordinary experience, meaning that, in Mailer’s Romantic articulation, there is a hierarchy of knowing, and that only some (heroic) persons are able to glimpse the magical foundations of being. Such a vision requires huge risks, which explains why many would prefer not to see what Mailer’s heroic seers may encounter, and those who take such risks are not necessarily good people.<br /> <br /> In ''Ancient Evenings'', which was composed during the Carter presidency, the weak, vacillating pharaoh Ramses IX must decide whether or not to trust the protagonist Menenhetet, a figure who has earned scorn in his attempts to accumulate visionary power through experiments with scatological ceremonies and incest. In this novel Mailer stages his idea that we must make “bargains with evil” into a historical setting that could be called “Before Good and Evil.” Mailer’s setting predates the monotheistic moral codes that undergird our language of morality, thus showing the Eurocentric view to be, in Chakrabarty’s terms, “provincial.” This incarnation of the Mailer vision is, then, radically Manichean, since the Egyptian gods are not centered by a transcendent notion of the Good, against which an evil force defines itself. One could, through cosmological backformation, interpret the theomachy between Osiris and Set as a war between good and evil. In any event, the nature of goodness is never really in question. Artistically modulated growth—a middle way between stagnation and the uncontrolled growth of cancer—has always been the sign of health in Mailer’s universe. Mailer’s praise of Osiris resonates exactly with the adaptations of John Dewey’s “live creature.”<br /> <br /> The existential mystery animating Mailer’s visions has to do not with the existence of good and evil but rather with knowing which is which. Rosenbaum gives a name to the tendency to ground our moral awareness in a false absolute: ''argumentum ad Hitlerum''. When we can no longer endure uncer- tainties, when we have run out of negative capability, we appeal to Hitler to end the argument: ''Hitler'' was evil. The seduction of absolutist thinking, as Mailer shows in his Cold War articulation, is that we name the world in terms of Good and Evil and then proceed to identify our own actions and interests with the Good in self-interested and thus delusory ways: “There is no emotion on earth more powerful than anti-Americanism. To the rest of the world, America is the Garden of Eden. Unmitigated envy, the ugliest emotion of them all.”<br /> “Yessir.” (Harlot’s Ghost 340)<br /> <br /> As George Bush put it in the wake of the 9/11 (2001) attack on the World Trade Center, you are either with us or you are against us. You are either with God or the Devil. The tendency and aim of such a formulation is to make everyone into a “yes-man,” just like the CIA analyst in the quotation above who quickly says “Yessir” to Harlot, Mailer’s architect of American postwar paranoia. In The Gospel according to the Son, Mailer resists the equal-and-opposite fallacy, ''argumentum ad Jesus'', in which one identifies self-with-Jesus-with-Goodness. Mailer despises the ways in which the Bush White House rolls together what Dieter of The Castle in the Forest calls “cheap patriotism” and “cheap prayer”{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=386}} , but in ''The Gospel according to the Son'' Mailer wishes not to attack a “cheap” Jesus but to imagine an authentic one.{{efn|See ''Why Are We at War?'' if you doubt Mailer despises the mentality and policies of the Bush administration.}} Mailer’s authentic Jesus (as opposed to the authentic Jesus of mainstream Christians) is one who cannot know for sure what the effects of his actions will be. Though Jesus narrates his own gospel, Mailer denies us a text on which to build a fundamentalist worldview. Here is how Brian McDonald presents the narrative uncertainty in “Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the ‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel according to the Son”'': The story, Mailer’s Jesus reassures us, “is true,” but like a careful witness testifying under oath he is quick to add the caveat, “at least to all that I recall” (Gospel 2).<br /> <br /> Mailer’s critics ravaged him for presuming to write in the voice of Jesus, and Mailer clearly anticipates the charge when he has ''his'' Jesus say with nice condescension that the four synoptic gospels were good as far as they went, but they went too far. Mailer’s novelistic hubris, if it should be called that, is in presuming to know the views of God and the Devil and everything in between, but it is presumptuous of the critic to assume that Mailer is ever unaware of the effects of ego, as it is an important theme in all of the “epic” works here discussed:<br /> <br /> When one has become an overseer of death who holds the power to liquidate masses of people, one is also in great need of a very hard shell to the ego in order to feel no intimate horror over the price to one’s soul. Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification—patriotism! That is still the most dependable instrument for guiding the masses, although it may yet be replaced by revealed religion. We love fundamentalists. Their faith offers us every promise of developing into the final weapon of mass destruction.<br /> <br /> Dieter provocatively ranks Hitler as a “statesmen,” thus restating the A. J. P. Taylor argument that Hitler would have been counted a great statesmen if only he had died at the right time, but the honorific word is inverted when we see, in context, that the necessary condition for being a statesman is an ego, a psychic callous to protect one’s sleep from meaningful knowledge of one’s actions.{{efn|Readers would be wrong to assume that Mailer is agreeing with A. J. P. Taylor. It is part of Dieter’s worldview and it is in his personal interest to defend the kind of egotism that is an insulation against subtle awareness of the feelings of others. Lest we think—as his typical detractors certainly would—that Mailer is defending egotism of this sort, we should recall the image of Ramses II after the Battle of Kadesh, the pharaoh taking care to heft every single amputated hand of the vanquished Hittite soldiers while the rest of the army enjoy the spoils of war in the most libidinal way. Mailer’s Ramses II is, in this one respect at least, the ethical antipode to contemporary leaders who, according to Dieter’s own political realism, must ''necessarily'' shield themselves from awareness of the consequences of their actions.}} When Dieter stirs in “patriotism” and fundamentalism, it becomes clear that Mailer’s Hitler has been used as a “cudgel” to beat George W. Bush, a president who has been most politely described as “incurious” regarding the facts of the world.{{efn|Cenk Uygur, a blogger from ''The Huffington Post'', has entitled his column on President<br /> Bush’s lack of curiosity “The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush.”}} “Cudgel,” in ''The Castle in the Forest'', is the name devils such as Dieter give to the Angels, who cause beings pain in their sleep when their actions are hateful rather than loving.<br /> <br /> Antithetical elements call attention to one another, reminding readers of nothing so much as the presence of the author himself. Think back to Mailer’s character Roth in ''The Naked and the Dead'', and of Stephen Richards Rojack walking the parapet in ''An American Dream''. Mailer’s writings are full of intentional impasses and voracious chasms. Readers who cannot make the leap will quickly fly from the page and declare Mailer unreadable. How are we to make the leap from the pure (if uncertain) speech of Jesus back to the vulva of Hitler’s mother? Mailer’s narratives are visionary landscapes designed to engulf some readers while allowing others the chance to develop in admittedly idiosyncratic ways—but it is a mindless response to note Mailer’s stylistic self-reference without noting the antipodal contextualization of his stylistic “egotism.”<br /> <br /> Mailer shows every awareness in his artful rendition of the Devil’s shaping hand that ''ego'' is one of the Devil’s most important tools, but then, most shockingly, he will put in a narrative turn that does nothing so much as foreground the author. Authorial egotism comes into the foreground of Hitler’s mind when he chooses among intellectual influences: <br /> <br /> He certainly rejected Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him. It was too personal—as if they were much too pleased with what they were saying. Not serious enough, Adolf decided. The other two, Kant and Schleiermacher, he simply could not read. After Jahn, his highest pleasure came from the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers. That had also been assigned to his class. Those were good stories, and deep!{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=377}}<br /> <br /> Adolf uses the stories of Grimm to terrorize his younger brother Edmund, whom Mailer imagines as Hitler’s first murder victim: in a variation of the killing of Abel, jealous Hitler intentionally passes Edmund the measles that will kill him. This passage is one of a dozen or so highly literate moments in ''The Castle in the Forest'' in which Mailer positively revels in the ironies that were once so properly shocking, those attaching to the apparent incongruity of Nazis who loved Beethoven.<br /> <br /> But not all writers and not all ironies are the same—it is not as if Mailer is inviting plague on all the literary houses. Mailer, if I read him rightly, mocks the rectitude with which we have sometimes allowed ourselves to think that literature as such was a proof of superior humanity, when much more is required. Hitler’s literary tastes give some hint of his taste for cruelty, as his sadistic use of the Grimm stories suggests, but even more important is his impatience with queer, unsettling humor, that of Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him? Mailer’s humor here is profound: he knows—has known since he meditated on the career of Henry Miller in the mid-1970s—that his own unsettling humor would “annoy” many of his readers. Merely to make oneself an antipode to Adolf is the laziest move imaginable, but this is not at all where Mailer leaves the matter. He goes on to reveal why Goethe and Schiller annoyed Adi: they reminded him too much that they exist.<br /> <br /> It cannot be said that this humor is inherently ethical. The freedom of humor (and it is this often disappointing freedom of the other to disappoint you that proves that the other is not a function of your own fantasy) has its horrible uses. Hitler’s ''literary'' torture of Edmund is one of the most grimly funny moments in a novel replete with dark humor. Young Adolf has been reading Edmund terrifying Grimm stories:<br /> “Do you want another story?”<br /> &quot;Maybe not.&quot;<br /> “This one is the best,” said Adolf.<br /> &quot;Is it truly the best?&quot;<br /> &quot;Yes&quot;<br /> “Then maybe I don’t want to hear it.”<br /> “It’s about a young man who is ordered to sleep with a corpse.<br /> In time to come you, too, may have to sleep next to a dead man.” At this point, Edmund shrieked. Then he fainted.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|379}}<br /> <br /> In genuinely frightening ways that inter-leaven the literary and the wicked, Mailer exacerbates our moral consciences; American literature has not been as darkly funny since Twain’s ''Letters from the Earth''. Twain’s and Mailer’s are good stories, and deep!<br /> <br /> Mailer’s laughter in The Castle in the Forest is not the raucous, adolescent laughter of America’s 1960s black humor fiction, a laughter that is always implicitly the laughter of an overly stable know-it-all ''we''.{{efn|One could say that Yossarian is a character who must act from isolation even when he crucially chooses to act for the sake of others, but I would still characterize the laughter aroused by the novel as more social. This we carried over quite smoothly<br /> from the novel to the film ''M*A*S*H'' and to the buddy-scenarios of the television version as well. Consider the narrative situation of ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'', Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo narrative: however iconoclastic and anarchic the voice of Raoul Duke, this road novel depends for it’s effects on internalizing the “we,” so Duke is accompanied by Dr. Gonzo, his Samoan attorney (who is based on Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Mexican-American political activist). If we look through ''Castle'' carefully, we will see that Mailer has, again and again, done without the protections of an imaginary men’s club.}} We laugh at the bureaucrats in ''Catch-22''. There’s an unsettling oddity to Mailer’s style, though, an awareness that, like Dieter’s, Mailer’s humor is both on the mark and a bit to one side of the main stream of events. Mailer does not pretend to be in the ethical center, and the rude, cruel, and invasive qualities of his “diabolical” narrative technique are, he will not let us forget, essential elements in our own conventional mind-set. The castle in Mailer’s forest, the redemptive beauty that makes the pain and failures of such unappreciated masterpieces as Ancient Evenings and The Castle in the Forest bearable, is always a repetition and ever-free variation of a cavalier wit. As it is in the moment in which Adolf tortures his brother with literature, Mailer’s humor is genuinely funny and, at exactly the same time, resoundingly grim. Put- ting his own idea that our best is often closest to our worst into the mouth of Himmler, Mailer turns into the pain of his own humor and allows—encourages, actually—the nasty identifications his harshest critics made of himself and his work, that he was violent and cruel and “patriarchal” in the sense in which patriarchy is a synonym for Fascism. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to this cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably ''alone''.{{efn|None of this article could have been written if I had not been told the joke about lawyers and sharks by Professor Winfried “the Hun” Schleiner of UC Davis twenty years ago.}}<br /> <br /> ===Notes===<br /> {{notelist}}<br /> <br /> ===Citations===<br /> {{Reflist|20em}}<br /> <br /> ===Works Cited===<br /> {{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br /> * {{cite journal |last=Adamowski |first=T. H. |title=Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer |url= |journal=University of Toronto Quarterly |volume=75 |issue=3 |date=Summer 2006 |pages=883–904 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite news |last=Bosman |first=Julie |date=December 6, 2006 |title=Literature: Do Novels Really Need Bibliographies? |url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061208122042/http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php |archive-date=December 8, 2006 |work=International Herald Tribune |location= |access-date=2020-09-10 |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Chakrabarty |first=Dipesh |date=2007 |title=Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference |url= |location=Princeton, NJ |publisher=Princeton UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} New edition with a new preface by the author.<br /> * {{cite journal |last=Gubar |first=Susan |title=Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries |url= |journal=The Yale Journal of Criticism |volume=14 |issue=1 |date=Spring 2001 |pages=191–215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |title=Mailer’s Cosmology |url= |journal=Modern Language Studies |volume=12 |issue=3 |date=1982 |pages=18-29 |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1983 |title=Ancient Evenings |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dial |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman |authormask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |url= |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman| authormask=1 |date=2007 |title= Why Are We at War |url= |location= New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McCann|first=Sean|title=The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism|url= |journal=English Literary History|volume=67|issue=1|date=2000|pages=293–336|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McDonald|first=Brian|title=Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the 'Very Jewish Jesus' of Norman Mailer's ''The Gospel according to the Son|url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=78–90|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rorty|first=Richard|date=1989|title=Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity|url= |location=New York|publisher=Cambridge UP|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rosenbaum|first=Ron|date=March 6, 2007|title=The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer: What Will He Make of 'Hitler's Chappaquiddick'?|url=http://www.slate.com/id/2161302/|location= |publisher=Slate |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Taylor|first=A. J. P |date=1996|title=The Origins of the Second World War|url= |location=New York|publisher=Touchstone|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite web |url= http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/the-incrediblyunbelieva_b_35882.html|title=The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush |last=Uygur|first=Cenk|date=December 8, 2006|website= |publisher= |access-date=1 August 2008|quote= |ref=harv }}<br /> {{Refend}}<br /> {{Review}}<br /> {{DEFAULTSORT:Their Humor Annoyed Him}}<br /> [[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:CDucharme/sandbox&diff=11615 2020-09-19T00:45:41Z

<p>CDucharme: </p> <hr /> <div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:&lt;span style=&quot;font-size:22px;&gt;{{BASEPAGENAME}}/&lt;/span&gt;&quot;Their Humor Annoyed Him&quot;: Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in ''The Castle in the Forest''}}<br /> {{MR12}}<br /> {{Byline|last=Whalen-Bridge|first=John|abstract=Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omniscience of third person. Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to the ''Castle''’s cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably alone.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08whal}}<br /> {{cquote|Himmler subscribed to the theory that the best human possibilities lie close to the worst.}}<br /> <br /> {{dc|dc=T|here is a joke about attorneys}} that goes like this: lots of people were on a boat, which sank in shark-infested waters. It was horrible. The sharks were tearing all the passengers to pieces as they tried to make it to shore. All the passengers were dying. Except one passenger, who was an attorney. He swam right to the shore. As he was shaking himself off, the bewildered people on the beach asked him, “How come the sharks did not eat you?” He said: “Professional courtesy, I suppose.” We don’t like attorneys, such a joke conveys, because they are not like us. They are like sharks, and we are like people. We laugh at the joke, if we do, to commune in our fantasy-rejection of lawyerly cruelty. But Mailer’s last novel, ''The Castle in the Forest'', is organized around a very different sort of humor. Instead of laughing at lawyers to confirm our fantasy that we ourselves are not sharks, Mailer shocks readers, methodically and skillfully, with the knowledge that they are intimately involved with so much of what they—we, I should say—resoundingly reject. The undertow of laughter in this novel won’t necessarily drag you out to sea, but it will make you ask if you share qualities with what is being held up for laughter and judgment.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s narrator in ''The Castle in the Forest'' speaks with courtesy and intelligence.{{efn|Both Steven Poole in his ''New Statesman'' review, “[https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2007/02/norman-mailer-hitler-novel Sympathy for the Devil]” (19 February 2007) and John Freeman in his ''Independent'' review “[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/sympathy-for-the-devil-norman-mailer-on-his-satanic-new-novel-434647.html Sympathy for the Devil: Norman Mailer on His Satanic New Novel]” (2 February 2007) connect Mailer’s novel and the Rolling Stones’ song in their titles. The Jagger/Richards song, which first appeared on the 1968 album ''Beggers Banquet'', is a dramatic monologue in which Lucifer brags about his achievements, insists on commonalities between himself and his listeners, and demands courtesy if met: he is a “man of wealth and taste,” after all. All criminals are cops, all sinners are saints, and we all killed the Kennedys.}} He calls himself “Dieter” (though it is not clear what he means to “deter”), and he has been a witness to the formation of Adolf Hitler. Dieter explains to the reader that he has been a functionary in the Third Reich, but he has been—long before he came to work for Himmler—part of the Devil’s bureaucracy, with young “Adi” as his most important case. In this way, Mailer manages to bring together the bureaucratic “banality” of evil with the attractions and powers of evil that the word banality cannot subsume.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s final novel (2007) is a concatenation of aesthetic shocks that tells of the formation of Adolf Hitler’s character, beginning with the incestuous influences of his grandfather (about the identity of whom there has been much historical speculation), and continuing through his schooling. Ron Rosenbaum’s ''Explaining Hitler'' can fruitfully be read as a companion-text to Mailer’s novel; its central question is “When and how did Hitler become Hitler?” Mailer’s novel affirms the idea that Hitler developed sociopathic tendencies by his early teens and that these were the foundation for the subsequent obsession with eliminationist anti-Semitism that would come later—but this evolution in Hitler’s darkness is not central to Mailer’s novel. Mailer builds a Hitler to explain a person attracted to murder and deceit, but anti-Semitism is not the driving force of the life Mailer imagines. Mailer does not at all exclude the idea that everything in the novel is tuned toward the Holocaust. The title “The Castle in the Forest,” Dieter tells readers in the final pages, is the translation of a death camp called “''Schlossimwald''” by those inmates who would not, even in the face of ultimate pain and evil, surrender their sense of irony.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=465}} That irony would remain a prized possession under such circumstances will shock some readers, since the phenomena of Hitler and the Holocaust are for many the very limit of irony. In the Rortyean, postmodern, and thoroughly ironic world in which we live, the Holocaust cannot be reduced to a contingent phenomena whose meaning is entirely dependent upon the subject position of the perceiver. Such a way of thinking will earn a comparison with Holocaust deniers. Mailer not only concludes with an homage to ironic camp inmates but also has Dieter-the-demon tell us that the Devil (whom he calls “the Maestro”) is a connoisseur of irony: “All this was uttered by the Maestro with characteristic irony. We never know how serious he might be when he speaks to our mind’s ear. (His voice is a cornucopia of humors.)”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=78}} Mailer might even be describing himself in this passage.<br /> <br /> A ''New York Times'' article paused to note that a number of recent novels had the odd feature of including bibliographies. The bibliography of ''The Castle in the Forest'' is rich with entries on bee-keeping. Readers of the novel know it is a richly over-determined metaphor, combining elements of modulated brutality and great technical skill. Bee-keeping is perhaps the central metaphor of the novel, and Mailer’s bibliography lists half-a-dozen or so specialist books on the subject. Bee-keeping signifies social order, but order as understood from an awful height, that of humans looking down on potentially profitable insects, or that of God looking down on mischievous creation. The bees themselves are ruthless at maintaining order, and they eliminate all threats to the hive without hesitation. Mailer’s Alois Hitler is presented as a dedicated bee-keeper, and the narrator Dieter—while perhaps disingenuously or even seductively warning readers not to make too much of such events!—presents several scenes in which hives are gassed or burned. Readers might wonder how exactly they could ever make “too much” of such a parallel.<br /> <br /> As important as bee-keeping is to Mailer’s larger narrative loops, it competes in the reader’s imagination with a theme that is given equal air-time but which etches the memory more ruthlessly moment for moment and image for image: transgressive sex. Mailer stays true to his fascination with the idea that God and the Devil partake in human lives through dreams and sex acts. The reader must consider a Freudian primal scene in which young Adolf witnesses Alois and Klara in the sixty-nine position, and witnessing the fictional event makes the reader equal, in some imaginative sense, to demons like Dieter who enter minds and bodies in the most intimate situations imaginable.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omni- science of third person. By “epistemological realism,” I mean that we can only experience our own minds directly, unless we have supernormal powers, and furthermore we can only draw inferences about other minds.{{efn|I am not using “epistemological realism” in the standard way, which refers specifically to the form of objectivism in which objects exist independently of one’s own mind in support of a correspondence theory of truth. Such objects would then, presumably, be available for apprehension by subjects from various perspectives, ameliorating the ways in<br /> which contemporary, post-Nietzschean perspectivism subverts assertions about an objective world. Mailer’s attraction to what I’m calling “epistemological realism,” on the other hand, finds ways of conflating first- and third-person perspectives—such as by resorting to the epistolary novel in the omega manuscript of ''Harlot’s Ghost'' to ensure that all perceptions are grounded in the first-person-singular perspective—precisely because Mailer’s fictions do not construct worlds out of a comfortable, objectivist epistemological realism.}} So first-person-singular narration is as close as fiction can get to what an individual person without telepathic skills can really know. Yet our success in the world depends entirely on having confidence in inferences drawn about other minds, and to develop this confidence we need to develop exactly the sort of imagination found in a convincing social novel. But in ''The Castle in the Forest'', Mailer’s narrator is a demon from hell who takes pride in his work; the associative connection Mailer develops at length does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that all human knowing is damned, but we are privy, as it were, to the intrusions of devils much, much more than we are, in Mailer’s fictional rendition, to the mind-intrusions of angels.<br /> <br /> What are we to make of a carefully wrought fictional scene in which the Hitlers, before young Adi even comes into the world, adventure past ordinary naughty sex into pedal-to-the-metal analingus? In foregrounding sex acts of this sort in a book purportedly about radical evil, Mailer risks being discussed in terms of radical eccentricity.{{efn|Ron Rosenbaum, author of ''Explaining Hitler'',, warns Mailer against pursuing, in a rumored sequel to ''The Castle in the Forest'', a sexual explanation of Hitler’s evil. See his essay “The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer” for a convincing admonition about the limits of psycho-sexual explanations of Hitler.}} Or, one could say that approaching radical evil through sexual obscenity is artistically obscene. However we put it, the novel intentionally jars the reader just as much as ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), and the central narrative device of ''that'' novel was an act of fellatio between two ghosts in a tomb. Here is the sex act between Alois and Klara that Mailer’s young Hitler witnesses: We may remember that the last time we saw Alois, he was burying his nose and lips in Klara’s vulva, his tongue as long and demonic as a devil’s phallus. (Be it said: we are not without our contributions to these arts.) Alois was certainly being aided by us. Never before had he given himself so completely to this exercise, and quickly he had become good at it, and so quickly that no explanation is possible unless we are given credit as well. (Which is why we speak of the Evil One when joining in the act—we do have the power to pass these lubricious gifts to men and women even when we are not attempting to convert them into clients.) (98)<br /> <br /> What shall we make of this? One possible response will be to link Mailer’s use of the Holocaust with that of Sylvia Plath.{{efn|See Gubar for a discussion of attacks on Plath for reducing the Holocaust to a metaphor.}} One could say each author uses the pain of others to provide historical ballast to pain that is really individual. It would be the height of egotism to use the deaths of six million in order to hide the idiosyncrasy of one’s pain or the eccentricity of one’s ideas.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. He consistently presented himself as an author with an important vision, one worthy of “the mind of Joyce” or Melville, since the mid-1950s, and critics debated whether he ever wrote his ''Ulysses'' or ''Moby Dick''. Mailer’s personal ambition, however, was never in question.<br /> <br /> The cosmological vision has been reiterated in all of Mailer’s major works, including ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (1991), and ''The Gospel according to the Son'' (1997).{{efn|See Lennon’s “Mailer’s Cosmology” for a discussion of Mailer’s cosmological foundation, which is relatively stable across the decades from the mid-Sixties through Mailer’s final work.}} In each of these novel’s (if we allow for ''The Executioner’s Song'' as a “nonfiction novel”), the struggle between divine forces explains the relation between apparently insignificant actors in ways that factor out what Mailer calls “the Absurd.” The divinity potential of quotidian existence is the binding material in Mailer’s cosmos, with “divinity” meaning extraordinary, magical, and foundational. The experience of the divine overlaps with the extraordinary in the manner of aesthetic wonder, and this commonality allows Mailer to find God in the aesthetic aspects of sexual experience, but the divine must be more than ''merely'' extraordinary. The experience of divinity, which some people achieve and many do not, transcends ordinary experience, meaning that, in Mailer’s Romantic articulation, there is a hierarchy of knowing, and that only some (heroic) persons are able to glimpse the magical foundations of being. Such a vision requires huge risks, which explains why many would prefer not to see what Mailer’s heroic seers may encounter, and those who take such risks are not necessarily good people.<br /> <br /> In ''Ancient Evenings'', which was composed during the Carter presidency, the weak, vacillating pharaoh Ramses IX must decide whether or not to trust the protagonist Menenhetet, a figure who has earned scorn in his attempts to accumulate visionary power through experiments with scatological ceremonies and incest. In this novel Mailer stages his idea that we must make “bargains with evil” into a historical setting that could be called “Before Good and Evil.” Mailer’s setting predates the monotheistic moral codes that undergird our language of morality, thus showing the Eurocentric view to be, in Chakrabarty’s terms, “provincial.” This incarnation of the Mailer vision is, then, radically Manichean, since the Egyptian gods are not centered by a transcendent notion of the Good, against which an evil force defines itself. One could, through cosmological backformation, interpret the theomachy between Osiris and Set as a war between good and evil. In any event, the nature of goodness is never really in question. Artistically modulated growth—a middle way between stagnation and the uncontrolled growth of cancer—has always been the sign of health in Mailer’s universe. Mailer’s praise of Osiris resonates exactly with the adaptations of John Dewey’s “live creature.”<br /> <br /> The existential mystery animating Mailer’s visions has to do not with the existence of good and evil but rather with knowing which is which. Rosenbaum gives a name to the tendency to ground our moral awareness in a false absolute: ''argumentum ad Hitlerum''. When we can no longer endure uncer- tainties, when we have run out of negative capability, we appeal to Hitler to end the argument: ''Hitler'' was evil. The seduction of absolutist thinking, as Mailer shows in his Cold War articulation, is that we name the world in terms of Good and Evil and then proceed to identify our own actions and interests with the Good in self-interested and thus delusory ways: “There is no emotion on earth more powerful than anti-Americanism. To the rest of the world, America is the Garden of Eden. Unmitigated envy, the ugliest emotion of them all.”<br /> “Yessir.” (Harlot’s Ghost 340)<br /> <br /> As George Bush put it in the wake of the 9/11 (2001) attack on the World Trade Center, you are either with us or you are against us. You are either with God or the Devil. The tendency and aim of such a formulation is to make everyone into a “yes-man,” just like the CIA analyst in the quotation above who quickly says “Yessir” to Harlot, Mailer’s architect of American postwar paranoia. In The Gospel according to the Son, Mailer resists the equal-and-opposite fallacy, argumentum ad Jesus, in which one identifies self-with-Jesus-with-Goodness. Mailer despises the ways in which the Bush White House rolls together what Dieter of The Castle in the Forest calls “cheap patriotism” and “cheap prayer” (386), but in ''The Gospel'' according to the Son Mailer wishes not to attack a “cheap” Jesus but to imagine an authentic one.{{efn|See ''Why Are We at War?'' if you doubt Mailer despises the mentality and policies of the Bush administration.}} Mailer’s authentic Jesus (as opposed to the authentic Jesus of mainstream Christians) is one who cannot know for sure what the effects of his actions will be. Though Jesus narrates his own gospel, Mailer denies us a text on which to build a fundamentalist worldview. Here is how Brian McDonald presents the narrative uncertainty in “Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the ‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel according to the Son”'': The story, Mailer’s Jesus reassures us, “is true,” but like a careful witness testifying under oath he is quick to add the caveat, “at least to all that I recall” (Gospel 2).<br /> <br /> Mailer’s critics ravaged him for presuming to write in the voice of Jesus, and Mailer clearly anticipates the charge when he has ''his'' Jesus say with nice condescension that the four synoptic gospels were good as far as they went, but they went too far. Mailer’s novelistic hubris, if it should be called that, is in presuming to know the views of God and the Devil and everything in between, but it is presumptuous of the critic to assume that Mailer is ever unaware of the effects of ego, as it is an important theme in all of the “epic” works here discussed: When one has become an overseer of death who holds the power to liquidate masses of people, one is also in great need of a very hard shell to the ego in order to feel no intimate horror over the price to one’s soul. Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification—patriotism! That is still the most dependable instrument for guiding the masses, although it may yet be replaced by revealed religion. We love fundamentalists. Their faith offers us every promise of developing into the final weapon of mass destruction. (405–406)<br /> <br /> Dieter provocatively ranks Hitler as a “statesmen,” thus restating the A. J. P. Taylor argument that Hitler would have been counted a great statesmen if only he had died at the right time, but the honorific word is inverted when we see, in context, that the necessary condition for being a statesman is an ego, a psychic callous to protect one’s sleep from meaningful knowledge of one’s actions.{{efn|Readers would be wrong to assume that Mailer is agreeing with A. J. P. Taylor. It is part of Dieter’s worldview and it is in his personal interest to defend the kind of egotism that is an insulation against subtle awareness of the feelings of others. Lest we think—as his typical detractors certainly would—that Mailer is defending egotism of this sort, we should recall the image of Ramses II after the Battle of Kadesh, the pharaoh taking care to heft every single amputated hand of the vanquished Hittite soldiers while the rest of the army enjoy the spoils of war in the most libidinal way. Mailer’s Ramses II is, in this one respect at least, the ethical antipode to contemporary leaders who, according to Dieter’s own political realism, must ''necessarily'' shield themselves from awareness of the consequences of their actions.}} When Dieter stirs in “patriotism” and fundamentalism, it becomes clear that Mailer’s Hitler has been used as a “cudgel” to beat George W. Bush, a president who has been most politely described as “incurious” regarding the facts of the world.{{efn|Cenk Uygur, a blogger from ''The Huffington Post'', has entitled his column on President<br /> Bush’s lack of curiosity “The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush.”}} “Cudgel,” in ''The Castle in the Forest'', is the name devils such as Dieter give to the Angels, who cause beings pain in their sleep when their actions are hateful rather than loving.<br /> <br /> Antithetical elements call attention to one another, reminding readers of nothing so much as the presence of the author himself. Think back to Mailer’s character Roth in ''The Naked and the Dead'', and of Stephen Richards Rojack walking the parapet in ''An American Dream''. Mailer’s writings are full of intentional impasses and voracious chasms. Readers who cannot make the leap will quickly fly from the page and declare Mailer unreadable. How are we to make the leap from the pure (if uncertain) speech of Jesus back to the vulva of Hitler’s mother? Mailer’s narratives are visionary landscapes designed to engulf some readers while allowing others the chance to develop in admittedly idiosyncratic ways—but it is a mindless response to note Mailer’s stylistic self-reference without noting the antipodal contextualization of his stylistic “egotism.”<br /> <br /> Mailer shows every awareness in his artful rendition of the Devil’s shaping hand that ''ego'' is one of the Devil’s most important tools, but then, most shockingly, he will put in a narrative turn that does nothing so much as foreground the author. Authorial egotism comes into the foreground of Hitler’s mind when he chooses among intellectual influences: He certainly rejected Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him. It was too personal—as if they were much too pleased with what they were saying. Not serious enough, Adolf decided. The other two, Kant and Schleiermacher, he simply could not read. After Jahn, his highest pleasure came from the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers. That had also been assigned to his class. Those were good stories, and deep! (377)<br /> <br /> Adolf uses the stories of Grimm to terrorize his younger brother Edmund, whom Mailer imagines as Hitler’s first murder victim: in a variation of the killing of Abel, jealous Hitler intentionally passes Edmund the measles that will kill him. This passage is one of a dozen or so highly literate moments in ''The Castle in the Forest'' in which Mailer positively revels in the ironies that were once so properly shocking, those attaching to the apparent incongruity of Nazis who loved Beethoven.<br /> <br /> But not all writers and not all ironies are the same—it is not as if Mailer is inviting plague on all the literary houses. Mailer, if I read him rightly, mocks the rectitude with which we have sometimes allowed ourselves to think that literature as such was a proof of superior humanity, when much more is required. Hitler’s literary tastes give some hint of his taste for cruelty, as his sadistic use of the Grimm stories suggests, but even more important is his impatience with queer, unsettling humor, that of Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him? Mailer’s humor here is profound: he knows—has known since he meditated on the career of Henry Miller in the mid-1970s—that his own unsettling humor would “annoy” many of his readers. Merely to make oneself an antipode to Adolf is the laziest move imaginable, but this is not at all where Mailer leaves the matter. He goes on to reveal why Goethe and Schiller annoyed Adi: they reminded him too much that they exist.<br /> <br /> It cannot be said that this humor is inherently ethical. The freedom of humor (and it is this often disappointing freedom of the other to disappoint you that proves that the other is not a function of your own fantasy) has its horrible uses. Hitler’s ''literary'' torture of Edmund is one of the most grimly funny moments in a novel replete with dark humor. Young Adolf has been reading Edmund terrifying Grimm stories:<br /> “Do you want another story?”<br /> &quot;Maybe not.&quot;<br /> “This one is the best,” said Adolf.<br /> &quot;Is it truly the best?&quot;<br /> &quot;Yes&quot;<br /> “Then maybe I don’t want to hear it.”<br /> “It’s about a young man who is ordered to sleep with a corpse.<br /> In time to come you, too, may have to sleep next to a dead man.” At this point, Edmund shrieked. Then he fainted. (379)<br /> <br /> In genuinely frightening ways that inter-leaven the literary and the wicked, Mailer exacerbates our moral consciences; American literature has not been as darkly funny since Twain’s ''Letters from the Earth''. Twain’s and Mailer’s are good stories, and deep!<br /> <br /> Mailer’s laughter in The Castle in the Forest is not the raucous, adolescent laughter of America’s 1960s black humor fiction, a laughter that is always implicitly the laughter of an overly stable know-it-all ''we''.{{efn|One could say that Yossarian is a character who must act from isolation even when he crucially chooses to act for the sake of others, but I would still characterize the laughter aroused by the novel as more social. This we carried over quite smoothly<br /> from the novel to the film ''M*A*S*H'' and to the buddy-scenarios of the television version as well. Consider the narrative situation of ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'', Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo narrative: however iconoclastic and anarchic the voice of Raoul Duke, this road novel depends for it’s effects on internalizing the “we,” so Duke is accompanied by Dr. Gonzo, his Samoan attorney (who is based on Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Mexican-American political activist). If we look through ''Castle'' carefully, we will see that Mailer has, again and again, done without the protections of an imaginary men’s club.}} We laugh at the bureaucrats in ''Catch-22''. There’s an unsettling oddity to Mailer’s style, though, an awareness that, like Dieter’s, Mailer’s humor is both on the mark and a bit to one side of the main stream of events. Mailer does not pretend to be in the ethical center, and the rude, cruel, and invasive qualities of his “diabolical” narrative technique are, he will not let us forget, essential elements in our own conventional mind-set. The castle in Mailer’s forest, the redemptive beauty that makes the pain and failures of such unappreciated masterpieces as Ancient Evenings and The Castle in the Forest bearable, is always a repetition and ever-free variation of a cavalier wit. As it is in the moment in which Adolf tortures his brother with literature, Mailer’s humor is genuinely funny and, at exactly the same time, resoundingly grim. Put- ting his own idea that our best is often closest to our worst into the mouth of Himmler, Mailer turns into the pain of his own humor and allows—encourages, actually—the nasty identifications his harshest critics made of himself and his work, that he was violent and cruel and “patriarchal” in the sense in which patriarchy is a synonym for Fascism. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to this cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably ''alone''.{{efn|None of this article could have been written if I had not been told the joke about lawyers and sharks by Professor Winfried “the Hun” Schleiner of UC Davis twenty years ago.}}<br /> <br /> ===Notes===<br /> {{notelist}}<br /> <br /> ===Citations===<br /> {{Reflist|20em}}<br /> <br /> ===Works Cited===<br /> {{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br /> * {{cite journal |last=Adamowski |first=T. H. |title=Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer |url= |journal=University of Toronto Quarterly |volume=75 |issue=3 |date=Summer 2006 |pages=883–904 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite news |last=Bosman |first=Julie |date=December 6, 2006 |title=Literature: Do Novels Really Need Bibliographies? |url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061208122042/http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php |archive-date=December 8, 2006 |work=International Herald Tribune |location= |access-date=2020-09-10 |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Chakrabarty |first=Dipesh |date=2007 |title=Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference |url= |location=Princeton, NJ |publisher=Princeton UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} New edition with a new preface by the author.<br /> * {{cite journal |last=Gubar |first=Susan |title=Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries |url= |journal=The Yale Journal of Criticism |volume=14 |issue=1 |date=Spring 2001 |pages=191–215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |title=Mailer’s Cosmology |url= |journal=Modern Language Studies |volume=12 |issue=3 |date=1982 |pages=18-29 |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1983 |title=Ancient Evenings |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dial |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman |authormask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |url= |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman| authormask=1 |date=2007 |title= Why Are We at War |url= |location= New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McCann|first=Sean|title=The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism|url= |journal=English Literary History|volume=67|issue=1|date=2000|pages=293–336|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McDonald|first=Brian|title=Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the 'Very Jewish Jesus' of Norman Mailer's ''The Gospel according to the Son|url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=78–90|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rorty|first=Richard|date=1989|title=Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity|url= |location=New York|publisher=Cambridge UP|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rosenbaum|first=Ron|date=March 6, 2007|title=The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer: What Will He Make of 'Hitler's Chappaquiddick'?|url=http://www.slate.com/id/2161302/|location= |publisher=Slate |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Taylor|first=A. J. P |date=1996|title=The Origins of the Second World War|url= |location=New York|publisher=Touchstone|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite web |url= http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/the-incrediblyunbelieva_b_35882.html|title=The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush |last=Uygur|first=Cenk|date=December 8, 2006|website= |publisher= |access-date=1 August 2008|quote= |ref=harv }}<br /> {{Refend}}<br /> {{Review}}<br /> {{DEFAULTSORT:Their Humor Annoyed Him}}<br /> [[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:CDucharme/sandbox&diff=11587 2020-09-19T00:22:37Z

<p>CDucharme: </p> <hr /> <div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:&lt;span style=&quot;font-size:22px;&gt;{{BASEPAGENAME}}/&lt;/span&gt;&quot;Their Humor Annoyed Him&quot;: Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in ''The Castle in the Forest''}}<br /> {{MR12}}<br /> {{Byline|last=Whalen-Bridge|first=John|abstract=Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omniscience of third person. Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to the ''Castle''’s cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably alone.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08whal}}<br /> {{cquote|Himmler subscribed to the theory that the best human possibilities lie close to the worst.}}<br /> <br /> {{dc|dc=T|here is a joke about attorneys}} that goes like this: lots of people were on a boat, which sank in shark-infested waters. It was horrible. The sharks were tearing all the passengers to pieces as they tried to make it to shore. All the passengers were dying. Except one passenger, who was an attorney. He swam right to the shore. As he was shaking himself off, the bewildered people on the beach asked him, “How come the sharks did not eat you?” He said: “Professional courtesy, I suppose.” We don’t like attorneys, such a joke conveys, because they are not like us. They are like sharks, and we are like people. We laugh at the joke, if we do, to commune in our fantasy-rejection of lawyerly cruelty. But Mailer’s last novel, ''The Castle in the Forest'', is organized around a very different sort of humor. Instead of laughing at lawyers to confirm our fantasy that we ourselves are not sharks, Mailer shocks readers, methodically and skillfully, with the knowledge that they are intimately involved with so much of what they—we, I should say—resoundingly reject. The undertow of laughter in this novel won’t necessarily drag you out to sea, but it will make you ask if you share qualities with what is being held up for laughter and judgment.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s narrator in ''The Castle in the Forest'' speaks with courtesy and intelligence.{{efn|Both Steven Poole in his ''New Statesman'' review, “[https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2007/02/norman-mailer-hitler-novel Sympathy for the Devil]” (19 February 2007) and John Freeman in his ''Independent'' review “[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/sympathy-for-the-devil-norman-mailer-on-his-satanic-new-novel-434647.html Sympathy for the Devil: Norman Mailer on His Satanic New Novel]” (2 February 2007) connect Mailer’s novel and the Rolling Stones’ song in their titles. The Jagger/Richards song, which first appeared on the 1968 album ''Beggers Banquet'', is a dramatic monologue in which Lucifer brags about his achievements, insists on commonalities between himself and his listeners, and demands courtesy if met: he is a “man of wealth and taste,” after all. All criminals are cops, all sinners are saints, and we all killed the Kennedys.}} He calls himself “Dieter” (though it is not clear what he means to “deter”), and he has been a witness to the formation of Adolf Hitler. Dieter explains to the reader that he has been a functionary in the Third Reich, but he has been—long before he came to work for Himmler—part of the Devil’s bureaucracy, with young “Adi” as his most important case. In this way, Mailer manages to bring together the bureaucratic “banality” of evil with the attractions and powers of evil that the word banality cannot subsume.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s final novel (2007) is a concatenation of aesthetic shocks that tells of the formation of Adolf Hitler’s character, beginning with the incestuous influences of his grandfather (about the identity of whom there has been much historical speculation), and continuing through his schooling. Ron Rosenbaum’s ''Explaining Hitler'' can fruitfully be read as a companion-text to Mailer’s novel; its central question is “When and how did Hitler become Hitler?” Mailer’s novel affirms the idea that Hitler developed sociopathic tendencies by his early teens and that these were the foundation for the subsequent obsession with eliminationist anti-Semitism that would come later—but this evolution in Hitler’s darkness is not central to Mailer’s novel. Mailer builds a Hitler to explain a person attracted to murder and deceit, but anti-Semitism is not the driving force of the life Mailer imagines. Mailer does not at all exclude the idea that everything in the novel is tuned toward the Holocaust. The title “The Castle in the Forest,” Dieter tells readers in the final pages, is the translation of a death camp called “''Schlossimwald''” by those inmates who would not, even in the face of ultimate pain and evil, surrender their sense of irony.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=465}} That irony would remain a prized possession under such circumstances will shock some readers, since the phenomena of Hitler and the Holocaust are for many the very limit of irony. In the Rortyean, postmodern, and thoroughly ironic world in which we live, the Holocaust cannot be reduced to a contingent phenomena whose meaning is entirely dependent upon the subject position of the perceiver. Such a way of thinking will earn a comparison with Holocaust deniers. Mailer not only concludes with an homage to ironic camp inmates but also has Dieter-the-demon tell us that the Devil (whom he calls “the Maestro”) is a connoisseur of irony: “All this was uttered by the Maestro with characteristic irony. We never know how serious he might be when he speaks to our mind’s ear. (His voice is a cornucopia of humors.)”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=78}} Mailer might even be describing himself in this passage.<br /> <br /> A ''New York Times'' article paused to note that a number of recent novels had the odd feature of including bibliographies. The bibliography of ''The Castle in the Forest'' is rich with entries on bee-keeping. Readers of the novel know it is a richly over-determined metaphor, combining elements of modulated brutality and great technical skill. Bee-keeping is perhaps the central metaphor of the novel, and Mailer’s bibliography lists half-a-dozen or so specialist books on the subject. Bee-keeping signifies social order, but order as understood from an awful height, that of humans looking down on potentially profitable insects, or that of God looking down on mischievous creation. The bees themselves are ruthless at maintaining order, and they eliminate all threats to the hive without hesitation. Mailer’s Alois Hitler is presented as a dedicated bee-keeper, and the narrator Dieter—while perhaps disingenuously or even seductively warning readers not to make too much of such events!—presents several scenes in which hives are gassed or burned. Readers might wonder how exactly they could ever make “too much” of such a parallel.<br /> <br /> As important as bee-keeping is to Mailer’s larger narrative loops, it competes in the reader’s imagination with a theme that is given equal air-time but which etches the memory more ruthlessly moment for moment and image for image: transgressive sex. Mailer stays true to his fascination with the idea that God and the Devil partake in human lives through dreams and sex acts. The reader must consider a Freudian primal scene in which young Adolf witnesses Alois and Klara in the sixty-nine position, and witnessing the fictional event makes the reader equal, in some imaginative sense, to demons like Dieter who enter minds and bodies in the most intimate situations imaginable.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omni- science of third person. By “epistemological realism,” I mean that we can only experience our own minds directly, unless we have supernormal powers, and furthermore we can only draw inferences about other minds.{{efn|I am not using “epistemological realism” in the standard way, which refers specifically to the form of objectivism in which objects exist independently of one’s own mind in support of a correspondence theory of truth. Such objects would then, presumably, be available for apprehension by subjects from various perspectives, ameliorating the ways in<br /> which contemporary, post-Nietzschean perspectivism subverts assertions about an objective world. Mailer’s attraction to what I’m calling “epistemological realism,” on the other hand, finds ways of conflating first- and third-person perspectives—such as by resorting to the epistolary novel in the omega manuscript of ''Harlot’s Ghost'' to ensure that all perceptions are grounded in the first-person-singular perspective—precisely because Mailer’s fictions do not construct worlds out of a comfortable, objectivist epistemological realism.}} So first-person-singular narration is as close as fiction can get to what an individual person without telepathic skills can really know. Yet our success in the world depends entirely on having confidence in inferences drawn about other minds, and to develop this confidence we need to develop exactly the sort of imagination found in a convincing social novel. But in ''The Castle in the Forest'', Mailer’s narrator is a demon from hell who takes pride in his work; the associative connection Mailer develops at length does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that all human knowing is damned, but we are privy, as it were, to the intrusions of devils much, much more than we are, in Mailer’s fictional rendition, to the mind-intrusions of angels.<br /> <br /> What are we to make of a carefully wrought fictional scene in which the Hitlers, before young Adi even comes into the world, adventure past ordinary naughty sex into pedal-to-the-metal analingus? In foregrounding sex acts of this sort in a book purportedly about radical evil, Mailer risks being discussed in terms of radical eccentricity.{{efn|Ron Rosenbaum, author of ''Explaining Hitler'',, warns Mailer against pursuing, in a rumored sequel to ''The Castle in the Forest'', a sexual explanation of Hitler’s evil. See his essay “The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer” for a convincing admonition about the limits of psycho-sexual explanations of Hitler.}} Or, one could say that approaching radical evil through sexual obscenity is artistically obscene. However we put it, the novel intentionally jars the reader just as much as ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), and the central narrative device of ''that'' novel was an act of fellatio between two ghosts in a tomb. Here is the sex act between Alois and Klara that Mailer’s young Hitler witnesses: We may remember that the last time we saw Alois, he was burying his nose and lips in Klara’s vulva, his tongue as long and demonic as a devil’s phallus. (Be it said: we are not without our contributions to these arts.) Alois was certainly being aided by us. Never before had he given himself so completely to this exercise, and quickly he had become good at it, and so quickly that no explanation is possible unless we are given credit as well. (Which is why we speak of the Evil One when joining in the act—we do have the power to pass these lubricious gifts to men and women even when we are not attempting to convert them into clients.) (98)<br /> <br /> What shall we make of this? One possible response will be to link Mailer’s use of the Holocaust with that of Sylvia Plath. One could say each author uses the pain of others to provide historical ballast to pain that is really individual. It would be the height of egotism to use the deaths of six million in order to hide the idiosyncrasy of one’s pain or the eccentricity of one’s ideas.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. He consistently presented himself as an author with an important vision, one worthy of “the mind of Joyce” or Melville, since the mid-1950s, and critics debated whether he ever wrote his ''Ulysses'' or ''Moby Dick''. Mailer’s personal ambition, however, was never in question.<br /> <br /> The cosmological vision has been reiterated in all of Mailer’s major works, including ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (1991), and ''The Gospel according to the Son'' (1997). In each of these novel’s (if we allow for ''The Executioner’s Song'' as a “nonfiction novel”), the struggle between divine forces explains the relation between apparently insignificant actors in ways that factor out what Mailer calls “the Absurd.” The divinity potential of quotidian existence is the binding material in Mailer’s cosmos, with “divinity” meaning extraordinary, magical, and foundational. The experience of the divine overlaps with the extraordinary in the manner of aesthetic wonder, and this commonality allows Mailer to find God in the aesthetic aspects of sexual experience, but the divine must be more than ''merely'' extraordinary. The experience of divinity, which some people achieve and many do not, transcends ordinary experience, meaning that, in Mailer’s Romantic articulation, there is a hierarchy of knowing, and that only some (heroic) persons are able to glimpse the magical foundations of being. Such a vision requires huge risks, which explains why many would prefer not to see what Mailer’s heroic seers may encounter, and those who take such risks are not necessarily good people.<br /> <br /> In ''Ancient Evenings'', which was composed during the Carter presidency, the weak, vacillating pharaoh Ramses IX must decide whether or not to trust the protagonist Menenhetet, a figure who has earned scorn in his attempts to accumulate visionary power through experiments with scatological ceremonies and incest. In this novel Mailer stages his idea that we must make “bargains with evil” into a historical setting that could be called “Before Good and Evil.” Mailer’s setting predates the monotheistic moral codes that undergird our language of morality, thus showing the Eurocentric view to be, in Chakrabarty’s terms, “provincial.” This incarnation of the Mailer vision is, then, radically Manichean, since the Egyptian gods are not centered by a transcendent notion of the Good, against which an evil force defines itself. One could, through cosmological backformation, interpret the theomachy between Osiris and Set as a war between good and evil. In any event, the nature of goodness is never really in question. Artistically modulated growth—a middle way between stagnation and the uncontrolled growth of cancer—has always been the sign of health in Mailer’s universe. Mailer’s praise of Osiris resonates exactly with the adaptations of John Dewey’s “live creature.”<br /> <br /> The existential mystery animating Mailer’s visions has to do not with the existence of good and evil but rather with knowing which is which. Rosenbaum gives a name to the tendency to ground our moral awareness in a false absolute: ''argumentum ad Hitlerum''. When we can no longer endure uncer- tainties, when we have run out of negative capability, we appeal to Hitler to end the argument: ''Hitler'' was evil. The seduction of absolutist thinking, as Mailer shows in his Cold War articulation, is that we name the world in terms of Good and Evil and then proceed to identify our own actions and interests with the Good in self-interested and thus delusory ways: “There is no emotion on earth more powerful than anti-Americanism. To the rest of the world, America is the Garden of Eden. Unmitigated envy, the ugliest emotion of them all.”<br /> “Yessir.” (Harlot’s Ghost 340)<br /> <br /> As George Bush put it in the wake of the 9/11 (2001) attack on the World Trade Center, you are either with us or you are against us. You are either with God or the Devil. The tendency and aim of such a formulation is to make everyone into a “yes-man,” just like the CIA analyst in the quotation above who quickly says “Yessir” to Harlot, Mailer’s architect of American postwar paranoia. In The Gospel according to the Son, Mailer resists the equal-and-opposite fallacy, argumentum ad Jesus, in which one identifies self-with-Jesus-with-Goodness. Mailer despises the ways in which the Bush White House rolls together what Dieter of The Castle in the Forest calls “cheap patriotism” and “cheap prayer” (386), but in ''The Gospel'' according to the Son Mailer wishes not to attack a “cheap” Jesus but to imagine an authentic one. Mailer’s authentic Jesus (as opposed to the authentic Jesus of mainstream Christians) is one who cannot know for sure what the effects of his actions will be. Though Jesus narrates his own gospel, Mailer denies us a text on which to build a fundamentalist worldview. Here is how Brian McDonald presents the narrative uncertainty in “Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the ‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel according to the Son”'': The story, Mailer’s Jesus reassures us, “is true,” but like a careful witness testifying under oath he is quick to add the caveat, “at least to all that I recall” (Gospel 2).<br /> <br /> Mailer’s critics ravaged him for presuming to write in the voice of Jesus, and Mailer clearly anticipates the charge when he has ''his'' Jesus say with nice condescension that the four synoptic gospels were good as far as they went, but they went too far. Mailer’s novelistic hubris, if it should be called that, is in presuming to know the views of God and the Devil and everything in between, but it is presumptuous of the critic to assume that Mailer is ever unaware of the effects of ego, as it is an important theme in all of the “epic” works here discussed: When one has become an overseer of death who holds the power to liquidate masses of people, one is also in great need of a very hard shell to the ego in order to feel no intimate horror over the price to one’s soul. Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification—patriotism! That is still the most dependable instrument for guiding the masses, although it may yet be replaced by revealed religion. We love fundamentalists. Their faith offers us every promise of developing into the final weapon of mass destruction. (405–406)<br /> <br /> Dieter provocatively ranks Hitler as a “statesmen,” thus restating the A. J. P. Taylor argument that Hitler would have been counted a great statesmen if only he had died at the right time, but the honorific word is inverted when we see, in context, that the necessary condition for being a statesman is an ego, a psychic callous to protect one’s sleep from meaningful knowledge of one’s actions. When Dieter stirs in “patriotism” and fundamentalism, it becomes clear that Mailer’s Hitler has been used as a “cudgel” to beat George W. Bush, a president who has been most politely described as “incurious” regarding the facts of the world. “Cudgel,” in ''The Castle in the Forest'', is the name devils such as Dieter give to the Angels, who cause beings pain in their sleep when their actions are hateful rather than loving.<br /> <br /> Antithetical elements call attention to one another, reminding readers of nothing so much as the presence of the author himself. Think back to Mailer’s character Roth in ''The Naked and the Dead'', and of Stephen Richards Rojack walking the parapet in ''An American Dream''. Mailer’s writings are full of intentional impasses and voracious chasms. Readers who cannot make the leap will quickly fly from the page and declare Mailer unreadable. How are we to make the leap from the pure (if uncertain) speech of Jesus back to the vulva of Hitler’s mother? Mailer’s narratives are visionary landscapes designed to engulf some readers while allowing others the chance to develop in admittedly idiosyncratic ways—but it is a mindless response to note Mailer’s stylistic self-reference without noting the antipodal contextualization of his stylistic “egotism.”<br /> <br /> Mailer shows every awareness in his artful rendition of the Devil’s shaping hand that ''ego'' is one of the Devil’s most important tools, but then, most shockingly, he will put in a narrative turn that does nothing so much as foreground the author. Authorial egotism comes into the foreground of Hitler’s mind when he chooses among intellectual influences: He certainly rejected Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him. It was too personal—as if they were much too pleased with what they were saying. Not serious enough, Adolf decided. The other two, Kant and Schleiermacher, he simply could not read. After Jahn, his highest pleasure came from the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers. That had also been assigned to his class. Those were good stories, and deep! (377)<br /> <br /> Adolf uses the stories of Grimm to terrorize his younger brother Edmund, whom Mailer imagines as Hitler’s first murder victim: in a variation of the killing of Abel, jealous Hitler intentionally passes Edmund the measles that will kill him. This passage is one of a dozen or so highly literate moments in ''The Castle in the Forest'' in which Mailer positively revels in the ironies that were once so properly shocking, those attaching to the apparent incongruity of Nazis who loved Beethoven.<br /> <br /> But not all writers and not all ironies are the same—it is not as if Mailer is inviting plague on all the literary houses. Mailer, if I read him rightly, mocks the rectitude with which we have sometimes allowed ourselves to think that literature as such was a proof of superior humanity, when much more is required. Hitler’s literary tastes give some hint of his taste for cruelty, as his sadistic use of the Grimm stories suggests, but even more important is his impatience with queer, unsettling humor, that of Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him? Mailer’s humor here is profound: he knows—has known since he meditated on the career of Henry Miller in the mid-1970s—that his own unsettling humor would “annoy” many of his readers. Merely to make oneself an antipode to Adolf is the laziest move imaginable, but this is not at all where Mailer leaves the matter. He goes on to reveal why Goethe and Schiller annoyed Adi: they reminded him too much that they exist.<br /> <br /> It cannot be said that this humor is inherently ethical. The freedom of humor (and it is this often disappointing freedom of the other to disappoint you that proves that the other is not a function of your own fantasy) has its horrible uses. Hitler’s ''literary'' torture of Edmund is one of the most grimly funny moments in a novel replete with dark humor. Young Adolf has been reading Edmund terrifying Grimm stories:<br /> “Do you want another story?”<br /> &quot;Maybe not.&quot;<br /> “This one is the best,” said Adolf.<br /> &quot;Is it truly the best?&quot;<br /> &quot;Yes&quot;<br /> “Then maybe I don’t want to hear it.”<br /> “It’s about a young man who is ordered to sleep with a corpse.<br /> In time to come you, too, may have to sleep next to a dead man.” At this point, Edmund shrieked. Then he fainted. (379)<br /> <br /> In genuinely frightening ways that inter-leaven the literary and the wicked, Mailer exacerbates our moral consciences; American literature has not been as darkly funny since Twain’s ''Letters from the Earth''. Twain’s and Mailer’s are good stories, and deep!<br /> <br /> Mailer’s laughter in The Castle in the Forest is not the raucous, adolescent laughter of America’s 1960s black humor fiction, a laughter that is always implicitly the laughter of an overly stable know-it-all we. We laugh at the bureaucrats in ''Catch-22''. There’s an unsettling oddity to Mailer’s style, though, an awareness that, like Dieter’s, Mailer’s humor is both on the mark and a bit to one side of the main stream of events. Mailer does not pretend to be in the ethical center, and the rude, cruel, and invasive qualities of his “diabolical” narrative technique are, he will not let us forget, essential elements in our own conventional mind-set. The castle in Mailer’s forest, the redemptive beauty that makes the pain and failures of such unappreciated masterpieces as Ancient Evenings and The Castle in the Forest bearable, is always a repetition and ever-free variation of a cavalier wit. As it is in the moment in which Adolf tortures his brother with literature, Mailer’s humor is genuinely funny and, at exactly the same time, resoundingly grim. Put- ting his own idea that our best is often closest to our worst into the mouth of Himmler, Mailer turns into the pain of his own humor and allows—encourages, actually—the nasty identifications his harshest critics made of himself and his work, that he was violent and cruel and “patriarchal” in the sense in which patriarchy is a synonym for Fascism. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to this cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably ''alone''.<br /> <br /> ===Notes===<br /> {{notelist}}<br /> <br /> ===Citations===<br /> {{Reflist|20em}}<br /> <br /> ===Works Cited===<br /> {{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br /> * {{cite journal |last=Adamowski |first=T. H. |title=Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer |url= |journal=University of Toronto Quarterly |volume=75 |issue=3 |date=Summer 2006 |pages=883–904 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite news |last=Bosman |first=Julie |date=December 6, 2006 |title=Literature: Do Novels Really Need Bibliographies? |url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061208122042/http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php |archive-date=December 8, 2006 |work=International Herald Tribune |location= |access-date=2020-09-10 |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Chakrabarty |first=Dipesh |date=2007 |title=Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference |url= |location=Princeton, NJ |publisher=Princeton UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} New edition with a new preface by the author.<br /> * {{cite journal |last=Gubar |first=Susan |title=Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries |url= |journal=The Yale Journal of Criticism |volume=14 |issue=1 |date=Spring 2001 |pages=191–215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |title=Mailer’s Cosmology |url= |journal=Modern Language Studies |volume=12 |issue=3 |date=1982 |pages=18-29 |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1983 |title=Ancient Evenings |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dial |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman |authormask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |url= |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman| authormask=1 |date=2007 |title= Why Are We at War |url= |location= New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McCann|first=Sean|title=The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism|url= |journal=English Literary History|volume=67|issue=1|date=2000|pages=293–336|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McDonald|first=Brian|title=Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the 'Very Jewish Jesus' of Norman Mailer's ''The Gospel according to the Son|url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=78–90|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rorty|first=Richard|date=1989|title=Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity|url= |location=New York|publisher=Cambridge UP|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rosenbaum|first=Ron|date=March 6, 2007|title=The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer: What Will He Make of 'Hitler's Chappaquiddick'?|url=http://www.slate.com/id/2161302/|location= |publisher=Slate |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Taylor|first=A. J. P |date=1996|title=The Origins of the Second World War|url= |location=New York|publisher=Touchstone|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite web |url= http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/the-incrediblyunbelieva_b_35882.html|title=The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush |last=Uygur|first=Cenk|date=December 8, 2006|website= |publisher= |access-date=1 August 2008|quote= |ref=harv }}<br /> {{Refend}}<br /> {{Review}}<br /> {{DEFAULTSORT:Their Humor Annoyed Him}}<br /> [[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:CDucharme/sandbox&diff=11586 2020-09-19T00:16:09Z

<p>CDucharme: </p> <hr /> <div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:&lt;span style=&quot;font-size:22px;&gt;{{BASEPAGENAME}}/&lt;/span&gt;&quot;Their Humor Annoyed Him&quot;: Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in ''The Castle in the Forest''}}<br /> {{MR12}}<br /> {{Byline|last=Whalen-Bridge|first=John|abstract=Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omniscience of third person. Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to the ''Castle''’s cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably alone.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08whal}}<br /> {{cquote|Himmler subscribed to the theory that the best human possibilities lie close to the worst.}}<br /> <br /> {{dc|dc=T|here is a joke about attorneys}} that goes like this: lots of people were on a boat, which sank in shark-infested waters. It was horrible. The sharks were tearing all the passengers to pieces as they tried to make it to shore. All the passengers were dying. Except one passenger, who was an attorney. He swam right to the shore. As he was shaking himself off, the bewildered people on the beach asked him, “How come the sharks did not eat you?” He said: “Professional courtesy, I suppose.” We don’t like attorneys, such a joke conveys, because they are not like us. They are like sharks, and we are like people. We laugh at the joke, if we do, to commune in our fantasy-rejection of lawyerly cruelty. But Mailer’s last novel, ''The Castle in the Forest'', is organized around a very different sort of humor. Instead of laughing at lawyers to confirm our fantasy that we ourselves are not sharks, Mailer shocks readers, methodically and skillfully, with the knowledge that they are intimately involved with so much of what they—we, I should say—resoundingly reject. The undertow of laughter in this novel won’t necessarily drag you out to sea, but it will make you ask if you share qualities with what is being held up for laughter and judgment.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s narrator in ''The Castle in the Forest'' speaks with courtesy and intelligence.{{efn|Both Steven Poole in his ''New Statesman'' review, “[https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2007/02/norman-mailer-hitler-novel Sympathy for the Devil]” (19 February 2007) and John Freeman in his ''Independent'' review “[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/sympathy-for-the-devil-norman-mailer-on-his-satanic-new-novel-434647.html Sympathy for the Devil: Norman Mailer on His Satanic New Novel]” (2 February 2007) connect Mailer’s novel and the Rolling Stones’ song in their titles. The Jagger/Richards song, which first appeared on the 1968 album ''Beggers Banquet'', is a dramatic monologue in which Lucifer brags about his achievements, insists on commonalities between himself and his listeners, and demands courtesy if met: he is a “man of wealth and taste,” after all. All criminals are cops, all sinners are saints, and we all killed the Kennedys.}} He calls himself “Dieter” (though it is not clear what he means to “deter”), and he has been a witness to the formation of Adolf Hitler. Dieter explains to the reader that he has been a functionary in the Third Reich, but he has been—long before he came to work for Himmler—part of the Devil’s bureaucracy, with young “Adi” as his most important case. In this way, Mailer manages to bring together the bureaucratic “banality” of evil with the attractions and powers of evil that the word banality cannot subsume.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s final novel (2007) is a concatenation of aesthetic shocks that tells of the formation of Adolf Hitler’s character, beginning with the incestuous influences of his grandfather (about the identity of whom there has been much historical speculation), and continuing through his schooling. Ron Rosenbaum’s ''Explaining Hitler'' can fruitfully be read as a companion-text to Mailer’s novel; its central question is “When and how did Hitler become Hitler?” Mailer’s novel affirms the idea that Hitler developed sociopathic tendencies by his early teens and that these were the foundation for the subsequent obsession with eliminationist anti-Semitism that would come later—but this evolution in Hitler’s darkness is not central to Mailer’s novel. Mailer builds a Hitler to explain a person attracted to murder and deceit, but anti-Semitism is not the driving force of the life Mailer imagines. Mailer does not at all exclude the idea that everything in the novel is tuned toward the Holocaust. The title “The Castle in the Forest,” Dieter tells readers in the final pages, is the translation of a death camp called “''Schlossimwald''” by those inmates who would not, even in the face of ultimate pain and evil, surrender their sense of irony.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=465}} That irony would remain a prized possession under such circumstances will shock some readers, since the phenomena of Hitler and the Holocaust are for many the very limit of irony. In the Rortyean, postmodern, and thoroughly ironic world in which we live, the Holocaust cannot be reduced to a contingent phenomena whose meaning is entirely dependent upon the subject position of the perceiver. Such a way of thinking will earn a comparison with Holocaust deniers. Mailer not only concludes with an homage to ironic camp inmates but also has Dieter-the-demon tell us that the Devil (whom he calls “the Maestro”) is a connoisseur of irony: “All this was uttered by the Maestro with characteristic irony. We never know how serious he might be when he speaks to our mind’s ear. (His voice is a cornucopia of humors.)”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=78}} Mailer might even be describing himself in this passage.<br /> <br /> A ''New York Times'' article paused to note that a number of recent novels had the odd feature of including bibliographies. The bibliography of ''The Castle in the Forest'' is rich with entries on bee-keeping. Readers of the novel know it is a richly over-determined metaphor, combining elements of modulated brutality and great technical skill. Bee-keeping is perhaps the central metaphor of the novel, and Mailer’s bibliography lists half-a-dozen or so specialist books on the subject. Bee-keeping signifies social order, but order as understood from an awful height, that of humans looking down on potentially profitable insects, or that of God looking down on mischievous creation. The bees themselves are ruthless at maintaining order, and they eliminate all threats to the hive without hesitation. Mailer’s Alois Hitler is presented as a dedicated bee-keeper, and the narrator Dieter—while perhaps disingenuously or even seductively warning readers not to make too much of such events!—presents several scenes in which hives are gassed or burned. Readers might wonder how exactly they could ever make “too much” of such a parallel.<br /> <br /> As important as bee-keeping is to Mailer’s larger narrative loops, it competes in the reader’s imagination with a theme that is given equal air-time but which etches the memory more ruthlessly moment for moment and image for image: transgressive sex. Mailer stays true to his fascination with the idea that God and the Devil partake in human lives through dreams and sex acts. The reader must consider a Freudian primal scene in which young Adolf witnesses Alois and Klara in the sixty-nine position, and witnessing the fictional event makes the reader equal, in some imaginative sense, to demons like Dieter who enter minds and bodies in the most intimate situations imaginable.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omni- science of third person. By “epistemological realism,” I mean that we can only experience our own minds directly, unless we have supernormal powers, and furthermore we can only draw inferences about other minds.{{efn|Ron Rosenbaum, author of ''Explaining Hitler'',, warns Mailer against pursuing, in a rumored sequel to ''The Castle in the Forest'', a sexual explanation of Hitler’s evil. See his essay “The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer” for a convincing admonition about the limits of psycho-sexual explanations of Hitler.}} So first-person-singular narration is as close as fiction can get to what an individual person without telepathic skills can really know. Yet our success in the world depends entirely on having confidence in inferences drawn about other minds, and to develop this confidence we need to develop exactly the sort of imagination found in a convincing social novel. But in ''The Castle in the Forest'', Mailer’s narrator is a demon from hell who takes pride in his work; the associative connection Mailer develops at length does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that all human knowing is damned, but we are privy, as it were, to the intrusions of devils much, much more than we are, in Mailer’s fictional rendition, to the mind-intrusions of angels.<br /> <br /> What are we to make of a carefully wrought fictional scene in which the Hitlers, before young Adi even comes into the world, adventure past ordinary naughty sex into pedal-to-the-metal analingus? In foregrounding sex acts of this sort in a book purportedly about radical evil, Mailer risks being discussed in terms of radical eccentricity. Or, one could say that approaching radical evil through sexual obscenity is artistically obscene. However we put it, the novel intentionally jars the reader just as much as ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), and the central narrative device of ''that'' novel was an act of fellatio between two ghosts in a tomb. Here is the sex act between Alois and Klara that Mailer’s young Hitler witnesses: We may remember that the last time we saw Alois, he was burying his nose and lips in Klara’s vulva, his tongue as long and demonic as a devil’s phallus. (Be it said: we are not without our contributions to these arts.) Alois was certainly being aided by us. Never before had he given himself so completely to this exercise, and quickly he had become good at it, and so quickly that no explanation is possible unless we are given credit as well. (Which is why we speak of the Evil One when joining in the act—we do have the power to pass these lubricious gifts to men and women even when we are not attempting to convert them into clients.) (98)<br /> <br /> What shall we make of this? One possible response will be to link Mailer’s use of the Holocaust with that of Sylvia Plath. One could say each author uses the pain of others to provide historical ballast to pain that is really individual. It would be the height of egotism to use the deaths of six million in order to hide the idiosyncrasy of one’s pain or the eccentricity of one’s ideas.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. He consistently presented himself as an author with an important vision, one worthy of “the mind of Joyce” or Melville, since the mid-1950s, and critics debated whether he ever wrote his ''Ulysses'' or ''Moby Dick''. Mailer’s personal ambition, however, was never in question.<br /> <br /> The cosmological vision has been reiterated in all of Mailer’s major works, including ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (1991), and ''The Gospel according to the Son'' (1997). In each of these novel’s (if we allow for ''The Executioner’s Song'' as a “nonfiction novel”), the struggle between divine forces explains the relation between apparently insignificant actors in ways that factor out what Mailer calls “the Absurd.” The divinity potential of quotidian existence is the binding material in Mailer’s cosmos, with “divinity” meaning extraordinary, magical, and foundational. The experience of the divine overlaps with the extraordinary in the manner of aesthetic wonder, and this commonality allows Mailer to find God in the aesthetic aspects of sexual experience, but the divine must be more than ''merely'' extraordinary. The experience of divinity, which some people achieve and many do not, transcends ordinary experience, meaning that, in Mailer’s Romantic articulation, there is a hierarchy of knowing, and that only some (heroic) persons are able to glimpse the magical foundations of being. Such a vision requires huge risks, which explains why many would prefer not to see what Mailer’s heroic seers may encounter, and those who take such risks are not necessarily good people.<br /> <br /> In ''Ancient Evenings'', which was composed during the Carter presidency, the weak, vacillating pharaoh Ramses IX must decide whether or not to trust the protagonist Menenhetet, a figure who has earned scorn in his attempts to accumulate visionary power through experiments with scatological ceremonies and incest. In this novel Mailer stages his idea that we must make “bargains with evil” into a historical setting that could be called “Before Good and Evil.” Mailer’s setting predates the monotheistic moral codes that undergird our language of morality, thus showing the Eurocentric view to be, in Chakrabarty’s terms, “provincial.” This incarnation of the Mailer vision is, then, radically Manichean, since the Egyptian gods are not centered by a transcendent notion of the Good, against which an evil force defines itself. One could, through cosmological backformation, interpret the theomachy between Osiris and Set as a war between good and evil. In any event, the nature of goodness is never really in question. Artistically modulated growth—a middle way between stagnation and the uncontrolled growth of cancer—has always been the sign of health in Mailer’s universe. Mailer’s praise of Osiris resonates exactly with the adaptations of John Dewey’s “live creature.”<br /> <br /> The existential mystery animating Mailer’s visions has to do not with the existence of good and evil but rather with knowing which is which. Rosenbaum gives a name to the tendency to ground our moral awareness in a false absolute: ''argumentum ad Hitlerum''. When we can no longer endure uncer- tainties, when we have run out of negative capability, we appeal to Hitler to end the argument: ''Hitler'' was evil. The seduction of absolutist thinking, as Mailer shows in his Cold War articulation, is that we name the world in terms of Good and Evil and then proceed to identify our own actions and interests with the Good in self-interested and thus delusory ways: “There is no emotion on earth more powerful than anti-Americanism. To the rest of the world, America is the Garden of Eden. Unmitigated envy, the ugliest emotion of them all.”<br /> “Yessir.” (Harlot’s Ghost 340)<br /> <br /> As George Bush put it in the wake of the 9/11 (2001) attack on the World Trade Center, you are either with us or you are against us. You are either with God or the Devil. The tendency and aim of such a formulation is to make everyone into a “yes-man,” just like the CIA analyst in the quotation above who quickly says “Yessir” to Harlot, Mailer’s architect of American postwar paranoia. In The Gospel according to the Son, Mailer resists the equal-and-opposite fallacy, argumentum ad Jesus, in which one identifies self-with-Jesus-with-Goodness. Mailer despises the ways in which the Bush White House rolls together what Dieter of The Castle in the Forest calls “cheap patriotism” and “cheap prayer” (386), but in ''The Gospel'' according to the Son Mailer wishes not to attack a “cheap” Jesus but to imagine an authentic one. Mailer’s authentic Jesus (as opposed to the authentic Jesus of mainstream Christians) is one who cannot know for sure what the effects of his actions will be. Though Jesus narrates his own gospel, Mailer denies us a text on which to build a fundamentalist worldview. Here is how Brian McDonald presents the narrative uncertainty in “Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the ‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel according to the Son”'': The story, Mailer’s Jesus reassures us, “is true,” but like a careful witness testifying under oath he is quick to add the caveat, “at least to all that I recall” (Gospel 2).<br /> <br /> Mailer’s critics ravaged him for presuming to write in the voice of Jesus, and Mailer clearly anticipates the charge when he has ''his'' Jesus say with nice condescension that the four synoptic gospels were good as far as they went, but they went too far. Mailer’s novelistic hubris, if it should be called that, is in presuming to know the views of God and the Devil and everything in between, but it is presumptuous of the critic to assume that Mailer is ever unaware of the effects of ego, as it is an important theme in all of the “epic” works here discussed: When one has become an overseer of death who holds the power to liquidate masses of people, one is also in great need of a very hard shell to the ego in order to feel no intimate horror over the price to one’s soul. Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification—patriotism! That is still the most dependable instrument for guiding the masses, although it may yet be replaced by revealed religion. We love fundamentalists. Their faith offers us every promise of developing into the final weapon of mass destruction. (405–406)<br /> <br /> Dieter provocatively ranks Hitler as a “statesmen,” thus restating the A. J. P. Taylor argument that Hitler would have been counted a great statesmen if only he had died at the right time, but the honorific word is inverted when we see, in context, that the necessary condition for being a statesman is an ego, a psychic callous to protect one’s sleep from meaningful knowledge of one’s actions. When Dieter stirs in “patriotism” and fundamentalism, it becomes clear that Mailer’s Hitler has been used as a “cudgel” to beat George W. Bush, a president who has been most politely described as “incurious” regarding the facts of the world. “Cudgel,” in ''The Castle in the Forest'', is the name devils such as Dieter give to the Angels, who cause beings pain in their sleep when their actions are hateful rather than loving.<br /> <br /> Antithetical elements call attention to one another, reminding readers of nothing so much as the presence of the author himself. Think back to Mailer’s character Roth in ''The Naked and the Dead'', and of Stephen Richards Rojack walking the parapet in ''An American Dream''. Mailer’s writings are full of intentional impasses and voracious chasms. Readers who cannot make the leap will quickly fly from the page and declare Mailer unreadable. How are we to make the leap from the pure (if uncertain) speech of Jesus back to the vulva of Hitler’s mother? Mailer’s narratives are visionary landscapes designed to engulf some readers while allowing others the chance to develop in admittedly idiosyncratic ways—but it is a mindless response to note Mailer’s stylistic self-reference without noting the antipodal contextualization of his stylistic “egotism.”<br /> <br /> Mailer shows every awareness in his artful rendition of the Devil’s shaping hand that ''ego'' is one of the Devil’s most important tools, but then, most shockingly, he will put in a narrative turn that does nothing so much as foreground the author. Authorial egotism comes into the foreground of Hitler’s mind when he chooses among intellectual influences: He certainly rejected Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him. It was too personal—as if they were much too pleased with what they were saying. Not serious enough, Adolf decided. The other two, Kant and Schleiermacher, he simply could not read. After Jahn, his highest pleasure came from the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers. That had also been assigned to his class. Those were good stories, and deep! (377)<br /> <br /> Adolf uses the stories of Grimm to terrorize his younger brother Edmund, whom Mailer imagines as Hitler’s first murder victim: in a variation of the killing of Abel, jealous Hitler intentionally passes Edmund the measles that will kill him. This passage is one of a dozen or so highly literate moments in ''The Castle in the Forest'' in which Mailer positively revels in the ironies that were once so properly shocking, those attaching to the apparent incongruity of Nazis who loved Beethoven.<br /> <br /> But not all writers and not all ironies are the same—it is not as if Mailer is inviting plague on all the literary houses. Mailer, if I read him rightly, mocks the rectitude with which we have sometimes allowed ourselves to think that literature as such was a proof of superior humanity, when much more is required. Hitler’s literary tastes give some hint of his taste for cruelty, as his sadistic use of the Grimm stories suggests, but even more important is his impatience with queer, unsettling humor, that of Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him? Mailer’s humor here is profound: he knows—has known since he meditated on the career of Henry Miller in the mid-1970s—that his own unsettling humor would “annoy” many of his readers. Merely to make oneself an antipode to Adolf is the laziest move imaginable, but this is not at all where Mailer leaves the matter. He goes on to reveal why Goethe and Schiller annoyed Adi: they reminded him too much that they exist.<br /> <br /> It cannot be said that this humor is inherently ethical. The freedom of humor (and it is this often disappointing freedom of the other to disappoint you that proves that the other is not a function of your own fantasy) has its horrible uses. Hitler’s ''literary'' torture of Edmund is one of the most grimly funny moments in a novel replete with dark humor. Young Adolf has been reading Edmund terrifying Grimm stories:<br /> “Do you want another story?”<br /> &quot;Maybe not.&quot;<br /> “This one is the best,” said Adolf.<br /> &quot;Is it truly the best?&quot;<br /> &quot;Yes&quot;<br /> “Then maybe I don’t want to hear it.”<br /> “It’s about a young man who is ordered to sleep with a corpse.<br /> In time to come you, too, may have to sleep next to a dead man.” At this point, Edmund shrieked. Then he fainted. (379)<br /> <br /> In genuinely frightening ways that inter-leaven the literary and the wicked, Mailer exacerbates our moral consciences; American literature has not been as darkly funny since Twain’s ''Letters from the Earth''. Twain’s and Mailer’s are good stories, and deep!<br /> <br /> Mailer’s laughter in The Castle in the Forest is not the raucous, adolescent laughter of America’s 1960s black humor fiction, a laughter that is always implicitly the laughter of an overly stable know-it-all we. We laugh at the bureaucrats in ''Catch-22''. There’s an unsettling oddity to Mailer’s style, though, an awareness that, like Dieter’s, Mailer’s humor is both on the mark and a bit to one side of the main stream of events. Mailer does not pretend to be in the ethical center, and the rude, cruel, and invasive qualities of his “diabolical” narrative technique are, he will not let us forget, essential elements in our own conventional mind-set. The castle in Mailer’s forest, the redemptive beauty that makes the pain and failures of such unappreciated masterpieces as Ancient Evenings and The Castle in the Forest bearable, is always a repetition and ever-free variation of a cavalier wit. As it is in the moment in which Adolf tortures his brother with literature, Mailer’s humor is genuinely funny and, at exactly the same time, resoundingly grim. Put- ting his own idea that our best is often closest to our worst into the mouth of Himmler, Mailer turns into the pain of his own humor and allows—encourages, actually—the nasty identifications his harshest critics made of himself and his work, that he was violent and cruel and “patriarchal” in the sense in which patriarchy is a synonym for Fascism. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to this cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably ''alone''.<br /> <br /> ===Notes===<br /> {{notelist}}<br /> <br /> ===Citations===<br /> {{Reflist|20em}}<br /> <br /> ===Works Cited===<br /> {{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br /> * {{cite journal |last=Adamowski |first=T. H. |title=Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer |url= |journal=University of Toronto Quarterly |volume=75 |issue=3 |date=Summer 2006 |pages=883–904 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite news |last=Bosman |first=Julie |date=December 6, 2006 |title=Literature: Do Novels Really Need Bibliographies? |url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061208122042/http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php |archive-date=December 8, 2006 |work=International Herald Tribune |location= |access-date=2020-09-10 |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Chakrabarty |first=Dipesh |date=2007 |title=Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference |url= |location=Princeton, NJ |publisher=Princeton UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} New edition with a new preface by the author.<br /> * {{cite journal |last=Gubar |first=Susan |title=Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries |url= |journal=The Yale Journal of Criticism |volume=14 |issue=1 |date=Spring 2001 |pages=191–215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |title=Mailer’s Cosmology |url= |journal=Modern Language Studies |volume=12 |issue=3 |date=1982 |pages=18-29 |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1983 |title=Ancient Evenings |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dial |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman |authormask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |url= |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman| authormask=1 |date=2007 |title= Why Are We at War |url= |location= New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McCann|first=Sean|title=The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism|url= |journal=English Literary History|volume=67|issue=1|date=2000|pages=293–336|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McDonald|first=Brian|title=Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the 'Very Jewish Jesus' of Norman Mailer's ''The Gospel according to the Son|url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=78–90|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rorty|first=Richard|date=1989|title=Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity|url= |location=New York|publisher=Cambridge UP|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rosenbaum|first=Ron|date=March 6, 2007|title=The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer: What Will He Make of 'Hitler's Chappaquiddick'?|url=http://www.slate.com/id/2161302/|location= |publisher=Slate |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Taylor|first=A. J. P |date=1996|title=The Origins of the Second World War|url= |location=New York|publisher=Touchstone|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite web |url= http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/the-incrediblyunbelieva_b_35882.html|title=The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush |last=Uygur|first=Cenk|date=December 8, 2006|website= |publisher= |access-date=1 August 2008|quote= |ref=harv }}<br /> {{Refend}}<br /> {{Review}}<br /> {{DEFAULTSORT:Their Humor Annoyed Him}}<br /> [[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:CDucharme&diff=11395 2020-09-15T00:23:39Z

<p>CDucharme: </p> <hr /> <div>I am a senior at Middle Georgia State University, on track to receive a degree in New Media and Communication. After graduation I hope to begin a career in sports journalism.<br /> I have lived in Macon Georgia my entire life, my hobbies are playing golf and video games in my free time. I have joined this community in order to grow my skills in the digital field.<br /> <br /> {{Wikipedia:TWA/Badge/1template}}<br /> [[File:Wikipedia Adventure Screenshot.png|thumb]]</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=File:Wikipedia_Adventure_Screenshot.png&diff=11394 2020-09-15T00:23:30Z

<p>CDucharme: </p> <hr /> <div>Wikipedia Adventure Completion</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:CDucharme&diff=11392 2020-09-15T00:13:26Z

<p>CDucharme: Introduced myself</p> <hr /> <div>I am a senior at Middle Georgia State University, on track to receive a degree in New Media and Communication. After graduation I hope to begin a career in sports journalism.<br /> I have lived in Macon Georgia my entire life, my hobbies are playing golf and video games in my free time. I have joined this community in order to grow my skills in the digital field.<br /> <br /> {{Wikipedia:TWA/Badge/1template}}</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:CDucharme&diff=11391 2020-09-15T00:11:03Z

<p>CDucharme: </p> <hr /> <div>I am a senior at Middle Georgia State University, on track to receive a degree in New Media and Communication. After graduation I hope to begin a career in sports journalism.<br /> I have lived in Macon Georgia my entire life, my hobbies are playing golf and video games in my free time. I have joined this community in order to grow my skills in the digital field.<br /> {{Wikipedia:TWA/Badge/1template}}</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:CDucharme&diff=11385 2020-09-14T21:08:58Z

<p>CDucharme: </p> <hr /> <div>I am a senior at Middle Georgia State University, on track to receive a degree in New Media and Communication. After graduation I hope to begin a career in sports journalism.<br /> I have lived in Macon Georgia my entire life, my hobbies are playing golf and video games in my free time. I have joined this community in order to grow my skills in the digital field.</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User_talk:Grlucas&diff=11383 2020-09-14T21:04:09Z

<p>CDucharme: /* Article Errors */</p> <hr /> <div>{{Talk header}}<br /> <br /> == Article Errors ==<br /> <br /> I've added the body of the article to my sandbox page. What errors do I need to specifically change in order to make it correct?[[User:CDucharme|CDucharme]] ([[User talk:CDucharme|talk]]) 17:04, 14 September 2020 (EDT)</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User_talk:Grlucas&diff=11382 2020-09-14T21:03:07Z

<p>CDucharme: /* Article Errors */ new section</p> <hr /> <div>{{Talk header}}<br /> <br /> == Article Errors ==<br /> <br /> I've added the body of the article to my sandbox page. What errors do I need to specifically change in order to make it correct?</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:CDucharme/sandbox&diff=11374 2020-09-14T20:39:34Z

<p>CDucharme: </p> <hr /> <div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:&lt;span style=&quot;font-size:22px;&gt;{{BASEPAGENAME}}/&lt;/span&gt;&quot;Their Humor Annoyed Him&quot;: Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in ''The Castle in the Forest''}}<br /> {{MR12}}<br /> {{Byline|last=Whalen-Bridge|first=John|abstract=Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omniscience of third person. Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to the ''Castle''’s cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably alone.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08whal}}<br /> {{cquote|Himmler subscribed to the theory that the best human possibilities lie close to the worst.}}<br /> <br /> ==Article==<br /> {{start|There is a joke about attorneys}} that goes like this: lots of people were on a boat, which sank in shark-infested waters. It was horrible. The sharks were tearing all the passengers to pieces as they tried to make it to shore. All the passengers were dying. Except one passenger, who was an attorney. He swam right to the shore. As he was shaking himself off, the bewildered people on the beach asked him, “How come the sharks did not eat you?” He said: “Professional courtesy, I suppose.” We don’t like attorneys, such a joke conveys, because they are not like us. They are like sharks, and we are like people. We laugh at the joke, if we do, to commune in our fantasy-rejection of lawyerly cruelty. But Mailer’s last novel, ''The Castle in the Forest'', is organized around a very different sort of humor. Instead of laughing at lawyers to confirm our fantasy that we ourselves are not sharks, Mailer shocks readers, methodically and skillfully, with the knowledge that they are intimately involved with so much of what they—we, I should say—resoundingly reject. The undertow of laughter in this novel won’t necessarily drag you out to sea, but it will make you ask if you share qualities with what is being held up for laughter and judgment.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s narrator in ''The Castle in the Forest'' speaks with courtesy and intelligence.{{efn|Both Steven Poole in his ''New Statesman'' review, “[https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2007/02/norman-mailer-hitler-novel Sympathy for the Devil]” (19 February 2007) and John Freeman in his ''Independent'' review “[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/sympathy-for-the-devil-norman-mailer-on-his-satanic-new-novel-434647.html Sympathy for the Devil: Norman Mailer on His Satanic New Novel]” (2 February 2007) connect Mailer’s novel and the Rolling Stones’ song in their titles. The Jagger/Richards song, which first appeared on the 1968 album ''Beggers Banquet'', is a dramatic monologue in which Lucifer brags about his achievements, insists on commonalities between himself and his listeners, and demands courtesy if met: he is a “man of wealth and taste,” after all. All criminals are cops, all sinners are saints, and we all killed the Kennedys.}} He calls himself “Dieter” (though it is not clear what he means to “deter”), and he has been a witness to the formation of Adolf Hitler. Dieter explains to the reader that he has been a functionary in the Third Reich, but he has been—long before he came to work for Himmler—part of the Devil’s bureaucracy, with young “Adi” as his most important case. In this way, Mailer manages to bring together the bureaucratic “banality” of evil with the attractions and powers of evil that the word banality cannot subsume.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s final novel (2007) is a concatenation of aesthetic shocks that tells of the formation of Adolf Hitler’s character, beginning with the incestuous influences of his grandfather (about the identity of whom there has been much historical speculation), and continuing through his schooling. Ron Rosenbaum’s ''Explaining Hitler'' can fruitfully be read as a companion-text to Mailer’s novel; its central question is “When and how did Hitler become Hitler?” Mailer’s novel affirms the idea that Hitler developed sociopathic tendencies by his early teens and that these were the foundation for the subsequent obsession with eliminationist anti-Semitism that would come later—but this evolution in Hitler’s darkness is not central to Mailer’s novel. Mailer builds a Hitler to explain a person attracted to murder and deceit, but anti-Semitism is not the driving force of the life Mailer imagines. Mailer does not at all exclude the idea that everything in the novel is tuned toward the Holocaust. The title “The Castle in the Forest,” Dieter tells readers in the final pages, is the translation of a death camp called “''Schlossimwald''” by those inmates who would not, even in the face of ultimate pain and evil, surrender their sense of irony.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=465}} That irony would remain a prized possession under such circumstances will shock some readers, since the phenomena of Hitler and the Holocaust are for many the very limit of irony. In the Rortyean, postmodern, and thoroughly ironic world in which we live, the Holocaust cannot be reduced to a contingent phenomena whose meaning is entirely dependent upon the subject position of the perceiver. Such a way of thinking will earn a comparison with Holocaust deniers. Mailer not only concludes with an homage to ironic camp inmates but also has Dieter-the-demon tell us that the Devil (whom he calls “the Maestro”) is a connoisseur of irony: “All this was uttered by the Maestro with characteristic irony. We never know how serious he might be when he speaks to our mind’s ear. (His voice is a cornucopia of humors.)”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=78}} Mailer might even be describing himself in this passage.<br /> <br /> A ''New York Times'' article paused to note that a number of recent novels had the odd feature of including bibliographies. The bibliography of ''The Castle in the Forest'' is rich with entries on bee-keeping. Readers of the novel know it is a richly over-determined metaphor, combining elements of modulated brutality and great technical skill. Bee-keeping is perhaps the central metaphor of the novel, and Mailer’s bibliography lists half-a-dozen or so specialist books on the subject. Bee-keeping signifies social order, but order as understood from an awful height, that of humans looking down on potentially profitable insects, or that of God looking down on mischievous creation. The bees themselves are ruthless at maintaining order, and they eliminate all threats to the hive without hesitation. Mailer’s Alois Hitler is presented as a dedicated bee-keeper, and the narrator Dieter—while perhaps disingenuously or even seductively warning readers not to make too much of such events!—presents several scenes in which hives are gassed or burned. Readers might wonder how exactly they could ever make “too much” of such a parallel.<br /> <br /> As important as bee-keeping is to Mailer’s larger narrative loops, it competes in the reader’s imagination with a theme that is given equal air-time but which etches the memory more ruthlessly moment for moment and image for image: transgressive sex. Mailer stays true to his fascination with the idea that God and the Devil partake in human lives through dreams and sex acts. The reader must consider a Freudian primal scene in which young Adolf witnesses Alois and Klara in the sixty-nine position, and witnessing the fictional event makes the reader equal, in some imaginative sense, to demons like Dieter who enter minds and bodies in the most intimate situations imaginable.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omni- science of third person. By “epistemological realism,” I mean that we can only experience our own minds directly, unless we have supernormal powers, and furthermore we can only draw inferences about other minds. So first-person-singular narration is as close as fiction can get to what an individual person without telepathic skills can really know. Yet our success in the world depends entirely on having confidence in inferences drawn about other minds, and to develop this confidence we need to develop exactly the sort of imagination found in a convincing social novel. But in ''The Castle in the Forest'', Mailer’s narrator is a demon from hell who takes pride in his work; the associative connection Mailer develops at length does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that all human knowing is damned, but we are privy, as it were, to the intrusions of devils much, much more than we are, in Mailer’s fictional rendition, to the mind-intrusions of angels.<br /> <br /> What are we to make of a carefully wrought fictional scene in which the Hitlers, before young Adi even comes into the world, adventure past ordinary naughty sex into pedal-to-the-metal analingus? In foregrounding sex acts of this sort in a book purportedly about radical evil, Mailer risks being discussed in terms of radical eccentricity. Or, one could say that approaching radical evil through sexual obscenity is artistically obscene. However we put it, the novel intentionally jars the reader just as much as ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), and the central narrative device of ''that'' novel was an act of fellatio between two ghosts in a tomb. Here is the sex act between Alois and Klara that Mailer’s young Hitler witnesses: We may remember that the last time we saw Alois, he was burying his nose and lips in Klara’s vulva, his tongue as long and demonic as a devil’s phallus. (Be it said: we are not without our contributions to these arts.) Alois was certainly being aided by us. Never before had he given himself so completely to this exercise, and quickly he had become good at it, and so quickly that no explanation is possible unless we are given credit as well. (Which is why we speak of the Evil One when joining in the act—we do have the power to pass these lubricious gifts to men and women even when we are not attempting to convert them into clients.) (98)<br /> <br /> What shall we make of this? One possible response will be to link Mailer’s use of the Holocaust with that of Sylvia Plath. One could say each author uses the pain of others to provide historical ballast to pain that is really individual. It would be the height of egotism to use the deaths of six million in order to hide the idiosyncrasy of one’s pain or the eccentricity of one’s ideas.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. He consistently presented himself as an author with an important vision, one worthy of “the mind of Joyce” or Melville, since the mid-1950s, and critics debated whether he ever wrote his ''Ulysses'' or ''Moby Dick''. Mailer’s personal ambition, however, was never in question.<br /> <br /> The cosmological vision has been reiterated in all of Mailer’s major works, including ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (1991), and ''The Gospel according to the Son'' (1997). In each of these novel’s (if we allow for ''The Executioner’s Song'' as a “nonfiction novel”), the struggle between divine forces explains the relation between apparently insignificant actors in ways that factor out what Mailer calls “the Absurd.” The divinity potential of quotidian existence is the binding material in Mailer’s cosmos, with “divinity” meaning extraordinary, magical, and foundational. The experience of the divine overlaps with the extraordinary in the manner of aesthetic wonder, and this commonality allows Mailer to find God in the aesthetic aspects of sexual experience, but the divine must be more than ''merely'' extraordinary. The experience of divinity, which some people achieve and many do not, transcends ordinary experience, meaning that, in Mailer’s Romantic articulation, there is a hierarchy of knowing, and that only some (heroic) persons are able to glimpse the magical foundations of being. Such a vision requires huge risks, which explains why many would prefer not to see what Mailer’s heroic seers may encounter, and those who take such risks are not necessarily good people.<br /> <br /> In ''Ancient Evenings'', which was composed during the Carter presidency, the weak, vacillating pharaoh Ramses IX must decide whether or not to trust the protagonist Menenhetet, a figure who has earned scorn in his attempts to accumulate visionary power through experiments with scatological ceremonies and incest. In this novel Mailer stages his idea that we must make “bargains with evil” into a historical setting that could be called “Before Good and Evil.” Mailer’s setting predates the monotheistic moral codes that undergird our language of morality, thus showing the Eurocentric view to be, in Chakrabarty’s terms, “provincial.” This incarnation of the Mailer vision is, then, radically Manichean, since the Egyptian gods are not centered by a transcendent notion of the Good, against which an evil force defines itself. One could, through cosmological backformation, interpret the theomachy between Osiris and Set as a war between good and evil. In any event, the nature of goodness is never really in question. Artistically modulated growth—a middle way between stagnation and the uncontrolled growth of cancer—has always been the sign of health in Mailer’s universe. Mailer’s praise of Osiris resonates exactly with the adaptations of John Dewey’s “live creature.”<br /> <br /> The existential mystery animating Mailer’s visions has to do not with the existence of good and evil but rather with knowing which is which. Rosenbaum gives a name to the tendency to ground our moral awareness in a false absolute: ''argumentum ad Hitlerum''. When we can no longer endure uncer- tainties, when we have run out of negative capability, we appeal to Hitler to end the argument: ''Hitler'' was evil. The seduction of absolutist thinking, as Mailer shows in his Cold War articulation, is that we name the world in terms of Good and Evil and then proceed to identify our own actions and interests with the Good in self-interested and thus delusory ways: “There is no emotion on earth more powerful than anti-Americanism. To the rest of the world, America is the Garden of Eden. Unmitigated envy, the ugliest emotion of them all.”<br /> “Yessir.” (Harlot’s Ghost 340)<br /> <br /> As George Bush put it in the wake of the 9/11 (2001) attack on the World Trade Center, you are either with us or you are against us. You are either with God or the Devil. The tendency and aim of such a formulation is to make everyone into a “yes-man,” just like the CIA analyst in the quotation above who quickly says “Yessir” to Harlot, Mailer’s architect of American postwar paranoia. In The Gospel according to the Son, Mailer resists the equal-and-opposite fallacy, argumentum ad Jesus, in which one identifies self-with-Jesus-with-Goodness. Mailer despises the ways in which the Bush White House rolls together what Dieter of The Castle in the Forest calls “cheap patriotism” and “cheap prayer” (386), but in ''The Gospel'' according to the Son Mailer wishes not to attack a “cheap” Jesus but to imagine an authentic one. Mailer’s authentic Jesus (as opposed to the authentic Jesus of mainstream Christians) is one who cannot know for sure what the effects of his actions will be. Though Jesus narrates his own gospel, Mailer denies us a text on which to build a fundamentalist worldview. Here is how Brian McDonald presents the narrative uncertainty in “Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the ‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel according to the Son”'': The story, Mailer’s Jesus reassures us, “is true,” but like a careful witness testifying under oath he is quick to add the caveat, “at least to all that I recall” (Gospel 2).<br /> <br /> Mailer’s critics ravaged him for presuming to write in the voice of Jesus, and Mailer clearly anticipates the charge when he has ''his'' Jesus say with nice condescension that the four synoptic gospels were good as far as they went, but they went too far. Mailer’s novelistic hubris, if it should be called that, is in presuming to know the views of God and the Devil and everything in between, but it is presumptuous of the critic to assume that Mailer is ever unaware of the effects of ego, as it is an important theme in all of the “epic” works here discussed: When one has become an overseer of death who holds the power to liquidate masses of people, one is also in great need of a very hard shell to the ego in order to feel no intimate horror over the price to one’s soul. Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification—patriotism! That is still the most dependable instrument for guiding the masses, although it may yet be replaced by revealed religion. We love fundamentalists. Their faith offers us every promise of developing into the final weapon of mass destruction. (405–406)<br /> <br /> Dieter provocatively ranks Hitler as a “statesmen,” thus restating the A. J. P. Taylor argument that Hitler would have been counted a great statesmen if only he had died at the right time, but the honorific word is inverted when we see, in context, that the necessary condition for being a statesman is an ego, a psychic callous to protect one’s sleep from meaningful knowledge of one’s actions. When Dieter stirs in “patriotism” and fundamentalism, it becomes clear that Mailer’s Hitler has been used as a “cudgel” to beat George W. Bush, a president who has been most politely described as “incurious” regarding the facts of the world. “Cudgel,” in ''The Castle in the Forest'', is the name devils such as Dieter give to the Angels, who cause beings pain in their sleep when their actions are hateful rather than loving.<br /> <br /> Antithetical elements call attention to one another, reminding readers of nothing so much as the presence of the author himself. Think back to Mailer’s character Roth in ''The Naked and the Dead'', and of Stephen Richards Rojack walking the parapet in ''An American Dream''. Mailer’s writings are full of intentional impasses and voracious chasms. Readers who cannot make the leap will quickly fly from the page and declare Mailer unreadable. How are we to make the leap from the pure (if uncertain) speech of Jesus back to the vulva of Hitler’s mother? Mailer’s narratives are visionary landscapes designed to engulf some readers while allowing others the chance to develop in admittedly idiosyncratic ways—but it is a mindless response to note Mailer’s stylistic self-reference without noting the antipodal contextualization of his stylistic “egotism.”<br /> <br /> Mailer shows every awareness in his artful rendition of the Devil’s shaping hand that ''ego'' is one of the Devil’s most important tools, but then, most shockingly, he will put in a narrative turn that does nothing so much as foreground the author. Authorial egotism comes into the foreground of Hitler’s mind when he chooses among intellectual influences: He certainly rejected Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him. It was too personal—as if they were much too pleased with what they were saying. Not serious enough, Adolf decided. The other two, Kant and Schleiermacher, he simply could not read. After Jahn, his highest pleasure came from the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers. That had also been assigned to his class. Those were good stories, and deep! (377)<br /> <br /> Adolf uses the stories of Grimm to terrorize his younger brother Edmund, whom Mailer imagines as Hitler’s first murder victim: in a variation of the killing of Abel, jealous Hitler intentionally passes Edmund the measles that will kill him. This passage is one of a dozen or so highly literate moments in ''The Castle in the Forest'' in which Mailer positively revels in the ironies that were once so properly shocking, those attaching to the apparent incongruity of Nazis who loved Beethoven.<br /> <br /> But not all writers and not all ironies are the same—it is not as if Mailer is inviting plague on all the literary houses. Mailer, if I read him rightly, mocks the rectitude with which we have sometimes allowed ourselves to think that literature as such was a proof of superior humanity, when much more is required. Hitler’s literary tastes give some hint of his taste for cruelty, as his sadistic use of the Grimm stories suggests, but even more important is his impatience with queer, unsettling humor, that of Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him? Mailer’s humor here is profound: he knows—has known since he meditated on the career of Henry Miller in the mid-1970s—that his own unsettling humor would “annoy” many of his readers. Merely to make oneself an antipode to Adolf is the laziest move imaginable, but this is not at all where Mailer leaves the matter. He goes on to reveal why Goethe and Schiller annoyed Adi: they reminded him too much that they exist.<br /> <br /> It cannot be said that this humor is inherently ethical. The freedom of humor (and it is this often disappointing freedom of the other to disappoint you that proves that the other is not a function of your own fantasy) has its horrible uses. Hitler’s ''literary'' torture of Edmund is one of the most grimly funny moments in a novel replete with dark humor. Young Adolf has been reading Edmund terrifying Grimm stories:<br /> “Do you want another story?”<br /> &quot;Maybe not.&quot;<br /> “This one is the best,” said Adolf.<br /> &quot;Is it truly the best?&quot;<br /> &quot;Yes&quot;<br /> “Then maybe I don’t want to hear it.”<br /> “It’s about a young man who is ordered to sleep with a corpse.<br /> In time to come you, too, may have to sleep next to a dead man.” At this point, Edmund shrieked. Then he fainted. (379)<br /> <br /> In genuinely frightening ways that inter-leaven the literary and the wicked, Mailer exacerbates our moral consciences; American literature has not been as darkly funny since Twain’s ''Letters from the Earth''. Twain’s and Mailer’s are good stories, and deep!<br /> <br /> Mailer’s laughter in The Castle in the Forest is not the raucous, adolescent laughter of America’s 1960s black humor fiction, a laughter that is always implicitly the laughter of an overly stable know-it-all we. We laugh at the bureaucrats in ''Catch-22''. There’s an unsettling oddity to Mailer’s style, though, an awareness that, like Dieter’s, Mailer’s humor is both on the mark and a bit to one side of the main stream of events. Mailer does not pretend to be in the ethical center, and the rude, cruel, and invasive qualities of his “diabolical” narrative technique are, he will not let us forget, essential elements in our own conventional mind-set. The castle in Mailer’s forest, the redemptive beauty that makes the pain and failures of such unappreciated masterpieces as Ancient Evenings and The Castle in the Forest bearable, is always a repetition and ever-free variation of a cavalier wit. As it is in the moment in which Adolf tortures his brother with literature, Mailer’s humor is genuinely funny and, at exactly the same time, resoundingly grim. Put- ting his own idea that our best is often closest to our worst into the mouth of Himmler, Mailer turns into the pain of his own humor and allows—encourages, actually—the nasty identifications his harshest critics made of himself and his work, that he was violent and cruel and “patriarchal” in the sense in which patriarchy is a synonym for Fascism. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to this cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably ''alone''.<br /> ==Works Cited==<br /> {{Refbegin}}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Adamowski|first=T. H.|title=Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer|url=|journal=U of Toronto Quarterly|volume=75|issue=3|date=2006|pages=883-904|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Bosman|first=Julie|title=Literature: Do Novels Really Need Bibliographies?|url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php|journal=International Herald Tribune|volume=|issue=|date=December 6, 2006|pages=|access-date=3 August 2008|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Chakrabarty|first=Dipesh|date=2007|title=Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference|url= |location=Princeton, NJ|publisher=Princeton UP|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Gubar|first=Susan|title=Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries|url= |journal=The Yale Journal of Criticism|volume=14|issue=1|date=2001|pages=191–215|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Lennon|first=J. Michael|title=Mailer’s Cosmology|url= |journal=Modern Language Studies|volume=12|issue=3|date=1982|pages=18-29|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book|last=Mailer|first= Norman|date=1983|title=Ancient Evenings|url=|location=Boston|publisher=Little Brown|pages= |isbn= |author-link=|ref=harv }}<br /> {{cite book|date=1965|title=An American Dream|location=New York|publisher=Dial|ref=harv }}<br /> <br /> {{cite book|date=2007|title=The Castle in the Forest|location=New York|publisher=Random House|ref=harv }}<br /> <br /> {{cite book|date=1948|title=The Naked and the Dead|location=New York|publisher=Rinehart|ref=harv }}<br /> <br /> {{cite book|date=2003|title=Why Are We at War?|location=New York|publisher=Random House|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal |last1=Mailer|first1=Norman|last2=Whalen-Bridge|first2=John|title=The Karma of Words: Mailer since ''Executioner's Song''|url=|journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=1-16|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McCann|first=Sean|title=The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism|url= |journal=English Literary History|volume=67|issue=1|date=2000|pages=293–336|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McDonald|first=Brian|title=Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the 'Very Jewish Jesus' of Norman Mailer's ''The Gospel according to the Son|url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=78–90|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rorty|first=Richard|date=1989|title=Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity|url= |location=New York|publisher=Cambridge UP|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rosenbaum|first=Ron|date=March 6, 2007|title=The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer: What Will He Make of 'Hitler's Chappaquiddick'?|url=http://www.slate.com/id/2161302/|location= |publisher=Slate |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Taylor|first=A. J. P |date=1996|title=The Origins of the Second World War|url= |location=New York|publisher=Touchstone|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite web |url= http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/the-incrediblyunbelieva_b_35882.html|title=The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush|last=Uygur|first=Cenk|date=December 8, 2006|website= |publisher= |access-date=1 August 2008|quote= |ref=harv }}</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:CDucharme/sandbox&diff=11372 2020-09-14T20:37:58Z

<p>CDucharme: </p> <hr /> <div>==Article==<br /> {{start|There is a joke about attorneys}} that goes like this: lots of people were on a boat, which sank in shark-infested waters. It was horrible. The sharks were tearing all the passengers to pieces as they tried to make it to shore. All the passengers were dying. Except one passenger, who was an attorney. He swam right to the shore. As he was shaking himself off, the bewildered people on the beach asked him, “How come the sharks did not eat you?” He said: “Professional courtesy, I suppose.” We don’t like attorneys, such a joke conveys, because they are not like us. They are like sharks, and we are like people. We laugh at the joke, if we do, to commune in our fantasy-rejection of lawyerly cruelty. But Mailer’s last novel, ''The Castle in the Forest'', is organized around a very different sort of humor. Instead of laughing at lawyers to confirm our fantasy that we ourselves are not sharks, Mailer shocks readers, methodically and skillfully, with the knowledge that they are intimately involved with so much of what they—we, I should say—resoundingly reject. The undertow of laughter in this novel won’t necessarily drag you out to sea, but it will make you ask if you share qualities with what is being held up for laughter and judgment.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s narrator in ''The Castle in the Forest'' speaks with courtesy and intelligence.{{efn|Both Steven Poole in his ''New Statesman'' review, “[https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2007/02/norman-mailer-hitler-novel Sympathy for the Devil]” (19 February 2007) and John Freeman in his ''Independent'' review “[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/sympathy-for-the-devil-norman-mailer-on-his-satanic-new-novel-434647.html Sympathy for the Devil: Norman Mailer on His Satanic New Novel]” (2 February 2007) connect Mailer’s novel and the Rolling Stones’ song in their titles. The Jagger/Richards song, which first appeared on the 1968 album ''Beggers Banquet'', is a dramatic monologue in which Lucifer brags about his achievements, insists on commonalities between himself and his listeners, and demands courtesy if met: he is a “man of wealth and taste,” after all. All criminals are cops, all sinners are saints, and we all killed the Kennedys.}} He calls himself “Dieter” (though it is not clear what he means to “deter”), and he has been a witness to the formation of Adolf Hitler. Dieter explains to the reader that he has been a functionary in the Third Reich, but he has been—long before he came to work for Himmler—part of the Devil’s bureaucracy, with young “Adi” as his most important case. In this way, Mailer manages to bring together the bureaucratic “banality” of evil with the attractions and powers of evil that the word banality cannot subsume.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s final novel (2007) is a concatenation of aesthetic shocks that tells of the formation of Adolf Hitler’s character, beginning with the incestuous influences of his grandfather (about the identity of whom there has been much historical speculation), and continuing through his schooling. Ron Rosenbaum’s ''Explaining Hitler'' can fruitfully be read as a companion-text to Mailer’s novel; its central question is “When and how did Hitler become Hitler?” Mailer’s novel affirms the idea that Hitler developed sociopathic tendencies by his early teens and that these were the foundation for the subsequent obsession with eliminationist anti-Semitism that would come later—but this evolution in Hitler’s darkness is not central to Mailer’s novel. Mailer builds a Hitler to explain a person attracted to murder and deceit, but anti-Semitism is not the driving force of the life Mailer imagines. Mailer does not at all exclude the idea that everything in the novel is tuned toward the Holocaust. The title “The Castle in the Forest,” Dieter tells readers in the final pages, is the translation of a death camp called “''Schlossimwald''” by those inmates who would not, even in the face of ultimate pain and evil, surrender their sense of irony.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=465}} That irony would remain a prized possession under such circumstances will shock some readers, since the phenomena of Hitler and the Holocaust are for many the very limit of irony. In the Rortyean, postmodern, and thoroughly ironic world in which we live, the Holocaust cannot be reduced to a contingent phenomena whose meaning is entirely dependent upon the subject position of the perceiver. Such a way of thinking will earn a comparison with Holocaust deniers. Mailer not only concludes with an homage to ironic camp inmates but also has Dieter-the-demon tell us that the Devil (whom he calls “the Maestro”) is a connoisseur of irony: “All this was uttered by the Maestro with characteristic irony. We never know how serious he might be when he speaks to our mind’s ear. (His voice is a cornucopia of humors.)”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=78}} Mailer might even be describing himself in this passage.<br /> <br /> A ''New York Times'' article paused to note that a number of recent novels had the odd feature of including bibliographies. The bibliography of ''The Castle in the Forest'' is rich with entries on bee-keeping. Readers of the novel know it is a richly over-determined metaphor, combining elements of modulated brutality and great technical skill. Bee-keeping is perhaps the central metaphor of the novel, and Mailer’s bibliography lists half-a-dozen or so specialist books on the subject. Bee-keeping signifies social order, but order as understood from an awful height, that of humans looking down on potentially profitable insects, or that of God looking down on mischievous creation. The bees themselves are ruthless at maintaining order, and they eliminate all threats to the hive without hesitation. Mailer’s Alois Hitler is presented as a dedicated bee-keeper, and the narrator Dieter—while perhaps disingenuously or even seductively warning readers not to make too much of such events!—presents several scenes in which hives are gassed or burned. Readers might wonder how exactly they could ever make “too much” of such a parallel.<br /> <br /> As important as bee-keeping is to Mailer’s larger narrative loops, it competes in the reader’s imagination with a theme that is given equal air-time but which etches the memory more ruthlessly moment for moment and image for image: transgressive sex. Mailer stays true to his fascination with the idea that God and the Devil partake in human lives through dreams and sex acts. The reader must consider a Freudian primal scene in which young Adolf witnesses Alois and Klara in the sixty-nine position, and witnessing the fictional event makes the reader equal, in some imaginative sense, to demons like Dieter who enter minds and bodies in the most intimate situations imaginable.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omni- science of third person. By “epistemological realism,” I mean that we can only experience our own minds directly, unless we have supernormal powers, and furthermore we can only draw inferences about other minds. So first-person-singular narration is as close as fiction can get to what an individual person without telepathic skills can really know. Yet our success in the world depends entirely on having confidence in inferences drawn about other minds, and to develop this confidence we need to develop exactly the sort of imagination found in a convincing social novel. But in ''The Castle in the Forest'', Mailer’s narrator is a demon from hell who takes pride in his work; the associative connection Mailer develops at length does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that all human knowing is damned, but we are privy, as it were, to the intrusions of devils much, much more than we are, in Mailer’s fictional rendition, to the mind-intrusions of angels.<br /> <br /> What are we to make of a carefully wrought fictional scene in which the Hitlers, before young Adi even comes into the world, adventure past ordinary naughty sex into pedal-to-the-metal analingus? In foregrounding sex acts of this sort in a book purportedly about radical evil, Mailer risks being discussed in terms of radical eccentricity. Or, one could say that approaching radical evil through sexual obscenity is artistically obscene. However we put it, the novel intentionally jars the reader just as much as ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), and the central narrative device of ''that'' novel was an act of fellatio between two ghosts in a tomb. Here is the sex act between Alois and Klara that Mailer’s young Hitler witnesses: We may remember that the last time we saw Alois, he was burying his nose and lips in Klara’s vulva, his tongue as long and demonic as a devil’s phallus. (Be it said: we are not without our contributions to these arts.) Alois was certainly being aided by us. Never before had he given himself so completely to this exercise, and quickly he had become good at it, and so quickly that no explanation is possible unless we are given credit as well. (Which is why we speak of the Evil One when joining in the act—we do have the power to pass these lubricious gifts to men and women even when we are not attempting to convert them into clients.) (98)<br /> <br /> What shall we make of this? One possible response will be to link Mailer’s use of the Holocaust with that of Sylvia Plath. One could say each author uses the pain of others to provide historical ballast to pain that is really individual. It would be the height of egotism to use the deaths of six million in order to hide the idiosyncrasy of one’s pain or the eccentricity of one’s ideas.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. He consistently presented himself as an author with an important vision, one worthy of “the mind of Joyce” or Melville, since the mid-1950s, and critics debated whether he ever wrote his ''Ulysses'' or ''Moby Dick''. Mailer’s personal ambition, however, was never in question.<br /> <br /> The cosmological vision has been reiterated in all of Mailer’s major works, including ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (1991), and ''The Gospel according to the Son'' (1997). In each of these novel’s (if we allow for ''The Executioner’s Song'' as a “nonfiction novel”), the struggle between divine forces explains the relation between apparently insignificant actors in ways that factor out what Mailer calls “the Absurd.” The divinity potential of quotidian existence is the binding material in Mailer’s cosmos, with “divinity” meaning extraordinary, magical, and foundational. The experience of the divine overlaps with the extraordinary in the manner of aesthetic wonder, and this commonality allows Mailer to find God in the aesthetic aspects of sexual experience, but the divine must be more than ''merely'' extraordinary. The experience of divinity, which some people achieve and many do not, transcends ordinary experience, meaning that, in Mailer’s Romantic articulation, there is a hierarchy of knowing, and that only some (heroic) persons are able to glimpse the magical foundations of being. Such a vision requires huge risks, which explains why many would prefer not to see what Mailer’s heroic seers may encounter, and those who take such risks are not necessarily good people.<br /> <br /> In ''Ancient Evenings'', which was composed during the Carter presidency, the weak, vacillating pharaoh Ramses IX must decide whether or not to trust the protagonist Menenhetet, a figure who has earned scorn in his attempts to accumulate visionary power through experiments with scatological ceremonies and incest. In this novel Mailer stages his idea that we must make “bargains with evil” into a historical setting that could be called “Before Good and Evil.” Mailer’s setting predates the monotheistic moral codes that undergird our language of morality, thus showing the Eurocentric view to be, in Chakrabarty’s terms, “provincial.” This incarnation of the Mailer vision is, then, radically Manichean, since the Egyptian gods are not centered by a transcendent notion of the Good, against which an evil force defines itself. One could, through cosmological backformation, interpret the theomachy between Osiris and Set as a war between good and evil. In any event, the nature of goodness is never really in question. Artistically modulated growth—a middle way between stagnation and the uncontrolled growth of cancer—has always been the sign of health in Mailer’s universe. Mailer’s praise of Osiris resonates exactly with the adaptations of John Dewey’s “live creature.”<br /> <br /> The existential mystery animating Mailer’s visions has to do not with the existence of good and evil but rather with knowing which is which. Rosenbaum gives a name to the tendency to ground our moral awareness in a false absolute: ''argumentum ad Hitlerum''. When we can no longer endure uncer- tainties, when we have run out of negative capability, we appeal to Hitler to end the argument: ''Hitler'' was evil. The seduction of absolutist thinking, as Mailer shows in his Cold War articulation, is that we name the world in terms of Good and Evil and then proceed to identify our own actions and interests with the Good in self-interested and thus delusory ways: “There is no emotion on earth more powerful than anti-Americanism. To the rest of the world, America is the Garden of Eden. Unmitigated envy, the ugliest emotion of them all.”<br /> “Yessir.” (Harlot’s Ghost 340)<br /> <br /> As George Bush put it in the wake of the 9/11 (2001) attack on the World Trade Center, you are either with us or you are against us. You are either with God or the Devil. The tendency and aim of such a formulation is to make everyone into a “yes-man,” just like the CIA analyst in the quotation above who quickly says “Yessir” to Harlot, Mailer’s architect of American postwar paranoia. In The Gospel according to the Son, Mailer resists the equal-and-opposite fallacy, argumentum ad Jesus, in which one identifies self-with-Jesus-with-Goodness. Mailer despises the ways in which the Bush White House rolls together what Dieter of The Castle in the Forest calls “cheap patriotism” and “cheap prayer” (386), but in ''The Gospel'' according to the Son Mailer wishes not to attack a “cheap” Jesus but to imagine an authentic one. Mailer’s authentic Jesus (as opposed to the authentic Jesus of mainstream Christians) is one who cannot know for sure what the effects of his actions will be. Though Jesus narrates his own gospel, Mailer denies us a text on which to build a fundamentalist worldview. Here is how Brian McDonald presents the narrative uncertainty in “Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the ‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel according to the Son”'': The story, Mailer’s Jesus reassures us, “is true,” but like a careful witness testifying under oath he is quick to add the caveat, “at least to all that I recall” (Gospel 2).<br /> <br /> Mailer’s critics ravaged him for presuming to write in the voice of Jesus, and Mailer clearly anticipates the charge when he has ''his'' Jesus say with nice condescension that the four synoptic gospels were good as far as they went, but they went too far. Mailer’s novelistic hubris, if it should be called that, is in presuming to know the views of God and the Devil and everything in between, but it is presumptuous of the critic to assume that Mailer is ever unaware of the effects of ego, as it is an important theme in all of the “epic” works here discussed: When one has become an overseer of death who holds the power to liquidate masses of people, one is also in great need of a very hard shell to the ego in order to feel no intimate horror over the price to one’s soul. Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification—patriotism! That is still the most dependable instrument for guiding the masses, although it may yet be replaced by revealed religion. We love fundamentalists. Their faith offers us every promise of developing into the final weapon of mass destruction. (405–406)<br /> <br /> Dieter provocatively ranks Hitler as a “statesmen,” thus restating the A. J. P. Taylor argument that Hitler would have been counted a great statesmen if only he had died at the right time, but the honorific word is inverted when we see, in context, that the necessary condition for being a statesman is an ego, a psychic callous to protect one’s sleep from meaningful knowledge of one’s actions. When Dieter stirs in “patriotism” and fundamentalism, it becomes clear that Mailer’s Hitler has been used as a “cudgel” to beat George W. Bush, a president who has been most politely described as “incurious” regarding the facts of the world. “Cudgel,” in ''The Castle in the Forest'', is the name devils such as Dieter give to the Angels, who cause beings pain in their sleep when their actions are hateful rather than loving.<br /> <br /> Antithetical elements call attention to one another, reminding readers of nothing so much as the presence of the author himself. Think back to Mailer’s character Roth in ''The Naked and the Dead'', and of Stephen Richards Rojack walking the parapet in ''An American Dream''. Mailer’s writings are full of intentional impasses and voracious chasms. Readers who cannot make the leap will quickly fly from the page and declare Mailer unreadable. How are we to make the leap from the pure (if uncertain) speech of Jesus back to the vulva of Hitler’s mother? Mailer’s narratives are visionary landscapes designed to engulf some readers while allowing others the chance to develop in admittedly idiosyncratic ways—but it is a mindless response to note Mailer’s stylistic self-reference without noting the antipodal contextualization of his stylistic “egotism.”<br /> <br /> Mailer shows every awareness in his artful rendition of the Devil’s shaping hand that ''ego'' is one of the Devil’s most important tools, but then, most shockingly, he will put in a narrative turn that does nothing so much as foreground the author. Authorial egotism comes into the foreground of Hitler’s mind when he chooses among intellectual influences: He certainly rejected Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him. It was too personal—as if they were much too pleased with what they were saying. Not serious enough, Adolf decided. The other two, Kant and Schleiermacher, he simply could not read. After Jahn, his highest pleasure came from the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers. That had also been assigned to his class. Those were good stories, and deep! (377)<br /> <br /> Adolf uses the stories of Grimm to terrorize his younger brother Edmund, whom Mailer imagines as Hitler’s first murder victim: in a variation of the killing of Abel, jealous Hitler intentionally passes Edmund the measles that will kill him. This passage is one of a dozen or so highly literate moments in ''The Castle in the Forest'' in which Mailer positively revels in the ironies that were once so properly shocking, those attaching to the apparent incongruity of Nazis who loved Beethoven.<br /> <br /> But not all writers and not all ironies are the same—it is not as if Mailer is inviting plague on all the literary houses. Mailer, if I read him rightly, mocks the rectitude with which we have sometimes allowed ourselves to think that literature as such was a proof of superior humanity, when much more is required. Hitler’s literary tastes give some hint of his taste for cruelty, as his sadistic use of the Grimm stories suggests, but even more important is his impatience with queer, unsettling humor, that of Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him? Mailer’s humor here is profound: he knows—has known since he meditated on the career of Henry Miller in the mid-1970s—that his own unsettling humor would “annoy” many of his readers. Merely to make oneself an antipode to Adolf is the laziest move imaginable, but this is not at all where Mailer leaves the matter. He goes on to reveal why Goethe and Schiller annoyed Adi: they reminded him too much that they exist.<br /> <br /> It cannot be said that this humor is inherently ethical. The freedom of humor (and it is this often disappointing freedom of the other to disappoint you that proves that the other is not a function of your own fantasy) has its horrible uses. Hitler’s ''literary'' torture of Edmund is one of the most grimly funny moments in a novel replete with dark humor. Young Adolf has been reading Edmund terrifying Grimm stories:<br /> “Do you want another story?”<br /> &quot;Maybe not.&quot;<br /> “This one is the best,” said Adolf.<br /> &quot;Is it truly the best?&quot;<br /> &quot;Yes&quot;<br /> “Then maybe I don’t want to hear it.”<br /> “It’s about a young man who is ordered to sleep with a corpse.<br /> In time to come you, too, may have to sleep next to a dead man.” At this point, Edmund shrieked. Then he fainted. (379)<br /> <br /> In genuinely frightening ways that inter-leaven the literary and the wicked, Mailer exacerbates our moral consciences; American literature has not been as darkly funny since Twain’s ''Letters from the Earth''. Twain’s and Mailer’s are good stories, and deep!<br /> <br /> Mailer’s laughter in The Castle in the Forest is not the raucous, adolescent laughter of America’s 1960s black humor fiction, a laughter that is always implicitly the laughter of an overly stable know-it-all we. We laugh at the bureaucrats in ''Catch-22''. There’s an unsettling oddity to Mailer’s style, though, an awareness that, like Dieter’s, Mailer’s humor is both on the mark and a bit to one side of the main stream of events. Mailer does not pretend to be in the ethical center, and the rude, cruel, and invasive qualities of his “diabolical” narrative technique are, he will not let us forget, essential elements in our own conventional mind-set. The castle in Mailer’s forest, the redemptive beauty that makes the pain and failures of such unappreciated masterpieces as Ancient Evenings and The Castle in the Forest bearable, is always a repetition and ever-free variation of a cavalier wit. As it is in the moment in which Adolf tortures his brother with literature, Mailer’s humor is genuinely funny and, at exactly the same time, resoundingly grim. Put- ting his own idea that our best is often closest to our worst into the mouth of Himmler, Mailer turns into the pain of his own humor and allows—encourages, actually—the nasty identifications his harshest critics made of himself and his work, that he was violent and cruel and “patriarchal” in the sense in which patriarchy is a synonym for Fascism. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to this cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably ''alone''.<br /> ==Works Cited==<br /> {{Refbegin}}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Adamowski|first=T. H.|title=Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer|url=|journal=U of Toronto Quarterly|volume=75|issue=3|date=2006|pages=883-904|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Bosman|first=Julie|title=Literature: Do Novels Really Need Bibliographies?|url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php|journal=International Herald Tribune|volume=|issue=|date=December 6, 2006|pages=|access-date=3 August 2008|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Chakrabarty|first=Dipesh|date=2007|title=Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference|url= |location=Princeton, NJ|publisher=Princeton UP|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Gubar|first=Susan|title=Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries|url= |journal=The Yale Journal of Criticism|volume=14|issue=1|date=2001|pages=191–215|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Lennon|first=J. Michael|title=Mailer’s Cosmology|url= |journal=Modern Language Studies|volume=12|issue=3|date=1982|pages=18-29|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book|last=Mailer|first= Norman|date=1983|title=Ancient Evenings|url=|location=Boston|publisher=Little Brown|pages= |isbn= |author-link=|ref=harv }}<br /> {{cite book|date=1965|title=An American Dream|location=New York|publisher=Dial|ref=harv }}<br /> <br /> {{cite book|date=2007|title=The Castle in the Forest|location=New York|publisher=Random House|ref=harv }}<br /> <br /> {{cite book|date=1948|title=The Naked and the Dead|location=New York|publisher=Rinehart|ref=harv }}<br /> <br /> {{cite book|date=2003|title=Why Are We at War?|location=New York|publisher=Random House|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal |last1=Mailer|first1=Norman|last2=Whalen-Bridge|first2=John|title=The Karma of Words: Mailer since ''Executioner's Song''|url=|journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=1-16|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McCann|first=Sean|title=The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism|url= |journal=English Literary History|volume=67|issue=1|date=2000|pages=293–336|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McDonald|first=Brian|title=Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the 'Very Jewish Jesus' of Norman Mailer's ''The Gospel according to the Son|url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=78–90|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rorty|first=Richard|date=1989|title=Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity|url= |location=New York|publisher=Cambridge UP|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rosenbaum|first=Ron|date=March 6, 2007|title=The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer: What Will He Make of 'Hitler's Chappaquiddick'?|url=http://www.slate.com/id/2161302/|location= |publisher=Slate |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Taylor|first=A. J. P |date=1996|title=The Origins of the Second World War|url= |location=New York|publisher=Touchstone|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite web |url= http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/the-incrediblyunbelieva_b_35882.html|title=The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush|last=Uygur|first=Cenk|date=December 8, 2006|website= |publisher= |access-date=1 August 2008|quote= |ref=harv }}</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/%22Their_Humor_Annoyed_Him%22:_Cavalier_Wit_and_Sympathy_for_the_Devil_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest&diff=11371 2020-09-14T20:37:27Z

<p>CDucharme: </p> <hr /> <div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:&lt;span style=&quot;font-size:22px;&gt;{{BASEPAGENAME}}/&lt;/span&gt;&quot;Their Humor Annoyed Him&quot;: Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in ''The Castle in the Forest''}}<br /> {{MR12}}<br /> {{Byline|last=Whalen-Bridge|first=John|abstract=Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omniscience of third person. Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to the ''Castle''’s cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably alone.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08whal}}<br /> {{cquote|Himmler subscribed to the theory that the best human possibilities lie close to the worst.}}<br /> <br /> ==Article==<br /> {{start|There is a joke about attorneys}} that goes like this: lots of people were on a boat, which sank in shark-infested waters. It was horrible. The sharks were tearing all the passengers to pieces as they tried to make it to shore. All the passengers were dying. Except one passenger, who was an attorney. He swam right to the shore. As he was shaking himself off, the bewildered people on the beach asked him, “How come the sharks did not eat you?” He said: “Professional courtesy, I suppose.” We don’t like attorneys, such a joke conveys, because they are not like us. They are like sharks, and we are like people. We laugh at the joke, if we do, to commune in our fantasy-rejection of lawyerly cruelty. But Mailer’s last novel, ''The Castle in the Forest'', is organized around a very different sort of humor. Instead of laughing at lawyers to confirm our fantasy that we ourselves are not sharks, Mailer shocks readers, methodically and skillfully, with the knowledge that they are intimately involved with so much of what they—we, I should say—resoundingly reject. The undertow of laughter in this novel won’t necessarily drag you out to sea, but it will make you ask if you share qualities with what is being held up for laughter and judgment.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s narrator in ''The Castle in the Forest'' speaks with courtesy and intelligence.{{efn|Both Steven Poole in his ''New Statesman'' review, “[https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2007/02/norman-mailer-hitler-novel Sympathy for the Devil]” (19 February 2007) and John Freeman in his ''Independent'' review “[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/sympathy-for-the-devil-norman-mailer-on-his-satanic-new-novel-434647.html Sympathy for the Devil: Norman Mailer on His Satanic New Novel]” (2 February 2007) connect Mailer’s novel and the Rolling Stones’ song in their titles. The Jagger/Richards song, which first appeared on the 1968 album ''Beggers Banquet'', is a dramatic monologue in which Lucifer brags about his achievements, insists on commonalities between himself and his listeners, and demands courtesy if met: he is a “man of wealth and taste,” after all. All criminals are cops, all sinners are saints, and we all killed the Kennedys.}} He calls himself “Dieter” (though it is not clear what he means to “deter”), and he has been a witness to the formation of Adolf Hitler. Dieter explains to the reader that he has been a functionary in the Third Reich, but he has been—long before he came to work for Himmler—part of the Devil’s bureaucracy, with young “Adi” as his most important case. In this way, Mailer manages to bring together the bureaucratic “banality” of evil with the attractions and powers of evil that the word banality cannot subsume.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s final novel (2007) is a concatenation of aesthetic shocks that tells of the formation of Adolf Hitler’s character, beginning with the incestuous influences of his grandfather (about the identity of whom there has been much historical speculation), and continuing through his schooling. Ron Rosenbaum’s ''Explaining Hitler'' can fruitfully be read as a companion-text to Mailer’s novel; its central question is “When and how did Hitler become Hitler?” Mailer’s novel affirms the idea that Hitler developed sociopathic tendencies by his early teens and that these were the foundation for the subsequent obsession with eliminationist anti-Semitism that would come later—but this evolution in Hitler’s darkness is not central to Mailer’s novel. Mailer builds a Hitler to explain a person attracted to murder and deceit, but anti-Semitism is not the driving force of the life Mailer imagines. Mailer does not at all exclude the idea that everything in the novel is tuned toward the Holocaust. The title “The Castle in the Forest,” Dieter tells readers in the final pages, is the translation of a death camp called “''Schlossimwald''” by those inmates who would not, even in the face of ultimate pain and evil, surrender their sense of irony.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=465}} That irony would remain a prized possession under such circumstances will shock some readers, since the phenomena of Hitler and the Holocaust are for many the very limit of irony. In the Rortyean, postmodern, and thoroughly ironic world in which we live, the Holocaust cannot be reduced to a contingent phenomena whose meaning is entirely dependent upon the subject position of the perceiver. Such a way of thinking will earn a comparison with Holocaust deniers. Mailer not only concludes with an homage to ironic camp inmates but also has Dieter-the-demon tell us that the Devil (whom he calls “the Maestro”) is a connoisseur of irony: “All this was uttered by the Maestro with characteristic irony. We never know how serious he might be when he speaks to our mind’s ear. (His voice is a cornucopia of humors.)”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=78}} Mailer might even be describing himself in this passage.<br /> <br /> A ''New York Times'' article paused to note that a number of recent novels had the odd feature of including bibliographies. The bibliography of ''The Castle in the Forest'' is rich with entries on bee-keeping. Readers of the novel know it is a richly over-determined metaphor, combining elements of modulated brutality and great technical skill. Bee-keeping is perhaps the central metaphor of the novel, and Mailer’s bibliography lists half-a-dozen or so specialist books on the subject. Bee-keeping signifies social order, but order as understood from an awful height, that of humans looking down on potentially profitable insects, or that of God looking down on mischievous creation. The bees themselves are ruthless at maintaining order, and they eliminate all threats to the hive without hesitation. Mailer’s Alois Hitler is presented as a dedicated bee-keeper, and the narrator Dieter—while perhaps disingenuously or even seductively warning readers not to make too much of such events!—presents several scenes in which hives are gassed or burned. Readers might wonder how exactly they could ever make “too much” of such a parallel.<br /> <br /> As important as bee-keeping is to Mailer’s larger narrative loops, it competes in the reader’s imagination with a theme that is given equal air-time but which etches the memory more ruthlessly moment for moment and image for image: transgressive sex. Mailer stays true to his fascination with the idea that God and the Devil partake in human lives through dreams and sex acts. The reader must consider a Freudian primal scene in which young Adolf witnesses Alois and Klara in the sixty-nine position, and witnessing the fictional event makes the reader equal, in some imaginative sense, to demons like Dieter who enter minds and bodies in the most intimate situations imaginable.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omni- science of third person. By “epistemological realism,” I mean that we can only experience our own minds directly, unless we have supernormal powers, and furthermore we can only draw inferences about other minds. So first-person-singular narration is as close as fiction can get to what an individual person without telepathic skills can really know. Yet our success in the world depends entirely on having confidence in inferences drawn about other minds, and to develop this confidence we need to develop exactly the sort of imagination found in a convincing social novel. But in ''The Castle in the Forest'', Mailer’s narrator is a demon from hell who takes pride in his work; the associative connection Mailer develops at length does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that all human knowing is damned, but we are privy, as it were, to the intrusions of devils much, much more than we are, in Mailer’s fictional rendition, to the mind-intrusions of angels.<br /> <br /> What are we to make of a carefully wrought fictional scene in which the Hitlers, before young Adi even comes into the world, adventure past ordinary naughty sex into pedal-to-the-metal analingus? In foregrounding sex acts of this sort in a book purportedly about radical evil, Mailer risks being discussed in terms of radical eccentricity. Or, one could say that approaching radical evil through sexual obscenity is artistically obscene. However we put it, the novel intentionally jars the reader just as much as ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), and the central narrative device of ''that'' novel was an act of fellatio between two ghosts in a tomb. Here is the sex act between Alois and Klara that Mailer’s young Hitler witnesses: We may remember that the last time we saw Alois, he was burying his nose and lips in Klara’s vulva, his tongue as long and demonic as a devil’s phallus. (Be it said: we are not without our contributions to these arts.) Alois was certainly being aided by us. Never before had he given himself so completely to this exercise, and quickly he had become good at it, and so quickly that no explanation is possible unless we are given credit as well. (Which is why we speak of the Evil One when joining in the act—we do have the power to pass these lubricious gifts to men and women even when we are not attempting to convert them into clients.) (98)<br /> <br /> What shall we make of this? One possible response will be to link Mailer’s use of the Holocaust with that of Sylvia Plath. One could say each author uses the pain of others to provide historical ballast to pain that is really individual. It would be the height of egotism to use the deaths of six million in order to hide the idiosyncrasy of one’s pain or the eccentricity of one’s ideas.<br /> <br /> Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. He consistently presented himself as an author with an important vision, one worthy of “the mind of Joyce” or Melville, since the mid-1950s, and critics debated whether he ever wrote his ''Ulysses'' or ''Moby Dick''. Mailer’s personal ambition, however, was never in question.<br /> <br /> The cosmological vision has been reiterated in all of Mailer’s major works, including ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (1991), and ''The Gospel according to the Son'' (1997). In each of these novel’s (if we allow for ''The Executioner’s Song'' as a “nonfiction novel”), the struggle between divine forces explains the relation between apparently insignificant actors in ways that factor out what Mailer calls “the Absurd.” The divinity potential of quotidian existence is the binding material in Mailer’s cosmos, with “divinity” meaning extraordinary, magical, and foundational. The experience of the divine overlaps with the extraordinary in the manner of aesthetic wonder, and this commonality allows Mailer to find God in the aesthetic aspects of sexual experience, but the divine must be more than ''merely'' extraordinary. The experience of divinity, which some people achieve and many do not, transcends ordinary experience, meaning that, in Mailer’s Romantic articulation, there is a hierarchy of knowing, and that only some (heroic) persons are able to glimpse the magical foundations of being. Such a vision requires huge risks, which explains why many would prefer not to see what Mailer’s heroic seers may encounter, and those who take such risks are not necessarily good people.<br /> <br /> In ''Ancient Evenings'', which was composed during the Carter presidency, the weak, vacillating pharaoh Ramses IX must decide whether or not to trust the protagonist Menenhetet, a figure who has earned scorn in his attempts to accumulate visionary power through experiments with scatological ceremonies and incest. In this novel Mailer stages his idea that we must make “bargains with evil” into a historical setting that could be called “Before Good and Evil.” Mailer’s setting predates the monotheistic moral codes that undergird our language of morality, thus showing the Eurocentric view to be, in Chakrabarty’s terms, “provincial.” This incarnation of the Mailer vision is, then, radically Manichean, since the Egyptian gods are not centered by a transcendent notion of the Good, against which an evil force defines itself. One could, through cosmological backformation, interpret the theomachy between Osiris and Set as a war between good and evil. In any event, the nature of goodness is never really in question. Artistically modulated growth—a middle way between stagnation and the uncontrolled growth of cancer—has always been the sign of health in Mailer’s universe. Mailer’s praise of Osiris resonates exactly with the adaptations of John Dewey’s “live creature.”<br /> <br /> The existential mystery animating Mailer’s visions has to do not with the existence of good and evil but rather with knowing which is which. Rosenbaum gives a name to the tendency to ground our moral awareness in a false absolute: ''argumentum ad Hitlerum''. When we can no longer endure uncer- tainties, when we have run out of negative capability, we appeal to Hitler to end the argument: ''Hitler'' was evil. The seduction of absolutist thinking, as Mailer shows in his Cold War articulation, is that we name the world in terms of Good and Evil and then proceed to identify our own actions and interests with the Good in self-interested and thus delusory ways: “There is no emotion on earth more powerful than anti-Americanism. To the rest of the world, America is the Garden of Eden. Unmitigated envy, the ugliest emotion of them all.”<br /> “Yessir.” (Harlot’s Ghost 340)<br /> <br /> As George Bush put it in the wake of the 9/11 (2001) attack on the World Trade Center, you are either with us or you are against us. You are either with God or the Devil. The tendency and aim of such a formulation is to make everyone into a “yes-man,” just like the CIA analyst in the quotation above who quickly says “Yessir” to Harlot, Mailer’s architect of American postwar paranoia. In The Gospel according to the Son, Mailer resists the equal-and-opposite fallacy, argumentum ad Jesus, in which one identifies self-with-Jesus-with-Goodness. Mailer despises the ways in which the Bush White House rolls together what Dieter of The Castle in the Forest calls “cheap patriotism” and “cheap prayer” (386), but in ''The Gospel'' according to the Son Mailer wishes not to attack a “cheap” Jesus but to imagine an authentic one. Mailer’s authentic Jesus (as opposed to the authentic Jesus of mainstream Christians) is one who cannot know for sure what the effects of his actions will be. Though Jesus narrates his own gospel, Mailer denies us a text on which to build a fundamentalist worldview. Here is how Brian McDonald presents the narrative uncertainty in “Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the ‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel according to the Son”'': The story, Mailer’s Jesus reassures us, “is true,” but like a careful witness testifying under oath he is quick to add the caveat, “at least to all that I recall” (Gospel 2).<br /> <br /> Mailer’s critics ravaged him for presuming to write in the voice of Jesus, and Mailer clearly anticipates the charge when he has ''his'' Jesus say with nice condescension that the four synoptic gospels were good as far as they went, but they went too far. Mailer’s novelistic hubris, if it should be called that, is in presuming to know the views of God and the Devil and everything in between, but it is presumptuous of the critic to assume that Mailer is ever unaware of the effects of ego, as it is an important theme in all of the “epic” works here discussed: When one has become an overseer of death who holds the power to liquidate masses of people, one is also in great need of a very hard shell to the ego in order to feel no intimate horror over the price to one’s soul. Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification—patriotism! That is still the most dependable instrument for guiding the masses, although it may yet be replaced by revealed religion. We love fundamentalists. Their faith offers us every promise of developing into the final weapon of mass destruction. (405–406)<br /> <br /> Dieter provocatively ranks Hitler as a “statesmen,” thus restating the A. J. P. Taylor argument that Hitler would have been counted a great statesmen if only he had died at the right time, but the honorific word is inverted when we see, in context, that the necessary condition for being a statesman is an ego, a psychic callous to protect one’s sleep from meaningful knowledge of one’s actions. When Dieter stirs in “patriotism” and fundamentalism, it becomes clear that Mailer’s Hitler has been used as a “cudgel” to beat George W. Bush, a president who has been most politely described as “incurious” regarding the facts of the world. “Cudgel,” in ''The Castle in the Forest'', is the name devils such as Dieter give to the Angels, who cause beings pain in their sleep when their actions are hateful rather than loving.<br /> <br /> Antithetical elements call attention to one another, reminding readers of nothing so much as the presence of the author himself. Think back to Mailer’s character Roth in ''The Naked and the Dead'', and of Stephen Richards Rojack walking the parapet in ''An American Dream''. Mailer’s writings are full of intentional impasses and voracious chasms. Readers who cannot make the leap will quickly fly from the page and declare Mailer unreadable. How are we to make the leap from the pure (if uncertain) speech of Jesus back to the vulva of Hitler’s mother? Mailer’s narratives are visionary landscapes designed to engulf some readers while allowing others the chance to develop in admittedly idiosyncratic ways—but it is a mindless response to note Mailer’s stylistic self-reference without noting the antipodal contextualization of his stylistic “egotism.”<br /> <br /> Mailer shows every awareness in his artful rendition of the Devil’s shaping hand that ''ego'' is one of the Devil’s most important tools, but then, most shockingly, he will put in a narrative turn that does nothing so much as foreground the author. Authorial egotism comes into the foreground of Hitler’s mind when he chooses among intellectual influences: He certainly rejected Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him. It was too personal—as if they were much too pleased with what they were saying. Not serious enough, Adolf decided. The other two, Kant and Schleiermacher, he simply could not read. After Jahn, his highest pleasure came from the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers. That had also been assigned to his class. Those were good stories, and deep! (377)<br /> <br /> Adolf uses the stories of Grimm to terrorize his younger brother Edmund, whom Mailer imagines as Hitler’s first murder victim: in a variation of the killing of Abel, jealous Hitler intentionally passes Edmund the measles that will kill him. This passage is one of a dozen or so highly literate moments in ''The Castle in the Forest'' in which Mailer positively revels in the ironies that were once so properly shocking, those attaching to the apparent incongruity of Nazis who loved Beethoven.<br /> <br /> But not all writers and not all ironies are the same—it is not as if Mailer is inviting plague on all the literary houses. Mailer, if I read him rightly, mocks the rectitude with which we have sometimes allowed ourselves to think that literature as such was a proof of superior humanity, when much more is required. Hitler’s literary tastes give some hint of his taste for cruelty, as his sadistic use of the Grimm stories suggests, but even more important is his impatience with queer, unsettling humor, that of Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him? Mailer’s humor here is profound: he knows—has known since he meditated on the career of Henry Miller in the mid-1970s—that his own unsettling humor would “annoy” many of his readers. Merely to make oneself an antipode to Adolf is the laziest move imaginable, but this is not at all where Mailer leaves the matter. He goes on to reveal why Goethe and Schiller annoyed Adi: they reminded him too much that they exist.<br /> <br /> It cannot be said that this humor is inherently ethical. The freedom of humor (and it is this often disappointing freedom of the other to disappoint you that proves that the other is not a function of your own fantasy) has its horrible uses. Hitler’s ''literary'' torture of Edmund is one of the most grimly funny moments in a novel replete with dark humor. Young Adolf has been reading Edmund terrifying Grimm stories:<br /> “Do you want another story?”<br /> &quot;Maybe not.&quot;<br /> “This one is the best,” said Adolf.<br /> &quot;Is it truly the best?&quot;<br /> &quot;Yes&quot;<br /> “Then maybe I don’t want to hear it.”<br /> “It’s about a young man who is ordered to sleep with a corpse.<br /> In time to come you, too, may have to sleep next to a dead man.” At this point, Edmund shrieked. Then he fainted. (379)<br /> <br /> In genuinely frightening ways that inter-leaven the literary and the wicked, Mailer exacerbates our moral consciences; American literature has not been as darkly funny since Twain’s ''Letters from the Earth''. Twain’s and Mailer’s are good stories, and deep!<br /> <br /> Mailer’s laughter in The Castle in the Forest is not the raucous, adolescent laughter of America’s 1960s black humor fiction, a laughter that is always implicitly the laughter of an overly stable know-it-all we. We laugh at the bureaucrats in ''Catch-22''. There’s an unsettling oddity to Mailer’s style, though, an awareness that, like Dieter’s, Mailer’s humor is both on the mark and a bit to one side of the main stream of events. Mailer does not pretend to be in the ethical center, and the rude, cruel, and invasive qualities of his “diabolical” narrative technique are, he will not let us forget, essential elements in our own conventional mind-set. The castle in Mailer’s forest, the redemptive beauty that makes the pain and failures of such unappreciated masterpieces as Ancient Evenings and The Castle in the Forest bearable, is always a repetition and ever-free variation of a cavalier wit. As it is in the moment in which Adolf tortures his brother with literature, Mailer’s humor is genuinely funny and, at exactly the same time, resoundingly grim. Put- ting his own idea that our best is often closest to our worst into the mouth of Himmler, Mailer turns into the pain of his own humor and allows—encourages, actually—the nasty identifications his harshest critics made of himself and his work, that he was violent and cruel and “patriarchal” in the sense in which patriarchy is a synonym for Fascism. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to this cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably ''alone''.<br /> <br /> ===Notes===<br /> {{notelist}}<br /> <br /> ===Citations===<br /> {{Reflist|20em}}<br /> <br /> ===Works Cited===<br /> {{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br /> * {{cite journal |last=Adamowski |first=T. H. |title=Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer |url= |journal=University of Toronto Quarterly |volume=75 |issue=3 |date=Summer 2006 |pages=883–904 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite news |last=Bosman |first=Julie |date=December 6, 2006 |title=Literature: Do Novels Really Need Bibliographies? |url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061208122042/http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php |archive-date=December 8, 2006 |work=International Herald Tribune |location= |access-date=2020-09-10 |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Chakrabarty |first=Dipesh |date=2007 |title=Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference |url= |location=Princeton, NJ |publisher=Princeton UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} New edition with a new preface by the author.<br /> * {{cite journal |last=Gubar |first=Susan |title=Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries |url= |journal=The Yale Journal of Criticism |volume=14 |issue=1 |date=Spring 2001 |pages=191–215 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * . . .<br /> *<br /> * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1983 |title=Ancient Evenings |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dial |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman |authormask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |url= |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman| authormask=1 |date=2007 |title= Why Are We at War |url= |location= New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * . . .<br /> {{Refend}}<br /> {{Review}}<br /> {{DEFAULTSORT:Their Humor Annoyed Him}}<br /> [[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/%22Their_Humor_Annoyed_Him%22:_Cavalier_Wit_and_Sympathy_for_the_Devil_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest&diff=11355 2020-09-14T16:34:44Z

<p>CDucharme: </p> <hr /> <div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:&lt;span style=&quot;font-size:22px;&gt;{{BASEPAGENAME}}/&lt;/span&gt;&quot;Their Humor Annoyed Him&quot;: Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in ''The Castle in the Forest''}}<br /> {{MR12}}<br /> {{Byline|last=Whalen-Bridge|first=John|abstract=Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omniscience of third person. Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to the ''Castle''’s cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably alone.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08whal}}<br /> <br /> ==Works Cited==<br /> {{Refbegin}}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Adamowski|first=T. H.|title=Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer|url=|journal=U of Toronto Quarterly|volume=75|issue=3|date=2006|pages=883-904|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Bosman|first=Julie|title=Literature: Do Novels Really Need Bibliographies?|url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php|journal=International Herald Tribune|volume=|issue=|date=December 6, 2006|pages=|access-date=3 August 2008|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Chakrabarty|first=Dipesh|date=2007|title=Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference|url= |location=Princeton, NJ|publisher=Princeton UP|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Gubar|first=Susan|title=Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries|url= |journal=The Yale Journal of Criticism|volume=14|issue=1|date=2001|pages=191–215|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Lennon|first=J. Michael|title=Mailer’s Cosmology|url= |journal=Modern Language Studies|volume=12|issue=3|date=1982|pages=18-29|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book|last=Mailer|first= Norman|date=1983|title=Ancient Evenings|url=|location=Boston|publisher=Little Brown|pages= |isbn= |author-link=|ref=harv }}<br /> {{cite book|date=1965|title=An American Dream|location=New York|publisher=Dial|ref=harv }}<br /> <br /> {{cite book|date=2007|title=The Castle in the Forest|location=New York|publisher=Random House|ref=harv }}<br /> <br /> {{cite book|date=1948|title=The Naked and the Dead|location=New York|publisher=Rinehart|ref=harv }}<br /> <br /> {{cite book|date=2003|title=Why Are We at War?|location=New York|publisher=Random House|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal |last1=Mailer|first1=Norman|last2=Whalen-Bridge|first2=John|title=The Karma of Words: Mailer since ''Executioner's Song''|url=|journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=1-16|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McCann|first=Sean|title=The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism|url= |journal=English Literary History|volume=67|issue=1|date=2000|pages=293–336|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McDonald|first=Brian|title=Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the 'Very Jewish Jesus' of Norman Mailer's ''The Gospel according to the Son|url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=78–90|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rorty|first=Richard|date=1989|title=Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity|url= |location=New York|publisher=Cambridge UP|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rosenbaum|first=Ron|date=March 6, 2007|title=The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer: What Will He Make of 'Hitler's Chappaquiddick'?|url=http://www.slate.com/id/2161302/|location= |publisher=Slate |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Taylor|first=A. J. P |date=1996|title=The Origins of the Second World War|url= |location=New York|publisher=Touchstone|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite web |url= http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/the-incrediblyunbelieva_b_35882.html|title=The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush|last=Uygur|first=Cenk|date=December 8, 2006|website= |publisher= |access-date=1 August 2008|quote= |ref=harv }}</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:CDucharme/sandbox&diff=11354 2020-09-14T16:31:19Z

<p>CDucharme: </p> <hr /> <div>==Works Cited==<br /> {{Refbegin}}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Adamowski|first=T. H.|title=Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer|url=|journal=U of Toronto Quarterly|volume=75|issue=3|date=2006|pages=883-904|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Bosman|first=Julie|title=Literature: Do Novels Really Need Bibliographies?|url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/features/novels.php|journal=International Herald Tribune|volume=|issue=|date=December 6, 2006|pages=|access-date=3 August 2008|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Chakrabarty|first=Dipesh|date=2007|title=Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference|url= |location=Princeton, NJ|publisher=Princeton UP|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Gubar|first=Susan|title=Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries|url= |journal=The Yale Journal of Criticism|volume=14|issue=1|date=2001|pages=191–215|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Lennon|first=J. Michael|title=Mailer’s Cosmology|url= |journal=Modern Language Studies|volume=12|issue=3|date=1982|pages=18-29|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book|last=Mailer|first= Norman|date=1983|title=Ancient Evenings|url=|location=Boston|publisher=Little Brown|pages= |isbn= |author-link=|ref=harv }}<br /> {{cite book|date=1965|title=An American Dream|location=New York|publisher=Dial|ref=harv }}<br /> <br /> {{cite book|date=2007|title=The Castle in the Forest|location=New York|publisher=Random House|ref=harv }}<br /> <br /> {{cite book|date=1948|title=The Naked and the Dead|location=New York|publisher=Rinehart|ref=harv }}<br /> <br /> {{cite book|date=2003|title=Why Are We at War?|location=New York|publisher=Random House|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal |last1=Mailer|first1=Norman|last2=Whalen-Bridge|first2=John|title=The Karma of Words: Mailer since ''Executioner's Song''|url=|journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=1-16|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McCann|first=Sean|title=The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism|url= |journal=English Literary History|volume=67|issue=1|date=2000|pages=293–336|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McDonald|first=Brian|title=Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the 'Very Jewish Jesus' of Norman Mailer's ''The Gospel according to the Son|url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=78–90|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rorty|first=Richard|date=1989|title=Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity|url= |location=New York|publisher=Cambridge UP|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rosenbaum|first=Ron|date=March 6, 2007|title=The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer: What Will He Make of 'Hitler's Chappaquiddick'?|url=http://www.slate.com/id/2161302/|location= |publisher=Slate |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Taylor|first=A. J. P |date=1996|title=The Origins of the Second World War|url= |location=New York|publisher=Touchstone|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite web |url= http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/the-incrediblyunbelieva_b_35882.html|title=The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush|last=Uygur|first=Cenk|date=December 8, 2006|website= |publisher= |access-date=1 August 2008|quote= |ref=harv }}</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/%22Their_Humor_Annoyed_Him%22:_Cavalier_Wit_and_Sympathy_for_the_Devil_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest&diff=11202 2020-09-09T00:05:46Z

<p>CDucharme: </p> <hr /> <div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:&lt;span style=&quot;font-size:22px;&gt;{{BASEPAGENAME}}/&lt;/span&gt;&quot;Their Humor Annoyed Him&quot;: Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in ''The Castle in the Forest''}}<br /> {{MR12}}<br /> {{Byline|last=Whalen-Bridge|first=John|abstract=Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omniscience of third person. Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to the ''Castle''’s cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably alone.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08whal}}<br /> <br /> ==Works Cited==<br /> {{Refbegin}}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Adamowski|first=T. H.|title=Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman<br /> Mailer|url=|journal=U of Toronto Quarterly|volume=75|issue=3|date=2006|pages=883-904|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Bosman|first=Julie|title=Literature: Do Novels Really Need Bibliographies?|url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/<br /> features/novels.php|journal=International Herald Tribune|volume=|issue=|date=December 6, 2006|pages=|access-date=3 August 2008|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Chakrabarty|first=Dipesh|date=2007|title=Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference|url= |location=Princeton, NJ|publisher=Princeton UP|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Gubar|first=Susan|title=Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries|url= |journal=The Yale Journal of Criticism|volume=14|issue=1|date=2001|pages=191–215|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=Lennon|first=J. Michael|title=Mailer’s Cosmology|url= |journal=Modern Language Studies|volume=12|issue=3|date=1982|pages=18-29|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book|last=Mailer|first= Norman|date=1983|title=Ancient Evenings|url=|location=Boston|publisher=Little Brown|pages= |isbn= |author-link=|ref=harv }}<br /> {{cite book|date=1965|title=An American Dream|location=New York|publisher=Dial|ref=harv }}<br /> <br /> {{cite book|date=2007|title=The Castle in the Forest|location=New York|publisher=Random House|ref=harv }}<br /> <br /> {{cite book|date=1948|title=The Naked and the Dead|location=New York|publisher=Rinehart|ref=harv }}<br /> <br /> {{cite book|date=2003|title=Why Are We at War?|location=New York|publisher=Random House|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal |last1=Mailer|first1=Norman|last2=Whalen-Bridge|first2=John|title=The Karma of Words: Mailer since Executioner’s<br /> Song|url=|journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=1-16|access-date=|ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McCann|first=Sean|title=The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism|url= |journal=English Literary History|volume=67|issue=1|date=2000|pages=293–336|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite journal|last=McDonald|first=Brian|title=Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the ‘Very Jewish<br /> Jesus’of Norman Mailer’s The Gospel according to the Son|url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=78–90|access-date= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rorty|first=Richard|date=1989|title=Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity|url= |location=New York|publisher=Cambridge UP|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Rosenbaum|first=Ron|date=March 6, 2007|title=The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer: What Will He Make of ‘Hitler’s<br /> Chappaquiddick’?|url=http://www.slate.com/id/2161302/|location= |publisher=Slate |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite book |last=Taylor|first=A. J. P |date=1996|title=The Origins of the Second World War|url= |location=New York|publisher=Touchstone|pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br /> * {{cite web |url= http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/the-incrediblyunbelieva_b_35882.html|title=The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush|last=Uygur|first=Cenk|date=December 8, 2006|website= |publisher= |access-date=1 August 2008|quote= |ref=harv }}</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/%22Their_Humor_Annoyed_Him%22:_Cavalier_Wit_and_Sympathy_for_the_Devil_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest&diff=11139 2020-09-03T00:34:05Z

<p>CDucharme: Created page with &quot;{{DISPLAYTITLE:&lt;span style=&quot;font-size:22px;&gt; {{BASEPAGENAME}}/&lt;/span&gt;&quot;Their Humor Annoyed Him&quot;: Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in &#039;&#039;The Castle in the Forest&#039;&#039;}} {{MR1...&quot;</p> <hr /> <div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:&lt;span style=&quot;font-size:22px;&gt;<br /> {{BASEPAGENAME}}/&lt;/span&gt;&quot;Their Humor Annoyed Him&quot;: Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in ''The Castle in the Forest''}}<br /> {{MR12}}<br /> {{Byline|last=Whalen-Bridge|first=John|abstract=&quot;Himmler subscribed to the theory that the best human possibilities lie close to the worst.&quot;|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/John_Whalen-Bridge}}</div>

CDucharme https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:CDucharme&diff=11135 2020-09-02T21:15:41Z

<p>CDucharme: Created page with &quot;I am a senior at Middle Georgia State University, on track to receive a degree in New Media and Communication. After graduation I hope to begin a career in sports journalism.&quot;</p> <hr /> <div>I am a senior at Middle Georgia State University, on track to receive a degree in New Media and Communication. After graduation I hope to begin a career in sports journalism.</div>

CDucharme