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The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

2021-06-28T02:31:28Z

JPridgeon:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Genre-Bending in ''The Armies of the Night''}}
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{{Byline|last=Mosser |first=Jason |abstract=How does Norman Mailer define the terms “novel” and “history” in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer
configures all three genres in remarkably original ways.| url=https://prmlr.us/mr03mos }}

{{dc|dc=I|n ''The Armies of the Night''}}, Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,” “denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another.”{{sfn|Smith|2003|p=191}} How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

{{quote|[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed.{{sfn|Lennon|2006|p=97}} }}

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form''.{{sfn|Burke|1974|pp=138–164}} Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “to ''get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning.”{{sfn|Burke|1974|pp=147–48}} Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:
{{quote|[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision.{{sfn|Burke|1974|p=148}} }}

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” {{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|p=148}}. By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=236}}. Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

<blockquote>[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)</blockquote>

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=243-4}}

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” {{sfn|Gutman|1975|p=162}}. Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=86}}. Mailer says that
<blockquote>the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=281}})</blockquote>

History, Mailer says, is “interior” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=281}}, indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=130}}. Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=65}}. He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” {{sfn|Smith|2003|p=187}}. Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” {{sfn|Hellmann|1981|p=37}}. Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=66}}. Mailer says that

<blockquote>if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History.{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=66}}</blockquote>

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=65}}, Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=20}}: no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=273}}. Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself {{sfn|Gutman|1975|p=167}}. Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=48}}. The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” {{sfn|Trachtenburg|1968|p=701}}. Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. {{sfn|Bufithis|1978|p=94}}

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=280}}. He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=281}}. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=284}}. The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=284}}. “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=284}}. The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=285}}. Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=299-305}}. Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=304}}. Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=306}}.

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

<blockquote>Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)</blockquote>

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

<blockquote>Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.</blockquote>

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” {{sfn|Hollowell|1977|p=100}}(100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=101}}, but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

<blockquote>Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. {{sfn|Gutman|1975|p=171}}</blockquote>

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” {{sfn|Schroeder|1992|p=104-05}}. In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” {{sfn|Berthoff|1971|p=327}}, but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

===Citations===
{{Reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* {{cite book |last= Adams|first= Laura|date= 1976|title= ''Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Athens:Ohio|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Bakhtin|first= M.M.|date= 1981|title= ''The Dialogic Imagination''|url= |location= Austin: U of Texas P,|publisher= Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Berthoff|first= Warner|date= 1971|title= “Witness and Testament: Two Contemporary Classics.” ''New Literary History 2''|url= |location= |publisher= |pages= 311-27|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Bufithis|first= Philip H.|date= 1978|title= ''Norman Mailer''|url= |location= New York|publisher= Frederick Ungar, Modern Literature Monographs|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Burke|first= Kenneth|date= 1974|title= "The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. 3rd ed."|url= |location= Berkeley: U of California P|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Chomsky last 2= S. Herman|first= Noam first 2= Edward|date= 1988|title= "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media"|url= |location= New York|publisher= Pantheon Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Gutman|first= Stanley T.|date= 1975|title= ''Mankind in Barbary: The Individual and Society in the Novels of Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Hanover: UP of New England|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hellmann|first= John|date= 1981|title= ''Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction''|url= |location= Urbana: U of Illinois P|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hollowell|first= John|date= 1977|title= ''Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel''|url= |location= Chapel Hill:U of North Carolina P|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Lennon|first= Michael J.|date= 2006|title= Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian?” ''Journal of Modern Literature 30.1''|url= |location= |publisher= |pages= 91-103|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1968|title= ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History''|url= |location= New York: New American Library|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Schroeder|first= Eric James|date= 1992|title= “Norman Mailer: The Hubris of the American Dream.” "Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers"|url= |location= Westport, CT|publisher= Praeger|pages= 91-105|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Smith|first= Kathy|date= 2003|title= “Norman Mailer and the Radical Text.” ''Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Philadelphia: Chelsea House|publisher= Ed. Harold Bloom, Bloom’s Modern Critical Views|pages= 181-196|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Trachtenberg |first=Alan |date=May 27, 1968 |title=Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon |url= |magazine=The Nation |pages=701–702 |access-date= |ref=harv }} Rev. of ''The Armies of the Night'', by Norman Mailer.

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Crime of His Time

2021-06-28T02:30:42Z

JPridgeon:

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{{Byline|last=Olshaker|first=Mark |abstract=}}

{{dc|dc=S|O, COMES NOW NORMAN MAILER IN THE YEAR 1995,}} to the High Court of Public Opinion, as he inevitably must, to wrestle with the tantalizing and sublime mystery of Lee Harvey Oswald. His pleading is entitled, ''Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery''.

Could it be otherwise for the man who took it upon himself to chronicle and interpret the zeitgeist of the American 1960s than to light at last— thirty-two years after the fact—on the subject matter that, perhaps more than any other, determined the very nature of the zeitgeist? We are talking, of course, of that pinpoint moment, just before 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas when everything changed forever. It took some time for this reality to sink in, for the march of history to catch up with the moment, but once it did, it caught up with a holy vengeance; a vengeance of near biblical proportions. The perceived cover-ups of CIA involvement in the murder, of Mafia involvement, of shady corporation involvement, the performance of the ham-handed Warren Commission, the newfound skepticism of government motives, and a president who felt a need to finish what his predecessor had begun in Southeast Asia, all contributed toward blowing out the foundations upon which a generation was built and substituted the flimsiest of materials. Skepticism regarding the Warren Report became its own litmus test of intellectual seriousness.

But for the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the ascendancy of Lyn- don Baines Johnson, how different it all might have been, how different we all might have been—the Butterfly Effect redoubling on itself down through the decades.

I came in on the trailing edge of that generation: children of the 1960s who grew up idealistic enough to believe that anything was possible and cynical enough to believe that nothing was true. It is from that background that I come to this examination, as well as from my perspectives as a Mailer devotee, a novelist, a writer on true crime, criminal justice and behavioral profiling and, particularly, as one of the cohort who remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing upon hearing that President Kennedy had been shot. Each of these qualifications, of course, brings its own biases, for at this remove, the subject is its own cultural Rorschach test that cannot be approached with any reasonable claim to objectivity.

The word “Tale” in the title, it seems to me, is crucial to the understanding of what Mailer is trying to do with this book or, as some critics have suggested, two books: the first covering Oswald’s sojourn in the Soviet Union and the second his return to the United States. In fact, Mailer divides the work into two related “volumes.” Volume One is entitled, ''Oswald in Minsk with Marina; Volume Two, Oswald in America''. By relating the story of Lee Harvey Oswald’s adult life—where he went, what he did and who he met— Mailer hopes to shed light on the two critical questions that everyone has been asking since the day Oswald himself was gunned down in full view of the television public: Did he do it? And, if so, why?

Because the author is the most audacious literary gunslinger of the age, there is always the risk, the compulsive gambler’s instinct, to bet it all on each roll of the dice. As with his oft-expressed notion that sex is not complete, is not the total existential act, without the element of sin and guilt, so the literary adventure he sets for himself is meaningless without the very real possibility of failure. He has done it over and over again—to brilliant effect in ''The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song'', to cite but two examples, and not so successfully in a number of others. But one of the many factors that solidified my tremendous admiration for Mailer, the pappable sense of excitement in his work, was just that sense of risk; that good writers should never rest on their laurels or fall back on the thing that worked last time. Whatever new book or article came out with his name on it, I always knew Mailer would be leading with his chin.

And with this monumental examination of Oswald’s short and unhappy life, it is as if he has doubled down, knowing well the difficulties he has set for himself. Like a literary Shackleton advertising the perilousness of the mission, he undertakes this adventure with little professed hope of success, at least so far as the term is commonly used. In fact, after we have accompanied him for more than five hundred pages, he stops to point out, “It is worth remembering that in life, as in other mysteries, there are no answers, only questions, but part of the pleasure of intellection is to refine the question, or discover a new one” {{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=515–16}}.

Mailer, with his enterprising and resourceful sidekick Lawrence Schiller—who had previously put together the ''Executioner'' project— travelled to Russia and spent months revisiting Oswald’s haunts in Moscow and Minsk, interviewing numerous people with whom he had come in contact, and examining newly opened KGB files. Their research finds are impressive, virtually a day-to-day account of Oswald’s actions and of those in his orbit. We read about his relationship with the In tourist guides, his half-hearted suicide attempt when informed he couldn’t stay beyond his visa, his parsimonious and quotidian routine, his pursuit of women, and his eventual courtship and almost immediately troubled marriage to Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, a pretty and flirtatious pharmacy student. In truth, Mailer’s and Schiller’s most interesting finds cast greater light on Soviet- American relations during this phase of the Cold War than they do on Oswald personally.

One particularly striking revelation is the amount of attention the Soviet intelligence apparatus devoted to such a non-noteworthy expatriate as Oswald. Apparently, they just could not figure out why a young American ex-Marine would want to relocate to Russia, except to spy. So they went to elaborate lengths to bug him, tail him, get reports and debriefs about him, all to try to figure out his game. When he courted and married Marina, was that part of the CIA’s overall plan for planting Oswald in the midst of Soviet society? Verbatim KGB transcripts detail their moments of passionate love- making as well as their far more frequent passionate arguments and marital spats. Mailer quotes liberally from these transcripts.

But the conclusion the “Organs”—as the intelligence services were colloquially known—ultimately came to is that far from being a spy, Oswald was some poor, innocuous schlep who knew he was dissatisfied with his lot in life, but not much more. Dissatisfied with capitalism and its lack of place for him, he had dreamed of becoming part of the great socialist experiment that the Soviet Union represented. Once there, however, sent from Moscow to the Byelorussian city of Minsk and assigned to drudge work in a backwater radio factory, he realized that the vast, cold Russian collectivist bureaucracy offered no more than capitalism. So he petitioned to return to his native land, along with Marina and their baby, June Lee. Save for the addition of wife and child, the twenty-year-old, dyslexic, poorly-educated product of a weirdly dysfunctional family with an undistinguished Marine Corp stint behind him, left the Soviet Union as a twenty-two-year-old of roughly the same description.

And here, I fear, is the rub. As illuminating as it is on a general level, as intriguing as the “Russified” English style is that Mailer creates, as much as it provides fascinating insights into various Soviet types, the extended Russian section of ''Oswald’s Tale'' doesn’t have all that much to do with the character’s outcome or the crime for which he became infamous. After reading through all of this, we have to ask ourselves, had Oswald not spent these two years in the Soviet Union, might the story have turned out essentially the same? Even keeping in mind all of the vagaries of the Butterfly Effect, the answer, as Hamlet so succinctly put it, is, “Very like.”

Let us be plain here. While the material on Oswald’s life in Moscow and Minsk effectively portrays a slice of the grim, gray life in the 1950s-1960s Soviet Union, it is hardly determinative in its detail regarding its protagonist. Mailer can get away with things lesser writers cannot. If he wants to show off his voluminous research into Soviet life of the time through 315 densely packed pages, then by God and by Norman, he will, and blue pencils be damned.

For Volume Two, he took a somewhat different tack, explaining, “That gap of three decades [between the assassination and the opening up of Russian society, during which there was little public debate] which had been an asset in Minsk would prove a liability in America” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=351}}. Instead, he quotes extensively from other sources, rather than straight reportage, in coming up with his own interpretation of events and motives, most notably the twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission itself and Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s 1977 joint biography, ''Marina and Lee''. Mailer says,

<blockquote>An attempt to come to grips with the full twenty-four years of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life seems in order, then. We have an advantage, after all! What was previously the dry material of the Warren Commission Hearings takes on more life because of our knowledge of Oswald’s behavior in Minsk. {{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=352}}</blockquote>

Mailer goes on, falling back on his once-characteristic third-person self-referencing:

This will hardly prove to be the limit of his task. The second volume is also, as advertised, replete with speculation. How else can one deal with the leading actor? After all, Oswald was a secret agent. There is no doubt about that. The only matter unsettled is whether he was working for any service larger than the power centers in the privacy of his mind. {{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=352}}

Fair enough, except for one nagging problem. To achieve this, to settle this “matter,” to justify devoting some 791 pages of text to “the question,” it is necessary to elevate Oswald the individual to the enormity of the crime. This, in effect, becomes the moral equivalent of conspiracy theory in that it tries to explain our national trauma and give it some dimension beyond merely the act of a deranged and inadequate loner.

That feeling of inadequacy, of course, is at the very heart of the defining act, as it almost always is. But for the moment, let us deal with the phenomenon of conspiracy theory itself, for certainly it is at the root of our collective obsession with the Kennedy murder and thus the motive cause for Mailer himself to embark upon this journey.

“So long as Oswald is a petty figure,” Mailer himself points out,
<blockquote>[A]lone twisted pathetic killer who happened to be in a position to kill a potentially great President, then, as has been argued earlier in this work, America is cursed with an absurdity. There was no logic to the event and no sense of balance in the universe. Historical absurdity (like the war in Vietnam) breeds social disease. {{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=606}}</blockquote>

Two paragraphs later he poses the central question:

<blockquote>Did Lee Harvey Oswald kill JFK, and if he did, was he a lone
gunman or a participant in a conspiracy? {{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=606}}</blockquote>

It is as if by redeeming Oswald as a man of deep and compelling character he can redeem all of us who have suffered for the crime. He nets it out even further in the next paragraph:

<blockquote>If a figure as large as Kennedy is cheated abruptly of his life, we feel better, inexplicably better, if his killer is also not without size. Then, to some degree, we can also mourn the loss of possibility in the man who did the deed. Tragedy is vastly preferable to absurdity. Such is the vested interest that adheres to perceiving Oswald as a tragic and infuriating hero (or, if you will, anti-hero) rather than as a snarling little wife abuser or a patsy.(607)</blockquote>

But that, in the end, is just what Oswald was. And what Mailer does manage to show us through both volumes of ''Oswald’s Tale'', I would suggest, is that this character who was unhappy with the American capitalist system, turned out to be equally unhappy with the Soviet socialist system, as he would have been with the Cuban revolution-oriented system, had he ultimately been allowed to emigrate there as he wished. And that is why Mailer cannot make ''Oswald’s Tale'' into ''The Executioner’s Song'', no matter how much effort, no matter how much detail he puts into it.

In preparing for this piece, I went back to the original reviews, which were decidedly mixed. What surprised me far more than the bundle of raves and brickbats that often greeted a Mailer work were the repeated descriptions of Oswald as “complex” and “deep.” Huh? What am I missing? I just don’t get it.
The portrait Mailer paints as Oswald’s own self-image is the typical one assassins project—of losers convinced of their own greatness and entitlement, who know they will be lauded by history for this great act that will put society back on the right track. The problem is that Oswald’s small and taw- dry life does not lend itself to large questions, as does Gary Gilmore’s equally sordid but more interesting and intellectually challenging existence. By insisting that the sentence of death handed down to him by a Utah jury and judge be carried out with all deliberate speed, Gilmore created high existential drama and challenged the basic integrity of our jurisprudential system and all of its related players. Oswald, on the other hand, remained a legitimate nobody until two days before his own untimely death and no effort of retroactively imposed moral gravitas can change that.

In his masterful essay on ''The Executioner’s Song'', Christopher Ricks extols Mailer for what we might call his negative capability: for not making any of the characters mouthpieces or surrogates for himself as author. But in ''Oswald’s Tale'', circumstances force him to do just the opposite and, if not become a mouthpiece, at least serve as an emotional sounding board for what Oswald may have been thinking and feeling. The problem is, the banal and often pathetic Oswald is not up to being a Mailerian hero.

In ''Executioner'', Mailer illuminates a man determined to fulfill the destiny of his damned soul. In ''Oswald'', he treats a man searching for his own exalted destiny within the milieus of the two superpowers he ultimately rejects. The word “soul” doesn’t come up much in any discussion of Lee Harvey Oswald. In ''Executioner'', every character plays his or her own unique and vital role. Since 1963, an army of assassination theorists has been trying to connect all the characters into some kind of coherent mosaic, without notable success.

So instead of a protagonist who interacts with and affects an entire cast of characters around him, what emerges is a near archetypal case study of a social misfit, a personality that is one of the prime building blocks of the assassin personality.

As former Special Agent and FBI behavioral profiling pioneer John Douglas and I outlined in our 1999 book, ''The Anatomy of Motive'' {{sfn|Douglas, Olshaker|1999|p=215-250}}, this assassin personality has been well studied and defined by law enforcement professionals in both the FBI and Secret Service, among other agencies, and forensically oriented psychiatrists. These personalities tend to be white male loners with self-esteem problems—no surprises there—and functional paranoiacs. By this we mean that they operate under a highly organized or methodical delusional system that helps them explain their marginalized social standing or position in society. In Oswald’s case, this was further fed by the books he devoured on Marxist and socialist theory. They have trouble keeping jobs and feel they are not appreciated for their true talents. They tend to latch on to “causes” that lend them some higher purpose. And indeed, Oswald became the entire New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an offshoot of the New York-based organization to which Mailer early lent his name. If Oswald couldn’t be a socialist hero in a country like Russia, well past its days of revolutionary fervor, then he would become one for Cuba, still in the midst of its revolution and facing his other nemesis, the big, bad USA. Yet in almost all cases except for the rare, rock- ribbed true believer, the political component is merely window dressing to justify the rage and violent behavior and the unfairness that the target is a celebrity or important person, and the potential assassin is not. There is strong evidence, detailed by Gus Russo and Stephen Molton in their definitive 2008 book, ''Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder'', that both Marina and Lee identified heavily with Jack Kennedy. It is therefore reasonable to infer that one motivation for the murder was Oswald’s psychological need to control/destroy the thing he could never be, a key component, for example, in Mark David Chapman’s 1980 murder of John Lennon {{sfn|Douglas, Olshaker|1999|p=234-235}}. And like Chapman, Oswald was at least perceptive enough to understand what every would-be assassin understands: that the act, if successful, will twin him forever with the great or evil personage whose life he robs. And for most of these guys, that is sufficient reward in itself.

It is striking how many assassin types choose their targets for completely capricious reasons, or change their focus once the quest begins. Arthur Bremer, who gunned down and permanently paralyzed Alabama Governor George Wallace in Laurel, Maryland, during the 1972 Presidential primary season, had first set his sights on President Richard Nixon. When he found that the chief executive’s security was too tight, he settled for a more accessible nationally known figure. Likewise, Oswald first tried to assassinate local Texas right-winger and vociferous anti-communist General Edwin Walker and Oswald was despondent when the attempt got virtually no press coverage.

Assassins are often gun fetishists, another means of empowering an inadequate personality. Remember the image of Oswald posed in his backyard proudly, brandishing his Italian-made Mannlicher Carcano 6.5 bolt-action clip-fed rifle. Diaries are common, going back at least to the days of John Wilkes Booth, as witness Bremer and Robert Kennedy’s killer Sirhan B. Sirhan. And here again, Lee Oswald fits the bill. Mailer gives us a good flavor of the bland and poorly-written nature of the entries, peppered with the occasional vehement rant.

With regard to Oswald being involved in a larger effort, let me take the liberty of quoting myself in The Anatomy of Motive:

</blockquote>Oswald’s not the kind of person you’d bring into a conspiracy, even as a dupe, because you couldn’t trust him. If you’re an agent of some sort, you’re not going to try to develop someone like Oswald. He’s too unreliable, too unpredictable, too much of a flake. He’s got too many personal problems, plus he’s not that smart. I don’t believe that any secret cabal could have known enough about behavioral psychology back in 1963 to choose someone who so perfectly conformed to the lone assassin profile to be their front man. {{sfn|Douglas, Olshaker|1999|p=249}}</blockquote>

So the larger mystery, perhaps, is that there has been so much doubt all these years about the perpetration of the crime. Again, let us be straightforward: All evidence points to Lee Harvey Oswald having done the deed and having acted alone—personality, proximity, ballistics, you name it. I don’t expect to convince the hardcore doubters in an article of this length, but then neither have they been convinced by entire books that detail all of the compelling evidence and logic.

Could he possibly have accomplished the hit: a slowly moving target at 88 yards with benefit of a four-power scope? On a good day, certainly, as the Secret Service repeatedly demonstrated with their own tests and recreations. He was considered an average shot in the Marine Corps, but that still puts him far above the general population of shooters. And the oft-quoted 5.6- second window to get off the three shots is basically a made-up number whose background we need not deal with here. Even the so-called “magic bullet” of the ardent conspiratists has a logical explanation. Given how Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connolly were actually seated in the Lincoln limousine, it would have been a truly magic bullet if it had not struck Connolly. Mailer finally admits:
<blockquote>[E]ach bullet, and the wound it causes, has an inter-relationship as unique as a fingerprint or a signature .... By the logic of such an argument, the proof of the magic bullet is that it happened. One cannot introduce the odds after the fact. {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=777}}</blockquote> Or, as one veteran homicide investigator once told me, “Every bullet is a magic bullet.” Trying to predict its path and ultimate effect after firing verges into the realm of chaos theory.

This only underscores the hard truth that most public tragedies, whether we are speaking of a bridge collapse, the accidental death of a celebrity, or the murder of a head of state, result not from one large factor, but from a series of elements going unpredictably wrong. They are built on a tenuous string of contingency. Had not the wrought iron tie bars on the Tay Rail Bridge not been badly designed and poorly maintained, had not the wind-loading considerations been better understood, had not a heavy train been passing over just as a storm gust blew up, then seventy-five good Scottish souls would not have lost their lives in the Firth of Tay in December 1879. Had not Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed decided to leave the Ritz Hotel for his Paris apartment that night in August 1997, and had their inebriated driver not been trying to outrun the paparazzi, and had he not driven into that tunnel and swerved and had Diana been wearing a seat belt and had the French emergency services rushed her to the emergency room rather than trying to stabilize her on the scene and . . . well, we all get the picture. By the same token, had not the tubercular Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip not despaired of shooting Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand after his compatriots missed with their bomb that June day in 1914, causing the motorcade to change plans and Princip to go get himself a sandwich, and had he not emerged from Schiller’s Delicatessen just as the archduke’s car was turning around in front of him to correct an unpredictable wrong turn, then World War I might not have been triggered and the entire history of the twentieth century would have been unrecognizably different. Again, to quote from ''Anatomy'':

<blockquote>Any successful assassin has to get lucky. Oswald was lucky in many ways, among them that Kennedy directed that the clear bubble top not be placed on the presidential limousine. Another was that the president was wearing a brace for his bad back. Had he not been, he might have been thrown forward by the first bullet and out of the critical line of fire. It’s always a confluence of unrelated coincidences. {{sfn|Douglas, Olshaker|1999|p=249}}</blockquote>

Take into account the coincidence of Oswald being fired from a job he liked and securing a lesser position at the Texas School Book Depository and then, as Mailer quotes Priscilla Johnson McMillan:

<blockquote>[T]he uncanny selection of a route that would carry the President right under his window could mean only one thing. Fate has singled him out to do the dangerous but necessary task which had been his destiny all along which would cause him to go down in history. {{sfn|McMillian|1977|p=573}</blockquote>

If you add to that Oswald’s well-established frustrated romantic overtures on the night of November 21 to a wife who is no longer living with him and the anger and despair that might have engendered in an already angry and desperate individual, then you come to appreciate the kind of karmic capriciousness through which history often declares itself. This moment was Oswald’s one last desperate stab at “normal” life and love, and Marina rebuffed him. In Mailer’s universe, everyone is searching—vainly—for love, and if they don’t find it in one form, they’ll pursue it in another. As one per- son close to the investigation put it to me in a decidedly earthy syllogism, “If Oswald had gotten laid on Thursday night, JFK would have gotten laid on Friday night.”

And it is in scenes like the aforementioned Marina’s bedroom, despite the unredeemable shallowness of the character he has to work with, where Mailer is at his speculative literary and psychological best. After that unfortunate rejection, Mailer tells us:

<blockquote>Oswald has reached that zone of serenity that some men attain before combat, when anxiety is deep enough to feel like quiet exaltation: You are finally going into an action that will be equal in dimension to the importance of your life. {{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=666}}</blockquote>

As far as a conspiracy, anyone who has read ''Harlot’s Ghost'', Mailer’s wonderful and unruly—and incomplete—epic novel of the CIA, must suspect that he cannot be more than half serious about such a bureaucratic behemoth being able to keep such a monumental secret. As to other groups— Mafia, corporate cabals, whatever—I think that has been effectively addressed by Gerald Posner (among others) in his 1993 book ''Case Closed'', from which Mailer also liberally quotes. He didn’t have the benefit of Vincent Bugliosi’s exhaustively detailed book, ''Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy'', which essentially demolishes the conspiracy theories. He also didn’t have Gus Russo’s and Stephen Molton’s ''Brothers in Arms'', or Russo’s earlier work on the assassination, ''Live by the Sword'', though even if he had, I doubt they would have diverted Mailer from his course. At the beginning of Volume Two he writes:

<blockquote>Let me propose, then, that a mystery of the immense dimensions of Oswald’s case will, in the writing, create a form of its own somewhere between fiction and non-fiction.... The author’s musings become some of the operative instruments. Of course, speculation is often an invaluable resource of the novelist. The result can be seen, therefore, as a special species of non-fiction that can be put under the rubric of mystery. {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=353}}</blockquote>

Now, the terms “fiction” and “non-fiction” have certainly lost a large measure of their rigidity, at least since the publication of The Armies of the Night with its game-changing subtitle, History as a Novel/The Novel as History. It became, under Mailer’s alchemy, a completely elastic and protean description to be expropriated by a multitude of less talented writers for their own purposes. But with Oswald, even Mailer has to strain at the distinction in order to keep up a modicum of suspense regarding the central “mystery”; i.e., whether Oswald did it and whether anyone else was involved.

Mailer just can’t resist the temptation of the conspiracy theory—the better angel of any decent thriller novelist but a minefield for a non-fiction reporter. He indulges in all manner of wild speculation in an ongoing exercise that is akin to, and has roughly the same odds of success as, trying to prove who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Dragging in the possibility that Oswald was an FBI informer, for example, even though there is no evidence to sup- port it, is to cast the speculative net so wide that it loses any semblance of logic or appearance of serious investigation. We wade through a morass of “could haves,” “would haves” and “might haves” that go so far as to suggest Oswald’s homosexuality through the body position of a murdered fellow Marine that there is no evidence Oswald had anything to do with. I can imagine Mailer delighting at the very premise.

And, of course, the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby under the very noses of the Dallas Police makes the case for conspiracy all the more enticing. That, in large measure, is the X-factor that transforms the story and adds to the tragedy the added dimension of paranoia. To his credit, Mailer does spend a chapter of considerable length exploring this possibility—mainly that the Mafia put Jack up to it—before concluding, along with Gerald Posner, that it just doesn’t add up. There were just too many variables involved, many having to do with Ruby chancing to be at the right place at the right time, like Princip getting his sandwich just as the archduke’s open car was correcting its wrong turn.

In the end, Mailer is willing to conclude that Ruby acted out of a combination of genuine admiration for President Kennedy, compassion for Jackie and wanting to save her the trauma of an Oswald trial, and as a response to the vitriolic ad in the ''Dallas Morning News'' that had welcomed Kennedy to Dallas. That ad had been taken out by a Jewish member of the John Birch Society named Bernard Weissman and suggested that the president was a Communist supporter. Ruby was appalled when he saw the ad and fretted that it tarnished the entire Jewish community of Dallas. Mailer quotes Posner:

<blockquote>“If I had planned this I couldn’t have had my timing better,” [Ruby] bragged.“It was one chance in a million... I guess I just had to show the world that a Jew has guts.” {{sfn|Posner, Mailer |1993, 1995|p=396-97,757}}</blockquote>

Do these three sentiments make logical sense as a motive for shooting Oswald? Only within their own paranoid context. And that is just the point. Like Oswald, the down and out Ruby, on the verge of bankruptcy, was operating out of his own ethical/heroic fantasy. In fact, by the time Chief Justice Earl Warren goes to Dallas to interview him, Ruby’s Jewish persecution paranoia has reached the psychotic level {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=734-40}}

And recognizing a great factoid, a term Norman invented in 1972 {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=18}}, when he hears one, Mailer concludes the chapter citing Posner’s quoting of a close friend who testified that Ruby would never have left his beloved dog Sheba in his car “ ‘if he knew he was going to shoot Oswald and end up in jail’ ” {{sfn|Posner, Mailer |1993, 1995|p=392,758}}. Sometimes, as Freud noted, “A cigar is just a cigar.” And sometimes, ordinary, practical considerations trump overarching conspiracies.

What Mailer does show is that once the assassination had taken place, numerous parties, while not in command of the whole truth or the big picture, certainly had their own reasons to want to stop others from getting any of it, lest it lead to what they feared might be the rest of the truth. The pro- and anti-Castro elements, the mob, the Soviets, all feared some of their own people might have been close enough to the action to maybe be involved. And if that were found out, there would be hell to pay. On the other hand, certain factions thought they could benefit by association. Mailer brings up Mob Lawyer by Frank Ragano, Santo Trafficante’s attorney. Ragano makes “it clear that [New Orleans mob kingpin Carlos] Marcello and Trafficante certainly wanted [Teamsters Union boss and Robert Kennedy archenemy] Jimmy Hoffa to believe they were responsible for the act” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=741}}(Mailer 741)

On one level, the great mystery at the center of the Oswald story is that there is any substantial mystery left at all. The evidence of this one man’s involvement in the assassination is overwhelming on every level, and there has never been a credible piece of evidence linking any other individual or group to the murder. As far as I am concerned, Gus Russo, at first singly and then ten years later with Stephen Molton, has answered the final important questions, based on newly-released documents, eyewitness interviews and meticulously gathered and triangulated research. By filling in such gaps as what Oswald was doing in Mexico City in September 1963 and whom he met with, Russo confirms what Mailer can only speculate—that Oswald did have contact with Cuban officials and that he did express his intent, “to kill that bastard! I’m going to kill Kennedy!” {{sfn|Russo, Molton |2008|p=310}}. Contrary to the official line and general perception, the Kennedy administration had not curtailed their attempts to kill Castro and overthrow his regime after the peaceful settlement of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. It is therefore far from surprising that Cuban intelligence would be sympathetic to anyone offering to return the favor.

But perhaps the most interesting part of Russo’s narrative is that the Cubans, who had been informed originally about Oswald by the Russian secret service organs when he quit the Soviet Union, essentially took the declaration in stride, wished him luck, and never took him very seriously. He was not the kind of guy you would pick or rely on to carry out a high-level hit. Although, according to Russo, they did give him assurances that if he did manage to pull off the operation, they would be there to rescue him and whisk him off to Cuba, which might explain Oswald’s declaration after capture that he was a “patsy.”

Russo and Molton suggest, and this very well might be the case, that the Warren Commission was purposely kept in the dark and steered away from such critical avenues of inquiry as the Cuban connection because new President Lyndon Johnson and other high government officials were deeply worried that any suggestion that Castro and Cuba were behind the assassination would lead to a public bloodlust for the overthrow of the regime, which in turn would lead to another nuclear stakes confrontation with the Russians. Having seen how narrowly World War III was avoided just 13 months before, and being one of the few people in the administration old enough to remember World War I and the living hell that Gavrilo Princip unwittingly unleashed on Europe, it was a chance Johnson was not willing to take. The result, unavoidably it seems, were the seeds of doubt that ultimately blossomed into full-blown distrust of the government and everything it undertook.

It is fascinating to note that this was an idea Mailer could easily wrap his mind around, and did so in the form of drama years before Russo collected the facts that could bear it out. For the April 1992 issue of ''Vanity Fair'', Mailer penned a mordant two-character drama entitled, “Earl and Lyndon: An Imaginary Conversation,” in which he had the ever-persuasive LBJ strong- arm Chief Justice Warren into accepting the commission chairmanship to assure the public’s faith in government integrity. Once he gets Warren’s assurance, Johnson outlines all the areas the commission is to stay away from.

It is this kind of literary agitprop and street theater that takes us back to the Norman Mailer of the 1960s, of ''The Armies of the Night'', W''hy Are We in Vietnam? and Miami and the Siege of Chicago'', and makes us remember why we wanted to rally around him. By the end of ''Oswald’s Tale'', it is as if he has added his own coda to the era. The time for bombast, for conspiracies and paranoia and the storming of the barricades is over. Now is the time for sober reflection of an era that seems long ago.

Those of us even marginally old enough to remember will recall that the election of JFK was supposed to launch the New Frontier of the hopeful 1960s. As it turned out, it was actually JFK’s death that launched the 1960s and we were soon waist-deep in the Big Muddy. As he had before and would do again in his long and prodigious career, Norman Mailer tried mightily to make sense out of those years with ''Oswald’s Tale''. But as he demonstrated so effectively in ''Harlot’s Ghost'', which he quotes from in Oswald to support some of his own theses, history is elusive, even to those who have lived it. For the rest, it can be all but unknowable.

Unfortunately, hanging the mantle of the age on the thin shoulders of Lee Harvey Oswald is not a cloak even a tailor as gifted as Mailer can cut to fit this demonstrably small and unheroic figure. Wife abuser—certainly. Patsy—newly revealed aspects of the Cuban connection might lead one to believe so. But little more. The kindest term we might use in relation to Oswald would be something on the order of pathetic.

“Every insight we have gained of him suggests the solitary nature of his act,” Mailer finally admits {{sfn|Mailer |1995|p=779}}.

Though it is painful to admit, the sad fact is that John F. Kennedy was killed by a no-count loser who becomes significant only in his perverse luck and once-in-his-life effectiveness in destroying our collective hopes and
dreams.
===CITATIONS===
{{Reflist|15em}}

===NOTES===
1. There is also a good discussion of this aspect of Jack Ruby’s personality in Gus Russo’s ''Live by the Sword'', page 499.
2. See Ragano and Raab, page 151, for further details.

===WORKS CITED===
{{Refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* {{cite book |last= Bugliosi|first= Vincent|date= 2007|title= ''Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy''|url= |location= New York|publisher=W.W. Norton & Company |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Douglas 2=Olshaker|first=John 2=Mark|date= 1999|title= “Shadow of a Gunman.”''The Anatomy of Motive''|url= |location= New York|publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Douglas 2=Olshaker|first=John 2=Mark|date= 1998|title= ''Obsession''|url= |location= New York|publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1968|title= ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel The Novel as History'' |url= |location= New York|publisher= The New American Library |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1992|title= “Earl and Lyndon: An Imaginary Conversation.” |url= |location= New York|publisher= Vanity Fair |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1991|title= ''Harlot’s Ghost'' |url= |location= New York|publisher=Random House |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1972|title= ''Marilyn'' |url= |location= New York|publisher=Grosset & Dunlap |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1995|title= ''Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery'' |url= |location= New York|publisher=Little Brown |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= McMillan|first= Priscilla Johnson|date= 1977|title= ''Marina and Lee'' |url= |location= New York|publisher= Harper & Row |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Posner|first= Gerald|date= 1993|title= ''Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK'' |url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Ragano 2=Rabb|first= Frank 2=Selwyn|date= 1994|title= ''Mob Lawyer'' |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner|pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Ricks |first= Christopher|date= 2008|title= “Norman Mailer: ''The Executioner’s Song."'' |url= |location= New York|publisher= ''The Mailer Review 2.1''|pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Russo 2=Stephen|first= Gus 2=Molton|date= 2008|title= ''Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder.''|url= |location= New York|publisher= Bloomsbury|pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= Gus|date= 1998|title= ''Live by the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK'' |url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= Bancroft Press|pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= United States|first= Warren Commission|date= 1964|title= ''Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination
of President John F. Kennedy'' |url= |location= Washington|publisher= GPO Press|pages= |ref=harv}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Crime of His Time

2021-06-28T02:30:29Z

JPridgeon:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''THE CRIME OF HIS TIME''}}
{{MR03}}

{{Byline|last=Olshaker|first=Mark |abstract=}}

{{dc|dc=S|O, COMES NOW NORMAN MAILER IN THE YEAR 1995,}} to the High Court of Public Opinion, as he inevitably must, to wrestle with the tantalizing and sublime mystery of Lee Harvey Oswald. His pleading is entitled, ''Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery''.

Could it be otherwise for the man who took it upon himself to chronicle and interpret the zeitgeist of the American 1960s than to light at last— thirty-two years after the fact—on the subject matter that, perhaps more than any other, determined the very nature of the zeitgeist? We are talking, of course, of that pinpoint moment, just before 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas when everything changed forever. It took some time for this reality to sink in, for the march of history to catch up with the moment, but once it did, it caught up with a holy vengeance; a vengeance of near biblical proportions. The perceived cover-ups of CIA involvement in the murder, of Mafia involvement, of shady corporation involvement, the performance of the ham-handed Warren Commission, the newfound skepticism of government motives, and a president who felt a need to finish what his predecessor had begun in Southeast Asia, all contributed toward blowing out the foundations upon which a generation was built and substituted the flimsiest of materials. Skepticism regarding the Warren Report became its own litmus test of intellectual seriousness.

But for the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the ascendancy of Lyn- don Baines Johnson, how different it all might have been, how different we all might have been—the Butterfly Effect redoubling on itself down through the decades.

I came in on the trailing edge of that generation: children of the 1960s who grew up idealistic enough to believe that anything was possible and cynical enough to believe that nothing was true. It is from that background that I come to this examination, as well as from my perspectives as a Mailer devotee, a novelist, a writer on true crime, criminal justice and behavioral profiling and, particularly, as one of the cohort who remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing upon hearing that President Kennedy had been shot. Each of these qualifications, of course, brings its own biases, for at this remove, the subject is its own cultural Rorschach test that cannot be approached with any reasonable claim to objectivity.

The word “Tale” in the title, it seems to me, is crucial to the understanding of what Mailer is trying to do with this book or, as some critics have suggested, two books: the first covering Oswald’s sojourn in the Soviet Union and the second his return to the United States. In fact, Mailer divides the work into two related “volumes.” Volume One is entitled, ''Oswald in Minsk with Marina; Volume Two, Oswald in America''. By relating the story of Lee Harvey Oswald’s adult life—where he went, what he did and who he met— Mailer hopes to shed light on the two critical questions that everyone has been asking since the day Oswald himself was gunned down in full view of the television public: Did he do it? And, if so, why?

Because the author is the most audacious literary gunslinger of the age, there is always the risk, the compulsive gambler’s instinct, to bet it all on each roll of the dice. As with his oft-expressed notion that sex is not complete, is not the total existential act, without the element of sin and guilt, so the literary adventure he sets for himself is meaningless without the very real possibility of failure. He has done it over and over again—to brilliant effect in ''The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song'', to cite but two examples, and not so successfully in a number of others. But one of the many factors that solidified my tremendous admiration for Mailer, the pappable sense of excitement in his work, was just that sense of risk; that good writers should never rest on their laurels or fall back on the thing that worked last time. Whatever new book or article came out with his name on it, I always knew Mailer would be leading with his chin.

And with this monumental examination of Oswald’s short and unhappy life, it is as if he has doubled down, knowing well the difficulties he has set for himself. Like a literary Shackleton advertising the perilousness of the mission, he undertakes this adventure with little professed hope of success, at least so far as the term is commonly used. In fact, after we have accompanied him for more than five hundred pages, he stops to point out, “It is worth remembering that in life, as in other mysteries, there are no answers, only questions, but part of the pleasure of intellection is to refine the question, or discover a new one” {{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=515–16}}.

Mailer, with his enterprising and resourceful sidekick Lawrence Schiller—who had previously put together the ''Executioner'' project— travelled to Russia and spent months revisiting Oswald’s haunts in Moscow and Minsk, interviewing numerous people with whom he had come in contact, and examining newly opened KGB files. Their research finds are impressive, virtually a day-to-day account of Oswald’s actions and of those in his orbit. We read about his relationship with the In tourist guides, his half-hearted suicide attempt when informed he couldn’t stay beyond his visa, his parsimonious and quotidian routine, his pursuit of women, and his eventual courtship and almost immediately troubled marriage to Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, a pretty and flirtatious pharmacy student. In truth, Mailer’s and Schiller’s most interesting finds cast greater light on Soviet- American relations during this phase of the Cold War than they do on Oswald personally.

One particularly striking revelation is the amount of attention the Soviet intelligence apparatus devoted to such a non-noteworthy expatriate as Oswald. Apparently, they just could not figure out why a young American ex-Marine would want to relocate to Russia, except to spy. So they went to elaborate lengths to bug him, tail him, get reports and debriefs about him, all to try to figure out his game. When he courted and married Marina, was that part of the CIA’s overall plan for planting Oswald in the midst of Soviet society? Verbatim KGB transcripts detail their moments of passionate love- making as well as their far more frequent passionate arguments and marital spats. Mailer quotes liberally from these transcripts.

But the conclusion the “Organs”—as the intelligence services were colloquially known—ultimately came to is that far from being a spy, Oswald was some poor, innocuous schlep who knew he was dissatisfied with his lot in life, but not much more. Dissatisfied with capitalism and its lack of place for him, he had dreamed of becoming part of the great socialist experiment that the Soviet Union represented. Once there, however, sent from Moscow to the Byelorussian city of Minsk and assigned to drudge work in a backwater radio factory, he realized that the vast, cold Russian collectivist bureaucracy offered no more than capitalism. So he petitioned to return to his native land, along with Marina and their baby, June Lee. Save for the addition of wife and child, the twenty-year-old, dyslexic, poorly-educated product of a weirdly dysfunctional family with an undistinguished Marine Corp stint behind him, left the Soviet Union as a twenty-two-year-old of roughly the same description.

And here, I fear, is the rub. As illuminating as it is on a general level, as intriguing as the “Russified” English style is that Mailer creates, as much as it provides fascinating insights into various Soviet types, the extended Russian section of ''Oswald’s Tale'' doesn’t have all that much to do with the character’s outcome or the crime for which he became infamous. After reading through all of this, we have to ask ourselves, had Oswald not spent these two years in the Soviet Union, might the story have turned out essentially the same? Even keeping in mind all of the vagaries of the Butterfly Effect, the answer, as Hamlet so succinctly put it, is, “Very like.”

Let us be plain here. While the material on Oswald’s life in Moscow and Minsk effectively portrays a slice of the grim, gray life in the 1950s-1960s Soviet Union, it is hardly determinative in its detail regarding its protagonist. Mailer can get away with things lesser writers cannot. If he wants to show off his voluminous research into Soviet life of the time through 315 densely packed pages, then by God and by Norman, he will, and blue pencils be damned.

For Volume Two, he took a somewhat different tack, explaining, “That gap of three decades [between the assassination and the opening up of Russian society, during which there was little public debate] which had been an asset in Minsk would prove a liability in America” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=351}}. Instead, he quotes extensively from other sources, rather than straight reportage, in coming up with his own interpretation of events and motives, most notably the twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission itself and Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s 1977 joint biography, ''Marina and Lee''. Mailer says,

<blockquote>An attempt to come to grips with the full twenty-four years of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life seems in order, then. We have an advantage, after all! What was previously the dry material of the Warren Commission Hearings takes on more life because of our knowledge of Oswald’s behavior in Minsk. {{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=352}}</blockquote>

Mailer goes on, falling back on his once-characteristic third-person self-referencing:

This will hardly prove to be the limit of his task. The second volume is also, as advertised, replete with speculation. How else can one deal with the leading actor? After all, Oswald was a secret agent. There is no doubt about that. The only matter unsettled is whether he was working for any service larger than the power centers in the privacy of his mind. {{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=352}}

Fair enough, except for one nagging problem. To achieve this, to settle this “matter,” to justify devoting some 791 pages of text to “the question,” it is necessary to elevate Oswald the individual to the enormity of the crime. This, in effect, becomes the moral equivalent of conspiracy theory in that it tries to explain our national trauma and give it some dimension beyond merely the act of a deranged and inadequate loner.

That feeling of inadequacy, of course, is at the very heart of the defining act, as it almost always is. But for the moment, let us deal with the phenomenon of conspiracy theory itself, for certainly it is at the root of our collective obsession with the Kennedy murder and thus the motive cause for Mailer himself to embark upon this journey.

“So long as Oswald is a petty figure,” Mailer himself points out,
<blockquote>[A]lone twisted pathetic killer who happened to be in a position to kill a potentially great President, then, as has been argued earlier in this work, America is cursed with an absurdity. There was no logic to the event and no sense of balance in the universe. Historical absurdity (like the war in Vietnam) breeds social disease. {{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=606}}</blockquote>

Two paragraphs later he poses the central question:

<blockquote>Did Lee Harvey Oswald kill JFK, and if he did, was he a lone
gunman or a participant in a conspiracy? {{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=606}}</blockquote>

It is as if by redeeming Oswald as a man of deep and compelling character he can redeem all of us who have suffered for the crime. He nets it out even further in the next paragraph:

<blockquote>If a figure as large as Kennedy is cheated abruptly of his life, we feel better, inexplicably better, if his killer is also not without size. Then, to some degree, we can also mourn the loss of possibility in the man who did the deed. Tragedy is vastly preferable to absurdity. Such is the vested interest that adheres to perceiving Oswald as a tragic and infuriating hero (or, if you will, anti-hero) rather than as a snarling little wife abuser or a patsy.(607)</blockquote>

But that, in the end, is just what Oswald was. And what Mailer does manage to show us through both volumes of ''Oswald’s Tale'', I would suggest, is that this character who was unhappy with the American capitalist system, turned out to be equally unhappy with the Soviet socialist system, as he would have been with the Cuban revolution-oriented system, had he ultimately been allowed to emigrate there as he wished. And that is why Mailer cannot make ''Oswald’s Tale'' into ''The Executioner’s Song'', no matter how much effort, no matter how much detail he puts into it.

In preparing for this piece, I went back to the original reviews, which were decidedly mixed. What surprised me far more than the bundle of raves and brickbats that often greeted a Mailer work were the repeated descriptions of Oswald as “complex” and “deep.” Huh? What am I missing? I just don’t get it.
The portrait Mailer paints as Oswald’s own self-image is the typical one assassins project—of losers convinced of their own greatness and entitlement, who know they will be lauded by history for this great act that will put society back on the right track. The problem is that Oswald’s small and taw- dry life does not lend itself to large questions, as does Gary Gilmore’s equally sordid but more interesting and intellectually challenging existence. By insisting that the sentence of death handed down to him by a Utah jury and judge be carried out with all deliberate speed, Gilmore created high existential drama and challenged the basic integrity of our jurisprudential system and all of its related players. Oswald, on the other hand, remained a legitimate nobody until two days before his own untimely death and no effort of retroactively imposed moral gravitas can change that.

In his masterful essay on ''The Executioner’s Song'', Christopher Ricks extols Mailer for what we might call his negative capability: for not making any of the characters mouthpieces or surrogates for himself as author. But in ''Oswald’s Tale'', circumstances force him to do just the opposite and, if not become a mouthpiece, at least serve as an emotional sounding board for what Oswald may have been thinking and feeling. The problem is, the banal and often pathetic Oswald is not up to being a Mailerian hero.

In ''Executioner'', Mailer illuminates a man determined to fulfill the destiny of his damned soul. In ''Oswald'', he treats a man searching for his own exalted destiny within the milieus of the two superpowers he ultimately rejects. The word “soul” doesn’t come up much in any discussion of Lee Harvey Oswald. In ''Executioner'', every character plays his or her own unique and vital role. Since 1963, an army of assassination theorists has been trying to connect all the characters into some kind of coherent mosaic, without notable success.

So instead of a protagonist who interacts with and affects an entire cast of characters around him, what emerges is a near archetypal case study of a social misfit, a personality that is one of the prime building blocks of the assassin personality.

As former Special Agent and FBI behavioral profiling pioneer John Douglas and I outlined in our 1999 book, ''The Anatomy of Motive'' {{sfn|Douglas, Olshaker|1999|p=215-250}}, this assassin personality has been well studied and defined by law enforcement professionals in both the FBI and Secret Service, among other agencies, and forensically oriented psychiatrists. These personalities tend to be white male loners with self-esteem problems—no surprises there—and functional paranoiacs. By this we mean that they operate under a highly organized or methodical delusional system that helps them explain their marginalized social standing or position in society. In Oswald’s case, this was further fed by the books he devoured on Marxist and socialist theory. They have trouble keeping jobs and feel they are not appreciated for their true talents. They tend to latch on to “causes” that lend them some higher purpose. And indeed, Oswald became the entire New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an offshoot of the New York-based organization to which Mailer early lent his name. If Oswald couldn’t be a socialist hero in a country like Russia, well past its days of revolutionary fervor, then he would become one for Cuba, still in the midst of its revolution and facing his other nemesis, the big, bad USA. Yet in almost all cases except for the rare, rock- ribbed true believer, the political component is merely window dressing to justify the rage and violent behavior and the unfairness that the target is a celebrity or important person, and the potential assassin is not. There is strong evidence, detailed by Gus Russo and Stephen Molton in their definitive 2008 book, ''Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder'', that both Marina and Lee identified heavily with Jack Kennedy. It is therefore reasonable to infer that one motivation for the murder was Oswald’s psychological need to control/destroy the thing he could never be, a key component, for example, in Mark David Chapman’s 1980 murder of John Lennon {{sfn|Douglas, Olshaker|1999|p=234-235}}. And like Chapman, Oswald was at least perceptive enough to understand what every would-be assassin understands: that the act, if successful, will twin him forever with the great or evil personage whose life he robs. And for most of these guys, that is sufficient reward in itself.

It is striking how many assassin types choose their targets for completely capricious reasons, or change their focus once the quest begins. Arthur Bremer, who gunned down and permanently paralyzed Alabama Governor George Wallace in Laurel, Maryland, during the 1972 Presidential primary season, had first set his sights on President Richard Nixon. When he found that the chief executive’s security was too tight, he settled for a more accessible nationally known figure. Likewise, Oswald first tried to assassinate local Texas right-winger and vociferous anti-communist General Edwin Walker and Oswald was despondent when the attempt got virtually no press coverage.

Assassins are often gun fetishists, another means of empowering an inadequate personality. Remember the image of Oswald posed in his backyard proudly, brandishing his Italian-made Mannlicher Carcano 6.5 bolt-action clip-fed rifle. Diaries are common, going back at least to the days of John Wilkes Booth, as witness Bremer and Robert Kennedy’s killer Sirhan B. Sirhan. And here again, Lee Oswald fits the bill. Mailer gives us a good flavor of the bland and poorly-written nature of the entries, peppered with the occasional vehement rant.

With regard to Oswald being involved in a larger effort, let me take the liberty of quoting myself in The Anatomy of Motive:

</blockquote>Oswald’s not the kind of person you’d bring into a conspiracy, even as a dupe, because you couldn’t trust him. If you’re an agent of some sort, you’re not going to try to develop someone like Oswald. He’s too unreliable, too unpredictable, too much of a flake. He’s got too many personal problems, plus he’s not that smart. I don’t believe that any secret cabal could have known enough about behavioral psychology back in 1963 to choose someone who so perfectly conformed to the lone assassin profile to be their front man. {{sfn|Douglas, Olshaker|1999|p=249}}</blockquote>

So the larger mystery, perhaps, is that there has been so much doubt all these years about the perpetration of the crime. Again, let us be straightforward: All evidence points to Lee Harvey Oswald having done the deed and having acted alone—personality, proximity, ballistics, you name it. I don’t expect to convince the hardcore doubters in an article of this length, but then neither have they been convinced by entire books that detail all of the compelling evidence and logic.

Could he possibly have accomplished the hit: a slowly moving target at 88 yards with benefit of a four-power scope? On a good day, certainly, as the Secret Service repeatedly demonstrated with their own tests and recreations. He was considered an average shot in the Marine Corps, but that still puts him far above the general population of shooters. And the oft-quoted 5.6- second window to get off the three shots is basically a made-up number whose background we need not deal with here. Even the so-called “magic bullet” of the ardent conspiratists has a logical explanation. Given how Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connolly were actually seated in the Lincoln limousine, it would have been a truly magic bullet if it had not struck Connolly. Mailer finally admits:
<blockquote>[E]ach bullet, and the wound it causes, has an inter-relationship as unique as a fingerprint or a signature .... By the logic of such an argument, the proof of the magic bullet is that it happened. One cannot introduce the odds after the fact. {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=777}}</blockquote> Or, as one veteran homicide investigator once told me, “Every bullet is a magic bullet.” Trying to predict its path and ultimate effect after firing verges into the realm of chaos theory.

This only underscores the hard truth that most public tragedies, whether we are speaking of a bridge collapse, the accidental death of a celebrity, or the murder of a head of state, result not from one large factor, but from a series of elements going unpredictably wrong. They are built on a tenuous string of contingency. Had not the wrought iron tie bars on the Tay Rail Bridge not been badly designed and poorly maintained, had not the wind-loading considerations been better understood, had not a heavy train been passing over just as a storm gust blew up, then seventy-five good Scottish souls would not have lost their lives in the Firth of Tay in December 1879. Had not Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed decided to leave the Ritz Hotel for his Paris apartment that night in August 1997, and had their inebriated driver not been trying to outrun the paparazzi, and had he not driven into that tunnel and swerved and had Diana been wearing a seat belt and had the French emergency services rushed her to the emergency room rather than trying to stabilize her on the scene and . . . well, we all get the picture. By the same token, had not the tubercular Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip not despaired of shooting Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand after his compatriots missed with their bomb that June day in 1914, causing the motorcade to change plans and Princip to go get himself a sandwich, and had he not emerged from Schiller’s Delicatessen just as the archduke’s car was turning around in front of him to correct an unpredictable wrong turn, then World War I might not have been triggered and the entire history of the twentieth century would have been unrecognizably different. Again, to quote from ''Anatomy'':

<blockquote>Any successful assassin has to get lucky. Oswald was lucky in many ways, among them that Kennedy directed that the clear bubble top not be placed on the presidential limousine. Another was that the president was wearing a brace for his bad back. Had he not been, he might have been thrown forward by the first bullet and out of the critical line of fire. It’s always a confluence of unrelated coincidences. {{sfn|Douglas, Olshaker|1999|p=249}}</blockquote>

Take into account the coincidence of Oswald being fired from a job he liked and securing a lesser position at the Texas School Book Depository and then, as Mailer quotes Priscilla Johnson McMillan:

<blockquote>[T]he uncanny selection of a route that would carry the President right under his window could mean only one thing. Fate has singled him out to do the dangerous but necessary task which had been his destiny all along which would cause him to go down in history. {{sfn|McMillian|1977|p=573}</blockquote>

If you add to that Oswald’s well-established frustrated romantic overtures on the night of November 21 to a wife who is no longer living with him and the anger and despair that might have engendered in an already angry and desperate individual, then you come to appreciate the kind of karmic capriciousness through which history often declares itself. This moment was Oswald’s one last desperate stab at “normal” life and love, and Marina rebuffed him. In Mailer’s universe, everyone is searching—vainly—for love, and if they don’t find it in one form, they’ll pursue it in another. As one per- son close to the investigation put it to me in a decidedly earthy syllogism, “If Oswald had gotten laid on Thursday night, JFK would have gotten laid on Friday night.”

And it is in scenes like the aforementioned Marina’s bedroom, despite the unredeemable shallowness of the character he has to work with, where Mailer is at his speculative literary and psychological best. After that unfortunate rejection, Mailer tells us:

<blockquote>Oswald has reached that zone of serenity that some men attain before combat, when anxiety is deep enough to feel like quiet exaltation: You are finally going into an action that will be equal in dimension to the importance of your life. {{sfn|Mailer|1995|p=666}}</blockquote>

As far as a conspiracy, anyone who has read ''Harlot’s Ghost'', Mailer’s wonderful and unruly—and incomplete—epic novel of the CIA, must suspect that he cannot be more than half serious about such a bureaucratic behemoth being able to keep such a monumental secret. As to other groups— Mafia, corporate cabals, whatever—I think that has been effectively addressed by Gerald Posner (among others) in his 1993 book ''Case Closed'', from which Mailer also liberally quotes. He didn’t have the benefit of Vincent Bugliosi’s exhaustively detailed book, ''Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy'', which essentially demolishes the conspiracy theories. He also didn’t have Gus Russo’s and Stephen Molton’s ''Brothers in Arms'', or Russo’s earlier work on the assassination, ''Live by the Sword'', though even if he had, I doubt they would have diverted Mailer from his course. At the beginning of Volume Two he writes:

<blockquote>Let me propose, then, that a mystery of the immense dimensions of Oswald’s case will, in the writing, create a form of its own somewhere between fiction and non-fiction.... The author’s musings become some of the operative instruments. Of course, speculation is often an invaluable resource of the novelist. The result can be seen, therefore, as a special species of non-fiction that can be put under the rubric of mystery. {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=353}}</blockquote>

Now, the terms “fiction” and “non-fiction” have certainly lost a large measure of their rigidity, at least since the publication of The Armies of the Night with its game-changing subtitle, History as a Novel/The Novel as History. It became, under Mailer’s alchemy, a completely elastic and protean description to be expropriated by a multitude of less talented writers for their own purposes. But with Oswald, even Mailer has to strain at the distinction in order to keep up a modicum of suspense regarding the central “mystery”; i.e., whether Oswald did it and whether anyone else was involved.

Mailer just can’t resist the temptation of the conspiracy theory—the better angel of any decent thriller novelist but a minefield for a non-fiction reporter. He indulges in all manner of wild speculation in an ongoing exercise that is akin to, and has roughly the same odds of success as, trying to prove who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Dragging in the possibility that Oswald was an FBI informer, for example, even though there is no evidence to sup- port it, is to cast the speculative net so wide that it loses any semblance of logic or appearance of serious investigation. We wade through a morass of “could haves,” “would haves” and “might haves” that go so far as to suggest Oswald’s homosexuality through the body position of a murdered fellow Marine that there is no evidence Oswald had anything to do with. I can imagine Mailer delighting at the very premise.

And, of course, the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby under the very noses of the Dallas Police makes the case for conspiracy all the more enticing. That, in large measure, is the X-factor that transforms the story and adds to the tragedy the added dimension of paranoia. To his credit, Mailer does spend a chapter of considerable length exploring this possibility—mainly that the Mafia put Jack up to it—before concluding, along with Gerald Posner, that it just doesn’t add up. There were just too many variables involved, many having to do with Ruby chancing to be at the right place at the right time, like Princip getting his sandwich just as the archduke’s open car was correcting its wrong turn.

In the end, Mailer is willing to conclude that Ruby acted out of a combination of genuine admiration for President Kennedy, compassion for Jackie and wanting to save her the trauma of an Oswald trial, and as a response to the vitriolic ad in the ''Dallas Morning News'' that had welcomed Kennedy to Dallas. That ad had been taken out by a Jewish member of the John Birch Society named Bernard Weissman and suggested that the president was a Communist supporter. Ruby was appalled when he saw the ad and fretted that it tarnished the entire Jewish community of Dallas. Mailer quotes Posner:

<blockquote>“If I had planned this I couldn’t have had my timing better,” [Ruby] bragged.“It was one chance in a million... I guess I just had to show the world that a Jew has guts.” {{sfn|Posner, Mailer |1993, 1995|p=396-97,757}}</blockquote>

Do these three sentiments make logical sense as a motive for shooting Oswald? Only within their own paranoid context. And that is just the point. Like Oswald, the down and out Ruby, on the verge of bankruptcy, was operating out of his own ethical/heroic fantasy. In fact, by the time Chief Justice Earl Warren goes to Dallas to interview him, Ruby’s Jewish persecution paranoia has reached the psychotic level {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=734-40}}

And recognizing a great factoid, a term Norman invented in 1972 {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=18}}, when he hears one, Mailer concludes the chapter citing Posner’s quoting of a close friend who testified that Ruby would never have left his beloved dog Sheba in his car “ ‘if he knew he was going to shoot Oswald and end up in jail’ ” {{sfn|Posner, Mailer |1993, 1995|p=392,758}}. Sometimes, as Freud noted, “A cigar is just a cigar.” And sometimes, ordinary, practical considerations trump overarching conspiracies.

What Mailer does show is that once the assassination had taken place, numerous parties, while not in command of the whole truth or the big picture, certainly had their own reasons to want to stop others from getting any of it, lest it lead to what they feared might be the rest of the truth. The pro- and anti-Castro elements, the mob, the Soviets, all feared some of their own people might have been close enough to the action to maybe be involved. And if that were found out, there would be hell to pay. On the other hand, certain factions thought they could benefit by association. Mailer brings up Mob Lawyer by Frank Ragano, Santo Trafficante’s attorney. Ragano makes “it clear that [New Orleans mob kingpin Carlos] Marcello and Trafficante certainly wanted [Teamsters Union boss and Robert Kennedy archenemy] Jimmy Hoffa to believe they were responsible for the act” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=741}}.

On one level, the great mystery at the center of the Oswald story is that there is any substantial mystery left at all. The evidence of this one man’s involvement in the assassination is overwhelming on every level, and there has never been a credible piece of evidence linking any other individual or group to the murder. As far as I am concerned, Gus Russo, at first singly and then ten years later with Stephen Molton, has answered the final important questions, based on newly-released documents, eyewitness interviews and meticulously gathered and triangulated research. By filling in such gaps as what Oswald was doing in Mexico City in September 1963 and whom he met with, Russo confirms what Mailer can only speculate—that Oswald did have contact with Cuban officials and that he did express his intent, “to kill that bastard! I’m going to kill Kennedy!” {{sfn|Russo, Molton |2008|p=310}}. Contrary to the official line and general perception, the Kennedy administration had not curtailed their attempts to kill Castro and overthrow his regime after the peaceful settlement of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. It is therefore far from surprising that Cuban intelligence would be sympathetic to anyone offering to return the favor.

But perhaps the most interesting part of Russo’s narrative is that the Cubans, who had been informed originally about Oswald by the Russian secret service organs when he quit the Soviet Union, essentially took the declaration in stride, wished him luck, and never took him very seriously. He was not the kind of guy you would pick or rely on to carry out a high-level hit. Although, according to Russo, they did give him assurances that if he did manage to pull off the operation, they would be there to rescue him and whisk him off to Cuba, which might explain Oswald’s declaration after capture that he was a “patsy.”

Russo and Molton suggest, and this very well might be the case, that the Warren Commission was purposely kept in the dark and steered away from such critical avenues of inquiry as the Cuban connection because new President Lyndon Johnson and other high government officials were deeply worried that any suggestion that Castro and Cuba were behind the assassination would lead to a public bloodlust for the overthrow of the regime, which in turn would lead to another nuclear stakes confrontation with the Russians. Having seen how narrowly World War III was avoided just 13 months before, and being one of the few people in the administration old enough to remember World War I and the living hell that Gavrilo Princip unwittingly unleashed on Europe, it was a chance Johnson was not willing to take. The result, unavoidably it seems, were the seeds of doubt that ultimately blossomed into full-blown distrust of the government and everything it undertook.

It is fascinating to note that this was an idea Mailer could easily wrap his mind around, and did so in the form of drama years before Russo collected the facts that could bear it out. For the April 1992 issue of ''Vanity Fair'', Mailer penned a mordant two-character drama entitled, “Earl and Lyndon: An Imaginary Conversation,” in which he had the ever-persuasive LBJ strong- arm Chief Justice Warren into accepting the commission chairmanship to assure the public’s faith in government integrity. Once he gets Warren’s assurance, Johnson outlines all the areas the commission is to stay away from.

It is this kind of literary agitprop and street theater that takes us back to the Norman Mailer of the 1960s, of ''The Armies of the Night'', W''hy Are We in Vietnam? and Miami and the Siege of Chicago'', and makes us remember why we wanted to rally around him. By the end of ''Oswald’s Tale'', it is as if he has added his own coda to the era. The time for bombast, for conspiracies and paranoia and the storming of the barricades is over. Now is the time for sober reflection of an era that seems long ago.

Those of us even marginally old enough to remember will recall that the election of JFK was supposed to launch the New Frontier of the hopeful 1960s. As it turned out, it was actually JFK’s death that launched the 1960s and we were soon waist-deep in the Big Muddy. As he had before and would do again in his long and prodigious career, Norman Mailer tried mightily to make sense out of those years with ''Oswald’s Tale''. But as he demonstrated so effectively in ''Harlot’s Ghost'', which he quotes from in Oswald to support some of his own theses, history is elusive, even to those who have lived it. For the rest, it can be all but unknowable.

Unfortunately, hanging the mantle of the age on the thin shoulders of Lee Harvey Oswald is not a cloak even a tailor as gifted as Mailer can cut to fit this demonstrably small and unheroic figure. Wife abuser—certainly. Patsy—newly revealed aspects of the Cuban connection might lead one to believe so. But little more. The kindest term we might use in relation to Oswald would be something on the order of pathetic.

“Every insight we have gained of him suggests the solitary nature of his act,” Mailer finally admits {{sfn|Mailer |1995|p=779}}.

Though it is painful to admit, the sad fact is that John F. Kennedy was killed by a no-count loser who becomes significant only in his perverse luck and once-in-his-life effectiveness in destroying our collective hopes and
dreams.
===CITATIONS===
{{Reflist|15em}}

===NOTES===
1. There is also a good discussion of this aspect of Jack Ruby’s personality in Gus Russo’s ''Live by the Sword'', page 499.
2. See Ragano and Raab, page 151, for further details.

===WORKS CITED===
{{Refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* {{cite book |last= Bugliosi|first= Vincent|date= 2007|title= ''Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy''|url= |location= New York|publisher=W.W. Norton & Company |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Douglas 2=Olshaker|first=John 2=Mark|date= 1999|title= “Shadow of a Gunman.”''The Anatomy of Motive''|url= |location= New York|publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Douglas 2=Olshaker|first=John 2=Mark|date= 1998|title= ''Obsession''|url= |location= New York|publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1968|title= ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel The Novel as History'' |url= |location= New York|publisher= The New American Library |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1992|title= “Earl and Lyndon: An Imaginary Conversation.” |url= |location= New York|publisher= Vanity Fair |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1991|title= ''Harlot’s Ghost'' |url= |location= New York|publisher=Random House |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1972|title= ''Marilyn'' |url= |location= New York|publisher=Grosset & Dunlap |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1995|title= ''Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery'' |url= |location= New York|publisher=Little Brown |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= McMillan|first= Priscilla Johnson|date= 1977|title= ''Marina and Lee'' |url= |location= New York|publisher= Harper & Row |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Posner|first= Gerald|date= 1993|title= ''Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK'' |url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Ragano 2=Rabb|first= Frank 2=Selwyn|date= 1994|title= ''Mob Lawyer'' |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner|pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Ricks |first= Christopher|date= 2008|title= “Norman Mailer: ''The Executioner’s Song."'' |url= |location= New York|publisher= ''The Mailer Review 2.1''|pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Russo 2=Stephen|first= Gus 2=Molton|date= 2008|title= ''Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder.''|url= |location= New York|publisher= Bloomsbury|pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= Gus|date= 1998|title= ''Live by the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK'' |url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= Bancroft Press|pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= United States|first= Warren Commission|date= 1964|title= ''Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination
of President John F. Kennedy'' |url= |location= Washington|publisher= GPO Press|pages= |ref=harv}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Crime of His Time

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JPridgeon: Created Inline Citations

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Crime of His Time

2021-06-28T01:49:07Z

JPridgeon: Finish Work Cited

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{{Byline|last=Olshaker|first=Mark |abstract=}}

{{dc|dc=S|O, COMES NOW NORMAN MAILER IN THE YEAR 1995,}} to the High Court of Public Opinion, as he inevitably must, to wrestle with the tantalizing and sublime mystery of Lee Harvey Oswald. His pleading is entitled, ''Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery''.

Could it be otherwise for the man who took it upon himself to chronicle and interpret the zeitgeist of the American 1960s than to light at last— thirty-two years after the fact—on the subject matter that, perhaps more than any other, determined the very nature of the zeitgeist? We are talking, of course, of that pinpoint moment, just before 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas when everything changed forever. It took some time for this reality to sink in, for the march of history to catch up with the moment, but once it did, it caught up with a holy vengeance; a vengeance of near biblical proportions. The perceived cover-ups of CIA involvement in the murder, of Mafia involvement, of shady corporation involvement, the performance of the ham-handed Warren Commission, the newfound skepticism of government motives, and a president who felt a need to finish what his predecessor had begun in Southeast Asia, all contributed toward blowing out the foundations upon which a generation was built and substituted the flimsiest of materials. Skepticism regarding the Warren Report became its own litmus test of intellectual seriousness.

But for the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the ascendancy of Lyn- don Baines Johnson, how different it all might have been, how different we all might have been—the Butterfly Effect redoubling on itself down through the decades.

I came in on the trailing edge of that generation: children of the 1960s who grew up idealistic enough to believe that anything was possible and cynical enough to believe that nothing was true. It is from that background that I come to this examination, as well as from my perspectives as a Mailer devotee, a novelist, a writer on true crime, criminal justice and behavioral profiling and, particularly, as one of the cohort who remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing upon hearing that President Kennedy had been shot. Each of these qualifications, of course, brings its own biases, for at this remove, the subject is its own cultural Rorschach test that cannot be approached with any reasonable claim to objectivity.

The word “Tale” in the title, it seems to me, is crucial to the understanding of what Mailer is trying to do with this book or, as some critics have suggested, two books: the first covering Oswald’s sojourn in the Soviet Union and the second his return to the United States. In fact, Mailer divides the work into two related “volumes.” Volume One is entitled, ''Oswald in Minsk with Marina; Volume Two, Oswald in America''. By relating the story of Lee Harvey Oswald’s adult life—where he went, what he did and who he met— Mailer hopes to shed light on the two critical questions that everyone has been asking since the day Oswald himself was gunned down in full view of the television public: Did he do it? And, if so, why?

Because the author is the most audacious literary gunslinger of the age, there is always the risk, the compulsive gambler’s instinct, to bet it all on each roll of the dice. As with his oft-expressed notion that sex is not complete, is not the total existential act, without the element of sin and guilt, so the literary adventure he sets for himself is meaningless without the very real possibility of failure. He has done it over and over again—to brilliant effect in ''The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song'', to cite but two examples, and not so successfully in a number of others. But one of the many factors that solidified my tremendous admiration for Mailer, the pappable sense of excitement in his work, was just that sense of risk; that good writers should never rest on their laurels or fall back on the thing that worked last time. Whatever new book or article came out with his name on it, I always knew Mailer would be leading with his chin.

And with this monumental examination of Oswald’s short and unhappy life, it is as if he has doubled down, knowing well the difficulties he has set for himself. Like a literary Shackleton advertising the perilousness of the mission, he undertakes this adventure with little professed hope of success, at least so far as the term is commonly used. In fact, after we have accompanied him for more than five hundred pages, he stops to point out, “It is worth remembering that in life, as in other mysteries, there are no answers, only questions, but part of the pleasure of intellection is to refine the question, or discover a new one” (Mailer 515–16).

Mailer, with his enterprising and resourceful sidekick Lawrence Schiller—who had previously put together the ''Executioner'' project— travelled to Russia and spent months revisiting Oswald’s haunts in Moscow and Minsk, interviewing numerous people with whom he had come in contact, and examining newly opened KGB files. Their research finds are impressive, virtually a day-to-day account of Oswald’s actions and of those in his orbit. We read about his relationship with the In tourist guides, his half-hearted suicide attempt when informed he couldn’t stay beyond his visa, his parsimonious and quotidian routine, his pursuit of women, and his eventual courtship and almost immediately troubled marriage to Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, a pretty and flirtatious pharmacy student. In truth, Mailer’s and Schiller’s most interesting finds cast greater light on Soviet- American relations during this phase of the Cold War than they do on Oswald personally.

One particularly striking revelation is the amount of attention the Soviet intelligence apparatus devoted to such a non-noteworthy expatriate as Oswald. Apparently, they just could not figure out why a young American ex-Marine would want to relocate to Russia, except to spy. So they went to elaborate lengths to bug him, tail him, get reports and debriefs about him, all to try to figure out his game. When he courted and married Marina, was that part of the CIA’s overall plan for planting Oswald in the midst of Soviet society? Verbatim KGB transcripts detail their moments of passionate love- making as well as their far more frequent passionate arguments and marital spats. Mailer quotes liberally from these transcripts.

But the conclusion the “Organs”—as the intelligence services were colloquially known—ultimately came to is that far from being a spy, Oswald was some poor, innocuous schlep who knew he was dissatisfied with his lot in life, but not much more. Dissatisfied with capitalism and its lack of place for him, he had dreamed of becoming part of the great socialist experiment that the Soviet Union represented. Once there, however, sent from Moscow to the Byelorussian city of Minsk and assigned to drudge work in a backwater radio factory, he realized that the vast, cold Russian collectivist bureaucracy offered no more than capitalism. So he petitioned to return to his native land, along with Marina and their baby, June Lee. Save for the addition of wife and child, the twenty-year-old, dyslexic, poorly-educated product of a weirdly dysfunctional family with an undistinguished Marine Corp stint behind him, left the Soviet Union as a twenty-two-year-old of roughly the same description.

And here, I fear, is the rub. As illuminating as it is on a general level, as intriguing as the “Russified” English style is that Mailer creates, as much as it provides fascinating insights into various Soviet types, the extended Russian section of ''Oswald’s Tale'' doesn’t have all that much to do with the character’s outcome or the crime for which he became infamous. After reading through all of this, we have to ask ourselves, had Oswald not spent these two years in the Soviet Union, might the story have turned out essentially the same? Even keeping in mind all of the vagaries of the Butterfly Effect, the answer, as Hamlet so succinctly put it, is, “Very like.”

Let us be plain here. While the material on Oswald’s life in Moscow and Minsk effectively portrays a slice of the grim, gray life in the 1950s-1960s Soviet Union, it is hardly determinative in its detail regarding its protagonist. Mailer can get away with things lesser writers cannot. If he wants to show off his voluminous research into Soviet life of the time through 315 densely packed pages, then by God and by Norman, he will, and blue pencils be damned.

For Volume Two, he took a somewhat different tack, explaining, “That gap of three decades [between the assassination and the opening up of Russian society, during which there was little public debate] which had been an asset in Minsk would prove a liability in America” (Mailer 351). Instead, he quotes extensively from other sources, rather than straight reportage, in coming up with his own interpretation of events and motives, most notably the twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission itself and Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s 1977 joint biography, ''Marina and Lee''. Mailer says,

<blockquote>An attempt to come to grips with the full twenty-four years of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life seems in order, then. We have an advantage, after all! What was previously the dry material of the Warren Commission Hearings takes on more life because of our knowledge of Oswald’s behavior in Minsk. (Mailer 352)</blockquote>

Mailer goes on, falling back on his once-characteristic third-person self-referencing:

This will hardly prove to be the limit of his task. The second volume is also, as advertised, replete with speculation. How else can one deal with the leading actor? After all, Oswald was a secret agent. There is no doubt about that. The only matter unsettled is whether he was working for any service larger than the power centers in the privacy of his mind. (352)

Fair enough, except for one nagging problem. To achieve this, to settle this “matter,” to justify devoting some 791 pages of text to “the question,” it is necessary to elevate Oswald the individual to the enormity of the crime. This, in effect, becomes the moral equivalent of conspiracy theory in that it tries to explain our national trauma and give it some dimension beyond merely the act of a deranged and inadequate loner.

That feeling of inadequacy, of course, is at the very heart of the defining act, as it almost always is. But for the moment, let us deal with the phenomenon of conspiracy theory itself, for certainly it is at the root of our collective obsession with the Kennedy murder and thus the motive cause for Mailer himself to embark upon this journey.

“So long as Oswald is a petty figure,” Mailer himself points out,
<blockquote>[A]lone twisted pathetic killer who happened to be in a position to kill a potentially great President, then, as has been argued earlier in this work, America is cursed with an absurdity. There was no logic to the event and no sense of balance in the universe. Historical absurdity (like the war in Vietnam) breeds social disease. (606)</blockquote>

Two paragraphs later he poses the central question:

<blockquote>Did Lee Harvey Oswald kill JFK, and if he did, was he a lone
gunman or a participant in a conspiracy? (606)</blockquote>

It is as if by redeeming Oswald as a man of deep and compelling character he can redeem all of us who have suffered for the crime. He nets it out even further in the next paragraph:

<blockquote>If a figure as large as Kennedy is cheated abruptly of his life, we feel better, inexplicably better, if his killer is also not without size. Then, to some degree, we can also mourn the loss of possibility in the man who did the deed. Tragedy is vastly preferable to absurdity. Such is the vested interest that adheres to perceiving Oswald as a tragic and infuriating hero (or, if you will, anti-hero) rather than as a snarling little wife abuser or a patsy.(607)</blockquote>

But that, in the end, is just what Oswald was. And what Mailer does manage to show us through both volumes of ''Oswald’s Tale'', I would suggest, is that this character who was unhappy with the American capitalist system, turned out to be equally unhappy with the Soviet socialist system, as he would have been with the Cuban revolution-oriented system, had he ultimately been allowed to emigrate there as he wished. And that is why Mailer cannot make ''Oswald’s Tale'' into ''The Executioner’s Song'', no matter how much effort, no matter how much detail he puts into it.

In preparing for this piece, I went back to the original reviews, which were decidedly mixed. What surprised me far more than the bundle of raves and brickbats that often greeted a Mailer work were the repeated descriptions of Oswald as “complex” and “deep.” Huh? What am I missing? I just don’t get it.
The portrait Mailer paints as Oswald’s own self-image is the typical one assassins project—of losers convinced of their own greatness and entitlement, who know they will be lauded by history for this great act that will put society back on the right track. The problem is that Oswald’s small and taw- dry life does not lend itself to large questions, as does Gary Gilmore’s equally sordid but more interesting and intellectually challenging existence. By insisting that the sentence of death handed down to him by a Utah jury and judge be carried out with all deliberate speed, Gilmore created high existential drama and challenged the basic integrity of our jurisprudential system and all of its related players. Oswald, on the other hand, remained a legitimate nobody until two days before his own untimely death and no effort of retroactively imposed moral gravitas can change that.

In his masterful essay on ''The Executioner’s Song'', Christopher Ricks extols Mailer for what we might call his negative capability: for not making any of the characters mouthpieces or surrogates for himself as author. But in ''Oswald’s Tale'', circumstances force him to do just the opposite and, if not become a mouthpiece, at least serve as an emotional sounding board for what Oswald may have been thinking and feeling. The problem is, the banal and often pathetic Oswald is not up to being a Mailerian hero.

In ''Executioner'', Mailer illuminates a man determined to fulfill the destiny of his damned soul. In ''Oswald'', he treats a man searching for his own exalted destiny within the milieus of the two superpowers he ultimately rejects. The word “soul” doesn’t come up much in any discussion of Lee Harvey Oswald. In ''Executioner'', every character plays his or her own unique and vital role. Since 1963, an army of assassination theorists has been trying to connect all the characters into some kind of coherent mosaic, without notable success.

So instead of a protagonist who interacts with and affects an entire cast of characters around him, what emerges is a near archetypal case study of a social misfit, a personality that is one of the prime building blocks of the assassin personality.

As former Special Agent and FBI behavioral profiling pioneer John Douglas and I outlined in our 1999 book, ''The Anatomy of Motive'' (215–250), this assassin personality has been well studied and defined by law enforcement professionals in both the FBI and Secret Service, among other agencies, and forensically oriented psychiatrists. These personalities tend to be white male loners with self-esteem problems—no surprises there—and functional paranoiacs. By this we mean that they operate under a highly organized or methodical delusional system that helps them explain their marginalized social standing or position in society. In Oswald’s case, this was further fed by the books he devoured on Marxist and socialist theory. They have trouble keeping jobs and feel they are not appreciated for their true talents. They tend to latch on to “causes” that lend them some higher purpose. And indeed, Oswald became the entire New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an offshoot of the New York-based organization to which Mailer early lent his name. If Oswald couldn’t be a socialist hero in a country like Russia, well past its days of revolutionary fervor, then he would become one for Cuba, still in the midst of its revolution and facing his other nemesis, the big, bad USA. Yet in almost all cases except for the rare, rock- ribbed true believer, the political component is merely window dressing to justify the rage and violent behavior and the unfairness that the target is a celebrity or important person, and the potential assassin is not. There is strong evidence, detailed by Gus Russo and Stephen Molton in their definitive 2008 book, ''Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder'', that both Marina and Lee identified heavily with Jack Kennedy. It is therefore reasonable to infer that one motivation for the murder was Oswald’s psychological need to control/destroy the thing he could never be, a key component, for example, in Mark David Chapman’s 1980 murder of John Lennon (Douglas and Olshaker, Obsession 234–235). And like Chapman, Oswald was at least perceptive enough to understand what every would-be assassin understands: that the act, if successful, will twin him forever with the great or evil personage whose life he robs. And for most of these guys, that is sufficient reward in itself.

It is striking how many assassin types choose their targets for completely capricious reasons, or change their focus once the quest begins. Arthur Bremer, who gunned down and permanently paralyzed Alabama Governor George Wallace in Laurel, Maryland, during the 1972 Presidential primary season, had first set his sights on President Richard Nixon. When he found that the chief executive’s security was too tight, he settled for a more accessible nationally known figure. Likewise, Oswald first tried to assassinate local Texas right-winger and vociferous anti-communist General Edwin Walker and Oswald was despondent when the attempt got virtually no press coverage.

Assassins are often gun fetishists, another means of empowering an inadequate personality. Remember the image of Oswald posed in his backyard proudly, brandishing his Italian-made Mannlicher Carcano 6.5 bolt-action clip-fed rifle. Diaries are common, going back at least to the days of John Wilkes Booth, as witness Bremer and Robert Kennedy’s killer Sirhan B. Sirhan. And here again, Lee Oswald fits the bill. Mailer gives us a good flavor of the bland and poorly-written nature of the entries, peppered with the occasional vehement rant.

With regard to Oswald being involved in a larger effort, let me take the liberty of quoting myself in The Anatomy of Motive:

</blockquote>Oswald’s not the kind of person you’d bring into a conspiracy, even as a dupe, because you couldn’t trust him. If you’re an agent of some sort, you’re not going to try to develop someone like Oswald. He’s too unreliable, too unpredictable, too much of a flake. He’s got too many personal problems, plus he’s not that smart. I don’t believe that any secret cabal could have known enough about behavioral psychology back in 1963 to choose someone who so perfectly conformed to the lone assassin profile to be their front man. (249)</blockquote>

So the larger mystery, perhaps, is that there has been so much doubt all these years about the perpetration of the crime. Again, let us be straightforward: All evidence points to Lee Harvey Oswald having done the deed and having acted alone—personality, proximity, ballistics, you name it. I don’t expect to convince the hardcore doubters in an article of this length, but then neither have they been convinced by entire books that detail all of the compelling evidence and logic.

Could he possibly have accomplished the hit: a slowly moving target at 88 yards with benefit of a four-power scope? On a good day, certainly, as the Secret Service repeatedly demonstrated with their own tests and recreations. He was considered an average shot in the Marine Corps, but that still puts him far above the general population of shooters. And the oft-quoted 5.6- second window to get off the three shots is basically a made-up number whose background we need not deal with here. Even the so-called “magic bullet” of the ardent conspiratists has a logical explanation. Given how Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connolly were actually seated in the Lincoln limousine, it would have been a truly magic bullet if it had not struck Connolly. Mailer finally admits:
<blockquote>[E]ach bullet, and the wound it causes, has an inter-relationship as unique as a fingerprint or a signature .... By the logic of such an argument, the proof of the magic bullet is that it happened. One cannot introduce the odds after the fact. (''Oswald’s Tale'' 777)</blockquote>
Or, as one veteran homicide investigator once told me, “Every bullet is a magic bullet.” Trying to predict its path and ultimate effect after firing verges into the realm of chaos theory.

This only underscores the hard truth that most public tragedies, whether we are speaking of a bridge collapse, the accidental death of a celebrity, or the murder of a head of state, result not from one large factor, but from a series of elements going unpredictably wrong. They are built on a tenuous string of contingency. Had not the wrought iron tie bars on the Tay Rail Bridge not been badly designed and poorly maintained, had not the wind-loading considerations been better understood, had not a heavy train been passing over just as a storm gust blew up, then seventy-five good Scottish souls would not have lost their lives in the Firth of Tay in December 1879. Had not Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed decided to leave the Ritz Hotel for his Paris apartment that night in August 1997, and had their inebriated driver not been trying to outrun the paparazzi, and had he not driven into that tunnel and swerved and had Diana been wearing a seat belt and had the French emergency services rushed her to the emergency room rather than trying to stabilize her on the scene and . . . well, we all get the picture. By the same token, had not the tubercular Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip not despaired of shooting Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand after his compatriots missed with their bomb that June day in 1914, causing the motorcade to change plans and Princip to go get himself a sandwich, and had he not emerged from Schiller’s Delicatessen just as the archduke’s car was turning around in front of him to correct an unpredictable wrong turn, then World War I might not have been triggered and the entire history of the twentieth century would have been unrecognizably different. Again, to quote from ''Anatomy'':

<blockquote>Any successful assassin has to get lucky. Oswald was lucky in many ways, among them that Kennedy directed that the clear bubble top not be placed on the presidential limousine. Another was that the president was wearing a brace for his bad back. Had he not been, he might have been thrown forward by the first bullet and out of the critical line of fire. It’s always a confluence of unrelated coincidences. (249)</blockquote>

Take into account the coincidence of Oswald being fired from a job he liked and securing a lesser position at the Texas School Book Depository and then, as Mailer quotes Priscilla Johnson McMillan:

<blockquote>[T]he uncanny selection of a route that would carry the President right under his window could mean only one thing. Fate has singled him out to do the dangerous but necessary task which had been his destiny all along which would cause him to go down in history. (McMillan 573; qtd. in Mailer, ''Oswald’s Tale'' 781) </blockquote>

If you add to that Oswald’s well-established frustrated romantic overtures on the night of November 21 to a wife who is no longer living with him and the anger and despair that might have engendered in an already angry and desperate individual, then you come to appreciate the kind of karmic capriciousness through which history often declares itself. This moment was Oswald’s one last desperate stab at “normal” life and love, and Marina rebuffed him. In Mailer’s universe, everyone is searching—vainly—for love, and if they don’t find it in one form, they’ll pursue it in another. As one per- son close to the investigation put it to me in a decidedly earthy syllogism, “If Oswald had gotten laid on Thursday night, JFK would have gotten laid on Friday night.”

And it is in scenes like the aforementioned Marina’s bedroom, despite the unredeemable shallowness of the character he has to work with, where Mailer is at his speculative literary and psychological best. After that unfortunate rejection, Mailer tells us:

<blockquote>Oswald has reached that zone of serenity that some men attain before combat, when anxiety is deep enough to feel like quiet exaltation: You are finally going into an action that will be equal in dimension to the importance of your life. (666)</blockquote>

As far as a conspiracy, anyone who has read ''Harlot’s Ghost'', Mailer’s wonderful and unruly—and incomplete—epic novel of the CIA, must suspect that he cannot be more than half serious about such a bureaucratic behemoth being able to keep such a monumental secret. As to other groups— Mafia, corporate cabals, whatever—I think that has been effectively addressed by Gerald Posner (among others) in his 1993 book ''Case Closed'', from which Mailer also liberally quotes. He didn’t have the benefit of Vincent Bugliosi’s exhaustively detailed book, ''Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy'', which essentially demolishes the conspiracy theories. He also didn’t have Gus Russo’s and Stephen Molton’s ''Brothers in Arms'', or Russo’s earlier work on the assassination, ''Live by the Sword'', though even if he had, I doubt they would have diverted Mailer from his course. At the beginning of Volume Two he writes:

<blockquote>Let me propose, then, that a mystery of the immense dimensions of Oswald’s case will, in the writing, create a form of its own somewhere between fiction and non-fiction.... The author’s musings become some of the operative instruments. Of course, speculation is often an invaluable resource of the novelist. The result can be seen, therefore, as a special species of non-fiction that can be put under the rubric of mystery. (353)</blockquote>

Now, the terms “fiction” and “non-fiction” have certainly lost a large measure of their rigidity, at least since the publication of The Armies of the Night with its game-changing subtitle, History as a Novel/The Novel as History. It became, under Mailer’s alchemy, a completely elastic and protean description to be expropriated by a multitude of less talented writers for their own purposes. But with Oswald, even Mailer has to strain at the distinction in order to keep up a modicum of suspense regarding the central “mystery”; i.e., whether Oswald did it and whether anyone else was involved.

Mailer just can’t resist the temptation of the conspiracy theory—the better angel of any decent thriller novelist but a minefield for a non-fiction reporter. He indulges in all manner of wild speculation in an ongoing exer- cise that is akin to, and has roughly the same odds of success as, trying to prove who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Dragging in the possibility that Oswald was an FBI informer, for example, even though there is no evidence to sup- port it, is to cast the speculative net so wide that it loses any semblance of logic or appearance of serious investigation. We wade through a morass of “could haves,” “would haves” and “might haves” that go so far as to suggest Oswald’s homosexuality through the body position of a murdered fellow Marine that there is no evidence Oswald had anything to do with. I can imagine Mailer delighting at the very premise.

And, of course, the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby under the very noses of the Dallas Police makes the case for conspiracy all the more enticing. That, in large measure, is the X-factor that transforms the story and adds to the tragedy the added dimension of paranoia. To his credit, Mailer does spend a chapter of considerable length exploring this possibility—mainly that the Mafia put Jack up to it—before concluding, along with Gerald Posner, that it just doesn’t add up. There were just too many variables involved, many having to do with Ruby chancing to be at the right place at the right time, like Princip getting his sandwich just as the archduke’s open car was correcting its wrong turn.

In the end, Mailer is willing to conclude that Ruby acted out of a combination of genuine admiration for President Kennedy, compassion for Jackie and wanting to save her the trauma of an Oswald trial, and as a response to the vitriolic ad in the ''Dallas Morning News'' that had welcomed Kennedy to Dallas. That ad had been taken out by a Jewish member of the John Birch Society named Bernard Weissman and suggested that the president was a Communist supporter. Ruby was appalled when he saw the ad and fretted that it tarnished the entire Jewish community of Dallas. Mailer quotes Posner:

<blockquote>“If I had planned this I couldn’t have had my timing better,” [Ruby] bragged.“It was one chance in a million... I guess I just had to show the world that a Jew has guts.” (Posner 396–97; qtd. in Mailer 757)</blockquote>

Do these three sentiments make logical sense as a motive for shooting Oswald? Only within their own paranoid context. And that is just the point. Like Oswald, the down and out Ruby, on the verge of bankruptcy, was operating out of his own ethical/heroic fantasy. In fact, by the time Chief Justice Earl Warren goes to Dallas to interview him, Ruby’s Jewish persecution paranoia has reached the psychotic level (734–40)

And recognizing a great factoid, a term Norman invented in 1972 (Marilyn 18), when he hears one, Mailer concludes the chapter citing Posner’s quoting of a close friend who testified that Ruby would never have left his beloved dog Sheba in his car “ ‘if he knew he was going to shoot Oswald and end up in jail’ ” (Posner 392; qtd. in Mailer, ''Oswald’s Tale'' 758). Sometimes, as Freud noted, “A cigar is just a cigar.” And sometimes, ordinary, practical considerations trump overarching conspiracies.

What Mailer does show is that once the assassination had taken place, numerous parties, while not in command of the whole truth or the big picture, certainly had their own reasons to want to stop others from getting any of it, lest it lead to what they feared might be the rest of the truth. The pro- and anti-Castro elements, the mob, the Soviets, all feared some of their own people might have been close enough to the action to maybe be involved. And if that were found out, there would be hell to pay. On the other hand, certain factions thought they could benefit by association. Mailer brings up Mob Lawyer by Frank Ragano, Santo Trafficante’s attorney. Ragano makes “it clear that [New Orleans mob kingpin Carlos] Marcello and Trafficante certainly wanted [Teamsters Union boss and Robert Kennedy archenemy] Jimmy Hoffa to believe they were responsible for the act” (Mailer 741)

On one level, the great mystery at the center of the Oswald story is that there is any substantial mystery left at all. The evidence of this one man’s involvement in the assassination is overwhelming on every level, and there has never been a credible piece of evidence linking any other individual or group to the murder. As far as I am concerned, Gus Russo, at first singly and then ten years later with Stephen Molton, has answered the final important questions, based on newly-released documents, eyewitness interviews and meticulously gathered and triangulated research. By filling in such gaps as what Oswald was doing in Mexico City in September 1963 and whom he met with, Russo confirms what Mailer can only speculate—that Oswald did have contact with Cuban officials and that he did express his intent, “to kill that bastard! I’m going to kill Kennedy!” (310). Contrary to the official line and general perception, the Kennedy administration had not curtailed their attempts to kill Castro and overthrow his regime after the peaceful settlement of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. It is therefore far from surprising that Cuban intelligence would be sympathetic to anyone offering to return the favor.

But perhaps the most interesting part of Russo’s narrative is that the Cubans, who had been informed originally about Oswald by the Russian secret service organs when he quit the Soviet Union, essentially took the declaration in stride, wished him luck, and never took him very seriously. He was not the kind of guy you would pick or rely on to carry out a high-level hit. Although, according to Russo, they did give him assurances that if he did manage to pull off the operation, they would be there to rescue him and whisk him off to Cuba, which might explain Oswald’s declaration after capture that he was a “patsy.”

Russo and Molton suggest, and this very well might be the case, that the Warren Commission was purposely kept in the dark and steered away from such critical avenues of inquiry as the Cuban connection because new President Lyndon Johnson and other high government officials were deeply worried that any suggestion that Castro and Cuba were behind the assassination would lead to a public bloodlust for the overthrow of the regime, which in turn would lead to another nuclear stakes confrontation with the Russians. Having seen how narrowly World War III was avoided just 13 months before, and being one of the few people in the administration old enough to remember World War I and the living hell that Gavrilo Princip unwittingly unleashed on Europe, it was a chance Johnson was not willing to take. The result, unavoidably it seems, were the seeds of doubt that ultimately blossomed into full-blown distrust of the government and everything it undertook.

It is fascinating to note that this was an idea Mailer could easily wrap his mind around, and did so in the form of drama years before Russo collected the facts that could bear it out. For the April 1992 issue of ''Vanity Fair'', Mailer penned a mordant two-character drama entitled, “Earl and Lyndon: An Imaginary Conversation,” in which he had the ever-persuasive LBJ strong- arm Chief Justice Warren into accepting the commission chairmanship to assure the public’s faith in government integrity. Once he gets Warren’s assurance, Johnson outlines all the areas the commission is to stay away from.

It is this kind of literary agitprop and street theater that takes us back to the Norman Mailer of the 1960s, of ''The Armies of the Night'', W''hy Are We in Vietnam? and Miami and the Siege of Chicago'', and makes us remember why we wanted to rally around him. By the end of ''Oswald’s Tale'', it is as if he has added his own coda to the era. The time for bombast, for conspiracies and paranoia and the storming of the barricades is over. Now is the time for sober reflection of an era that seems long ago.

Those of us even marginally old enough to remember will recall that the election of JFK was supposed to launch the New Frontier of the hopeful 1960s. As it turned out, it was actually JFK’s death that launched the 1960s and we were soon waist-deep in the Big Muddy. As he had before and would do again in his long and prodigious career, Norman Mailer tried mightily to make sense out of those years with ''Oswald’s Tale''. But as he demonstrated so effectively in ''Harlot’s Ghost'', which he quotes from in Oswald to support some of his own theses, history is elusive, even to those who have lived it. For the rest, it can be all but unknowable.

Unfortunately, hanging the mantle of the age on the thin shoulders of Lee Harvey Oswald is not a cloak even a tailor as gifted as Mailer can cut to fit this demonstrably small and unheroic figure. Wife abuser—certainly. Patsy—newly revealed aspects of the Cuban connection might lead one to believe so. But little more. The kindest term we might use in relation to Oswald would be something on the order of pathetic.

“Every insight we have gained of him suggests the solitary nature of his act,” Mailer finally admits (''Oswald’s Tale'' 779).

Though it is painful to admit, the sad fact is that John F. Kennedy was killed by a no-count loser who becomes significant only in his perverse luck and once-in-his-life effectiveness in destroying our collective hopes and
dreams.
===CITATIONS===
{{Reflist|15em}}

===NOTES===
1. There is also a good discussion of this aspect of Jack Ruby’s personality in Gus Russo’s ''Live by the Sword'', page 499.
2. See Ragano and Raab, page 151, for further details.

===WORKS CITED===
{{Refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* {{cite book |last= Bugliosi|first= Vincent|date= 2007|title= ''Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy''|url= |location= New York|publisher=W.W. Norton & Company |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Douglas 2=Olshaker|first=John 2=Mark|date= 1999|title= “Shadow of a Gunman.”''The Anatomy of Motive''|url= |location= New York|publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Douglas 2=Olshaker|first=John 2=Mark|date= 1998|title= ''Obsession''|url= |location= New York|publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1968|title= ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel The Novel as History'' |url= |location= New York|publisher= The New American Library |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1992|title= “Earl and Lyndon: An Imaginary Conversation.” |url= |location= New York|publisher= Vanity Fair |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1991|title= ''Harlot’s Ghost'' |url= |location= New York|publisher=Random House |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1972|title= ''Marilyn'' |url= |location= New York|publisher=Grosset & Dunlap |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1995|title= ''Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery'' |url= |location= New York|publisher=Little Brown |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= McMillan|first= Priscilla Johnson|date= 1977|title= ''Marina and Lee'' |url= |location= New York|publisher= Harper & Row |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Posner|first= Gerald|date= 1993|title= ''Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK'' |url= |location= New York|publisher= Random House |pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Ragano 2=Rabb|first= Frank 2=Selwyn|date= 1994|title= ''Mob Lawyer'' |url= |location= New York|publisher= Scribner|pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Ricks |first= Christopher|date= 2008|title= “Norman Mailer: ''The Executioner’s Song."'' |url= |location= New York|publisher= ''The Mailer Review 2.1''|pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Russo 2=Stephen|first= Gus 2=Molton|date= 2008|title= ''Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder.''|url= |location= New York|publisher= Bloomsbury|pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= Russo|first= Gus|date= 1998|title= ''Live by the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK'' |url= |location= Baltimore|publisher= Bancroft Press|pages= |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last= United States|first= Warren Commission|date= 1964|title= ''Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination
of President John F. Kennedy'' |url= |location= Washington|publisher= GPO Press|pages= |ref=harv}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Crime of His Time

2021-06-27T23:44:37Z

JPridgeon: Adjusting Spacing

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/''THE CRIME OF HIS TIME''}}
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{{Byline|last=Olshaker|first=Mark |abstract=}}

{{dc|dc=S|O, COMES NOW NORMAN MAILER IN THE YEAR 1995,}} to the High Court of Public Opinion, as he inevitably must, to wrestle with the tantalizing and sublime mystery of Lee Harvey Oswald. His pleading is entitled, ''Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery''.

Could it be otherwise for the man who took it upon himself to chronicle and interpret the zeitgeist of the American 1960s than to light at last— thirty-two years after the fact—on the subject matter that, perhaps more than any other, determined the very nature of the zeitgeist? We are talking, of course, of that pinpoint moment, just before 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas when everything changed forever. It took some time for this reality to sink in, for the march of history to catch up with the moment, but once it did, it caught up with a holy vengeance; a vengeance of near biblical proportions. The perceived cover-ups of CIA involvement in the murder, of Mafia involvement, of shady corporation involvement, the performance of the ham-handed Warren Commission, the newfound skepticism of government motives, and a president who felt a need to finish what his predecessor had begun in Southeast Asia, all contributed toward blowing out the foundations upon which a generation was built and substituted the flimsiest of materials. Skepticism regarding the Warren Report became its own litmus test of intellectual seriousness.

But for the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the ascendancy of Lyn- don Baines Johnson, how different it all might have been, how different we all might have been—the Butterfly Effect redoubling on itself down through the decades.

I came in on the trailing edge of that generation: children of the 1960s who grew up idealistic enough to believe that anything was possible and cynical enough to believe that nothing was true. It is from that background that I come to this examination, as well as from my perspectives as a Mailer devotee, a novelist, a writer on true crime, criminal justice and behavioral profiling and, particularly, as one of the cohort who remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing upon hearing that President Kennedy had been shot. Each of these qualifications, of course, brings its own biases, for at this remove, the subject is its own cultural Rorschach test that cannot be approached with any reasonable claim to objectivity.

The word “Tale” in the title, it seems to me, is crucial to the understanding of what Mailer is trying to do with this book or, as some critics have suggested, two books: the first covering Oswald’s sojourn in the Soviet Union and the second his return to the United States. In fact, Mailer divides the work into two related “volumes.” Volume One is entitled, ''Oswald in Minsk with Marina; Volume Two, Oswald in America''. By relating the story of Lee Harvey Oswald’s adult life—where he went, what he did and who he met— Mailer hopes to shed light on the two critical questions that everyone has been asking since the day Oswald himself was gunned down in full view of the television public: Did he do it? And, if so, why?

Because the author is the most audacious literary gunslinger of the age, there is always the risk, the compulsive gambler’s instinct, to bet it all on each roll of the dice. As with his oft-expressed notion that sex is not complete, is not the total existential act, without the element of sin and guilt, so the literary adventure he sets for himself is meaningless without the very real possibility of failure. He has done it over and over again—to brilliant effect in ''The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song'', to cite but two examples, and not so successfully in a number of others. But one of the many factors that solidified my tremendous admiration for Mailer, the pappable sense of excitement in his work, was just that sense of risk; that good writers should never rest on their laurels or fall back on the thing that worked last time. Whatever new book or article came out with his name on it, I always knew Mailer would be leading with his chin.

And with this monumental examination of Oswald’s short and unhappy life, it is as if he has doubled down, knowing well the difficulties he has set for himself. Like a literary Shackleton advertising the perilousness of the mission, he undertakes this adventure with little professed hope of success, at least so far as the term is commonly used. In fact, after we have accompanied him for more than five hundred pages, he stops to point out, “It is worth remembering that in life, as in other mysteries, there are no answers, only questions, but part of the pleasure of intellection is to refine the question, or discover a new one” (Mailer 515–16).

Mailer, with his enterprising and resourceful sidekick Lawrence Schiller—who had previously put together the ''Executioner'' project— travelled to Russia and spent months revisiting Oswald’s haunts in Moscow and Minsk, interviewing numerous people with whom he had come in contact, and examining newly opened KGB files. Their research finds are impressive, virtually a day-to-day account of Oswald’s actions and of those in his orbit. We read about his relationship with the In tourist guides, his half-hearted suicide attempt when informed he couldn’t stay beyond his visa, his parsimonious and quotidian routine, his pursuit of women, and his eventual courtship and almost immediately troubled marriage to Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, a pretty and flirtatious pharmacy student. In truth, Mailer’s and Schiller’s most interesting finds cast greater light on Soviet- American relations during this phase of the Cold War than they do on Oswald personally.

One particularly striking revelation is the amount of attention the Soviet intelligence apparatus devoted to such a non-noteworthy expatriate as Oswald. Apparently, they just could not figure out why a young American ex-Marine would want to relocate to Russia, except to spy. So they went to elaborate lengths to bug him, tail him, get reports and debriefs about him, all to try to figure out his game. When he courted and married Marina, was that part of the CIA’s overall plan for planting Oswald in the midst of Soviet society? Verbatim KGB transcripts detail their moments of passionate love- making as well as their far more frequent passionate arguments and marital spats. Mailer quotes liberally from these transcripts.

But the conclusion the “Organs”—as the intelligence services were colloquially known—ultimately came to is that far from being a spy, Oswald was some poor, innocuous schlep who knew he was dissatisfied with his lot in life, but not much more. Dissatisfied with capitalism and its lack of place for him, he had dreamed of becoming part of the great socialist experiment that the Soviet Union represented. Once there, however, sent from Moscow to the Byelorussian city of Minsk and assigned to drudge work in a backwater radio factory, he realized that the vast, cold Russian collectivist bureaucracy offered no more than capitalism. So he petitioned to return to his native land, along with Marina and their baby, June Lee. Save for the addition of wife and child, the twenty-year-old, dyslexic, poorly-educated product of a weirdly dysfunctional family with an undistinguished Marine Corp stint behind him, left the Soviet Union as a twenty-two-year-old of roughly the same description.

And here, I fear, is the rub. As illuminating as it is on a general level, as intriguing as the “Russified” English style is that Mailer creates, as much as it provides fascinating insights into various Soviet types, the extended Russian section of ''Oswald’s Tale'' doesn’t have all that much to do with the character’s outcome or the crime for which he became infamous. After reading through all of this, we have to ask ourselves, had Oswald not spent these two years in the Soviet Union, might the story have turned out essentially the same? Even keeping in mind all of the vagaries of the Butterfly Effect, the answer, as Hamlet so succinctly put it, is, “Very like.”

Let us be plain here. While the material on Oswald’s life in Moscow and Minsk effectively portrays a slice of the grim, gray life in the 1950s-1960s Soviet Union, it is hardly determinative in its detail regarding its protagonist. Mailer can get away with things lesser writers cannot. If he wants to show off his voluminous research into Soviet life of the time through 315 densely packed pages, then by God and by Norman, he will, and blue pencils be damned.

For Volume Two, he took a somewhat different tack, explaining, “That gap of three decades [between the assassination and the opening up of Russian society, during which there was little public debate] which had been an asset in Minsk would prove a liability in America” (Mailer 351). Instead, he quotes extensively from other sources, rather than straight reportage, in coming up with his own interpretation of events and motives, most notably the twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission itself and Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s 1977 joint biography, ''Marina and Lee''. Mailer says,

<blockquote>An attempt to come to grips with the full twenty-four years of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life seems in order, then. We have an advantage, after all! What was previously the dry material of the Warren Commission Hearings takes on more life because of our knowledge of Oswald’s behavior in Minsk. (Mailer 352)</blockquote>

Mailer goes on, falling back on his once-characteristic third-person self-referencing:

This will hardly prove to be the limit of his task. The second volume is also, as advertised, replete with speculation. How else can one deal with the leading actor? After all, Oswald was a secret agent. There is no doubt about that. The only matter unsettled is whether he was working for any service larger than the power centers in the privacy of his mind. (352)

Fair enough, except for one nagging problem. To achieve this, to settle this “matter,” to justify devoting some 791 pages of text to “the question,” it is necessary to elevate Oswald the individual to the enormity of the crime. This, in effect, becomes the moral equivalent of conspiracy theory in that it tries to explain our national trauma and give it some dimension beyond merely the act of a deranged and inadequate loner.

That feeling of inadequacy, of course, is at the very heart of the defining act, as it almost always is. But for the moment, let us deal with the phenomenon of conspiracy theory itself, for certainly it is at the root of our collective obsession with the Kennedy murder and thus the motive cause for Mailer himself to embark upon this journey.

“So long as Oswald is a petty figure,” Mailer himself points out,
<blockquote>[A]lone twisted pathetic killer who happened to be in a position to kill a potentially great President, then, as has been argued earlier in this work, America is cursed with an absurdity. There was no logic to the event and no sense of balance in the universe. Historical absurdity (like the war in Vietnam) breeds social disease. (606)</blockquote>

Two paragraphs later he poses the central question:

<blockquote>Did Lee Harvey Oswald kill JFK, and if he did, was he a lone
gunman or a participant in a conspiracy? (606)</blockquote>

It is as if by redeeming Oswald as a man of deep and compelling character he can redeem all of us who have suffered for the crime. He nets it out even further in the next paragraph:

<blockquote>If a figure as large as Kennedy is cheated abruptly of his life, we feel better, inexplicably better, if his killer is also not without size. Then, to some degree, we can also mourn the loss of possibility in the man who did the deed. Tragedy is vastly preferable to absurdity. Such is the vested interest that adheres to perceiving Oswald as a tragic and infuriating hero (or, if you will, anti-hero) rather than as a snarling little wife abuser or a patsy.(607)</blockquote>

But that, in the end, is just what Oswald was. And what Mailer does manage to show us through both volumes of ''Oswald’s Tale'', I would suggest, is that this character who was unhappy with the American capitalist system, turned out to be equally unhappy with the Soviet socialist system, as he would have been with the Cuban revolution-oriented system, had he ultimately been allowed to emigrate there as he wished. And that is why Mailer cannot make ''Oswald’s Tale'' into ''The Executioner’s Song'', no matter how much effort, no matter how much detail he puts into it.

In preparing for this piece, I went back to the original reviews, which were decidedly mixed. What surprised me far more than the bundle of raves and brickbats that often greeted a Mailer work were the repeated descriptions of Oswald as “complex” and “deep.” Huh? What am I missing? I just don’t get it.
The portrait Mailer paints as Oswald’s own self-image is the typical one assassins project—of losers convinced of their own greatness and entitlement, who know they will be lauded by history for this great act that will put society back on the right track. The problem is that Oswald’s small and taw- dry life does not lend itself to large questions, as does Gary Gilmore’s equally sordid but more interesting and intellectually challenging existence. By insisting that the sentence of death handed down to him by a Utah jury and judge be carried out with all deliberate speed, Gilmore created high existential drama and challenged the basic integrity of our jurisprudential system and all of its related players. Oswald, on the other hand, remained a legitimate nobody until two days before his own untimely death and no effort of retroactively imposed moral gravitas can change that.

In his masterful essay on ''The Executioner’s Song'', Christopher Ricks extols Mailer for what we might call his negative capability: for not making any of the characters mouthpieces or surrogates for himself as author. But in ''Oswald’s Tale'', circumstances force him to do just the opposite and, if not become a mouthpiece, at least serve as an emotional sounding board for what Oswald may have been thinking and feeling. The problem is, the banal and often pathetic Oswald is not up to being a Mailerian hero.

In ''Executioner'', Mailer illuminates a man determined to fulfill the destiny of his damned soul. In ''Oswald'', he treats a man searching for his own exalted destiny within the milieus of the two superpowers he ultimately rejects. The word “soul” doesn’t come up much in any discussion of Lee Harvey Oswald. In ''Executioner'', every character plays his or her own unique and vital role. Since 1963, an army of assassination theorists has been trying to connect all the characters into some kind of coherent mosaic, without notable success.

So instead of a protagonist who interacts with and affects an entire cast of characters around him, what emerges is a near archetypal case study of a social misfit, a personality that is one of the prime building blocks of the assassin personality.

As former Special Agent and FBI behavioral profiling pioneer John Douglas and I outlined in our 1999 book, ''The Anatomy of Motive'' (215–250), this assassin personality has been well studied and defined by law enforcement professionals in both the FBI and Secret Service, among other agencies, and forensically oriented psychiatrists. These personalities tend to be white male loners with self-esteem problems—no surprises there—and functional paranoiacs. By this we mean that they operate under a highly organized or methodical delusional system that helps them explain their marginalized social standing or position in society. In Oswald’s case, this was further fed by the books he devoured on Marxist and socialist theory. They have trouble keeping jobs and feel they are not appreciated for their true talents. They tend to latch on to “causes” that lend them some higher purpose. And indeed, Oswald became the entire New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an offshoot of the New York-based organization to which Mailer early lent his name. If Oswald couldn’t be a socialist hero in a country like Russia, well past its days of revolutionary fervor, then he would become one for Cuba, still in the midst of its revolution and facing his other nemesis, the big, bad USA. Yet in almost all cases except for the rare, rock- ribbed true believer, the political component is merely window dressing to justify the rage and violent behavior and the unfairness that the target is a celebrity or important person, and the potential assassin is not. There is strong evidence, detailed by Gus Russo and Stephen Molton in their definitive 2008 book, ''Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder'', that both Marina and Lee identified heavily with Jack Kennedy. It is therefore reasonable to infer that one motivation for the murder was Oswald’s psychological need to control/destroy the thing he could never be, a key component, for example, in Mark David Chapman’s 1980 murder of John Lennon (Douglas and Olshaker, Obsession 234–235). And like Chapman, Oswald was at least perceptive enough to understand what every would-be assassin understands: that the act, if successful, will twin him forever with the great or evil personage whose life he robs. And for most of these guys, that is sufficient reward in itself.

It is striking how many assassin types choose their targets for completely capricious reasons, or change their focus once the quest begins. Arthur Bremer, who gunned down and permanently paralyzed Alabama Governor George Wallace in Laurel, Maryland, during the 1972 Presidential primary season, had first set his sights on President Richard Nixon. When he found that the chief executive’s security was too tight, he settled for a more accessible nationally known figure. Likewise, Oswald first tried to assassinate local Texas right-winger and vociferous anti-communist General Edwin Walker and Oswald was despondent when the attempt got virtually no press coverage.

Assassins are often gun fetishists, another means of empowering an inadequate personality. Remember the image of Oswald posed in his backyard proudly, brandishing his Italian-made Mannlicher Carcano 6.5 bolt-action clip-fed rifle. Diaries are common, going back at least to the days of John Wilkes Booth, as witness Bremer and Robert Kennedy’s killer Sirhan B. Sirhan. And here again, Lee Oswald fits the bill. Mailer gives us a good flavor of the bland and poorly-written nature of the entries, peppered with the occasional vehement rant.

With regard to Oswald being involved in a larger effort, let me take the liberty of quoting myself in The Anatomy of Motive:

</blockquote>Oswald’s not the kind of person you’d bring into a conspiracy, even as a dupe, because you couldn’t trust him. If you’re an agent of some sort, you’re not going to try to develop someone like Oswald. He’s too unreliable, too unpredictable, too much of a flake. He’s got too many personal problems, plus he’s not that smart. I don’t believe that any secret cabal could have known enough about behavioral psychology back in 1963 to choose someone who so perfectly conformed to the lone assassin profile to be their front man. (249)</blockquote>

So the larger mystery, perhaps, is that there has been so much doubt all these years about the perpetration of the crime. Again, let us be straightforward: All evidence points to Lee Harvey Oswald having done the deed and having acted alone—personality, proximity, ballistics, you name it. I don’t expect to convince the hardcore doubters in an article of this length, but then neither have they been convinced by entire books that detail all of the compelling evidence and logic.

Could he possibly have accomplished the hit: a slowly moving target at 88 yards with benefit of a four-power scope? On a good day, certainly, as the Secret Service repeatedly demonstrated with their own tests and recreations. He was considered an average shot in the Marine Corps, but that still puts him far above the general population of shooters. And the oft-quoted 5.6- second window to get off the three shots is basically a made-up number whose background we need not deal with here. Even the so-called “magic bullet” of the ardent conspiratists has a logical explanation. Given how Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connolly were actually seated in the Lincoln limousine, it would have been a truly magic bullet if it had not struck Connolly. Mailer finally admits:
<blockquote>[E]ach bullet, and the wound it causes, has an inter-relationship as unique as a fingerprint or a signature .... By the logic of such an argument, the proof of the magic bullet is that it happened. One cannot introduce the odds after the fact. (''Oswald’s Tale'' 777)</blockquote>
Or, as one veteran homicide investigator once told me, “Every bullet is a magic bullet.” Trying to predict its path and ultimate effect after firing verges into the realm of chaos theory.

This only underscores the hard truth that most public tragedies, whether we are speaking of a bridge collapse, the accidental death of a celebrity, or the murder of a head of state, result not from one large factor, but from a series of elements going unpredictably wrong. They are built on a tenuous string of contingency. Had not the wrought iron tie bars on the Tay Rail Bridge not been badly designed and poorly maintained, had not the wind-loading considerations been better understood, had not a heavy train been passing over just as a storm gust blew up, then seventy-five good Scottish souls would not have lost their lives in the Firth of Tay in December 1879. Had not Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed decided to leave the Ritz Hotel for his Paris apartment that night in August 1997, and had their inebriated driver not been trying to outrun the paparazzi, and had he not driven into that tunnel and swerved and had Diana been wearing a seat belt and had the French emergency services rushed her to the emergency room rather than trying to stabilize her on the scene and . . . well, we all get the picture. By the same token, had not the tubercular Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip not despaired of shooting Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand after his compatriots missed with their bomb that June day in 1914, causing the motorcade to change plans and Princip to go get himself a sandwich, and had he not emerged from Schiller’s Delicatessen just as the archduke’s car was turning around in front of him to correct an unpredictable wrong turn, then World War I might not have been triggered and the entire history of the twentieth century would have been unrecognizably different. Again, to quote from ''Anatomy'':

<blockquote>Any successful assassin has to get lucky. Oswald was lucky in many ways, among them that Kennedy directed that the clear bubble top not be placed on the presidential limousine. Another was that the president was wearing a brace for his bad back. Had he not been, he might have been thrown forward by the first bullet and out of the critical line of fire. It’s always a confluence of unrelated coincidences. (249)</blockquote>

Take into account the coincidence of Oswald being fired from a job he liked and securing a lesser position at the Texas School Book Depository and then, as Mailer quotes Priscilla Johnson McMillan:

<blockquote>[T]he uncanny selection of a route that would carry the President right under his window could mean only one thing. Fate has singled him out to do the dangerous but necessary task which had been his destiny all along which would cause him to go down in history. (McMillan 573; qtd. in Mailer, ''Oswald’s Tale'' 781)

If you add to that Oswald’s well-established frustrated romantic overtures on the night of November 21 to a wife who is no longer living with him and the anger and despair that might have engendered in an already angry and desperate individual, then you come to appreciate the kind of karmic capriciousness through which history often declares itself. This moment was Oswald’s one last desperate stab at “normal” life and love, and Marina rebuffed him. In Mailer’s universe, everyone is searching—vainly—for love, and if they don’t find it in one form, they’ll pursue it in another. As one per- son close to the investigation put it to me in a decidedly earthy syllogism, “If Oswald had gotten laid on Thursday night, JFK would have gotten laid on Friday night.”

And it is in scenes like the aforementioned Marina’s bedroom, despite the unredeemable shallowness of the character he has to work with, where Mailer is at his speculative literary and psychological best. After that unfortunate rejection, Mailer tells us:

<blockquote>Oswald has reached that zone of serenity that some men attain before combat, when anxiety is deep enough to feel like quiet exaltation: You are finally going into an action that will be equal in dimension to the importance of your life. (666)</blockquote>

As far as a conspiracy, anyone who has read ''Harlot’s Ghost'', Mailer’s wonderful and unruly—and incomplete—epic novel of the CIA, must suspect that he cannot be more than half serious about such a bureaucratic behemoth being able to keep such a monumental secret. As to other groups— Mafia, corporate cabals, whatever—I think that has been effectively addressed by Gerald Posner (among others) in his 1993 book ''Case Closed'', from which Mailer also liberally quotes. He didn’t have the benefit of Vincent Bugliosi’s exhaustively detailed book, ''Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy'', which essentially demolishes the conspiracy theories. He also didn’t have Gus Russo’s and Stephen Molton’s ''Brothers in Arms'', or Russo’s earlier work on the assassination, ''Live by the Sword'', though even if he had, I doubt they would have diverted Mailer from his course. At the beginning of Volume Two he writes:

<blockquote>Let me propose, then, that a mystery of the immense dimensions of Oswald’s case will, in the writing, create a form of its own somewhere between fiction and non-fiction.... The author’s musings become some of the operative instruments. Of course, speculation is often an invaluable resource of the novelist. The result can be seen, therefore, as a special species of non-fiction that can be put under the rubric of mystery. (353)</blockquote>

Now, the terms “fiction” and “non-fiction” have certainly lost a large measure of their rigidity, at least since the publication of The Armies of the Night with its game-changing subtitle, History as a Novel/The Novel as History. It became, under Mailer’s alchemy, a completely elastic and protean description to be expropriated by a multitude of less talented writers for their own purposes. But with Oswald, even Mailer has to strain at the distinction in order to keep up a modicum of suspense regarding the central “mystery”; i.e., whether Oswald did it and whether anyone else was involved.

Mailer just can’t resist the temptation of the conspiracy theory—the better angel of any decent thriller novelist but a minefield for a non-fiction reporter. He indulges in all manner of wild speculation in an ongoing exer- cise that is akin to, and has roughly the same odds of success as, trying to prove who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Dragging in the possibility that Oswald was an FBI informer, for example, even though there is no evidence to sup- port it, is to cast the speculative net so wide that it loses any semblance of logic or appearance of serious investigation. We wade through a morass of “could haves,” “would haves” and “might haves” that go so far as to suggest Oswald’s homosexuality through the body position of a murdered fellow Marine that there is no evidence Oswald had anything to do with. I can imagine Mailer delighting at the very premise.

And, of course, the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby under the very noses of the Dallas Police makes the case for conspiracy all the more enticing. That, in large measure, is the X-factor that transforms the story and adds to the tragedy the added dimension of paranoia. To his credit, Mailer does spend a chapter of considerable length exploring this possibility—mainly that the Mafia put Jack up to it—before concluding, along with Gerald Posner, that it just doesn’t add up. There were just too many variables involved, many having to do with Ruby chancing to be at the right place at the right time, like Princip getting his sandwich just as the archduke’s open car was correcting its wrong turn.

In the end, Mailer is willing to conclude that Ruby acted out of a combination of genuine admiration for President Kennedy, compassion for Jackie and wanting to save her the trauma of an Oswald trial, and as a response to the vitriolic ad in the ''Dallas Morning News'' that had welcomed Kennedy to Dallas. That ad had been taken out by a Jewish member of the John Birch Society named Bernard Weissman and suggested that the president was a Communist supporter. Ruby was appalled when he saw the ad and fretted that it tarnished the entire Jewish community of Dallas. Mailer quotes Posner:

<blockquote>“If I had planned this I couldn’t have had my timing better,” [Ruby] bragged.“It was one chance in a million... I guess I just had to show the world that a Jew has guts.” (Posner 396–97; qtd. in Mailer 757)</blockquote>

Do these three sentiments make logical sense as a motive for shooting Oswald? Only within their own paranoid context. And that is just the point. Like Oswald, the down and out Ruby, on the verge of bankruptcy, was operating out of his own ethical/heroic fantasy. In fact, by the time Chief Justice Earl Warren goes to Dallas to interview him, Ruby’s Jewish persecution paranoia has reached the psychotic level (734–40)

And recognizing a great factoid, a term Norman invented in 1972 (Marilyn 18), when he hears one, Mailer concludes the chapter citing Posner’s quoting of a close friend who testified that Ruby would never have left his beloved dog Sheba in his car “ ‘if he knew he was going to shoot Oswald and end up in jail’ ” (Posner 392; qtd. in Mailer, ''Oswald’s Tale'' 758). Sometimes, as Freud noted, “A cigar is just a cigar.” And sometimes, ordinary, practical considerations trump overarching conspiracies.

What Mailer does show is that once the assassination had taken place, numerous parties, while not in command of the whole truth or the big picture, certainly had their own reasons to want to stop others from getting any of it, lest it lead to what they feared might be the rest of the truth. The pro- and anti-Castro elements, the mob, the Soviets, all feared some of their own people might have been close enough to the action to maybe be involved. And if that were found out, there would be hell to pay. On the other hand, certain factions thought they could benefit by association. Mailer brings up Mob Lawyer by Frank Ragano, Santo Trafficante’s attorney. Ragano makes “it clear that [New Orleans mob kingpin Carlos] Marcello and Trafficante certainly wanted [Teamsters Union boss and Robert Kennedy archenemy] Jimmy Hoffa to believe they were responsible for the act” (Mailer 741)

On one level, the great mystery at the center of the Oswald story is that there is any substantial mystery left at all. The evidence of this one man’s involvement in the assassination is overwhelming on every level, and there has never been a credible piece of evidence linking any other individual or group to the murder. As far as I am concerned, Gus Russo, at first singly and then ten years later with Stephen Molton, has answered the final important questions, based on newly-released documents, eyewitness interviews and meticulously gathered and triangulated research. By filling in such gaps as what Oswald was doing in Mexico City in September 1963 and whom he met with, Russo confirms what Mailer can only speculate—that Oswald did have contact with Cuban officials and that he did express his intent, “to kill that bastard! I’m going to kill Kennedy!” (310). Contrary to the official line and general perception, the Kennedy administration had not curtailed their attempts to kill Castro and overthrow his regime after the peaceful settlement of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. It is therefore far from surprising that Cuban intelligence would be sympathetic to anyone offering to return the favor.

But perhaps the most interesting part of Russo’s narrative is that the Cubans, who had been informed originally about Oswald by the Russian secret service organs when he quit the Soviet Union, essentially took the declaration in stride, wished him luck, and never took him very seriously. He was not the kind of guy you would pick or rely on to carry out a high-level hit. Although, according to Russo, they did give him assurances that if he did manage to pull off the operation, they would be there to rescue him and whisk him off to Cuba, which might explain Oswald’s declaration after capture that he was a “patsy.”

Russo and Molton suggest, and this very well might be the case, that the Warren Commission was purposely kept in the dark and steered away from such critical avenues of inquiry as the Cuban connection because new President Lyndon Johnson and other high government officials were deeply worried that any suggestion that Castro and Cuba were behind the assassination would lead to a public bloodlust for the overthrow of the regime, which in turn would lead to another nuclear stakes confrontation with the Russians. Having seen how narrowly World War III was avoided just 13 months before, and being one of the few people in the administration old enough to remember World War I and the living hell that Gavrilo Princip unwittingly unleashed on Europe, it was a chance Johnson was not willing to take. The result, unavoidably it seems, were the seeds of doubt that ultimately blossomed into full-blown distrust of the government and everything it undertook.

It is fascinating to note that this was an idea Mailer could easily wrap his mind around, and did so in the form of drama years before Russo collected the facts that could bear it out. For the April 1992 issue of ''Vanity Fair'', Mailer penned a mordant two-character drama entitled, “Earl and Lyndon: An Imaginary Conversation,” in which he had the ever-persuasive LBJ strong- arm Chief Justice Warren into accepting the commission chairmanship to assure the public’s faith in government integrity. Once he gets Warren’s assurance, Johnson outlines all the areas the commission is to stay away from.

It is this kind of literary agitprop and street theater that takes us back to the Norman Mailer of the 1960s, of ''The Armies of the Night'', W''hy Are We in Vietnam? and Miami and the Siege of Chicago'', and makes us remember why we wanted to rally around him. By the end of ''Oswald’s Tale'', it is as if he has added his own coda to the era. The time for bombast, for conspiracies and paranoia and the storming of the barricades is over. Now is the time for sober reflection of an era that seems long ago.

Those of us even marginally old enough to remember will recall that the election of JFK was supposed to launch the New Frontier of the hopeful 1960s. As it turned out, it was actually JFK’s death that launched the 1960s and we were soon waist-deep in the Big Muddy. As he had before and would do again in his long and prodigious career, Norman Mailer tried mightily to make sense out of those years with ''Oswald’s Tale''. But as he demonstrated so effectively in ''Harlot’s Ghost'', which he quotes from in Oswald to support some of his own theses, history is elusive, even to those who have lived it. For the rest, it can be all but unknowable.

Unfortunately, hanging the mantle of the age on the thin shoulders of Lee Harvey Oswald is not a cloak even a tailor as gifted as Mailer can cut to fit this demonstrably small and unheroic figure. Wife abuser—certainly. Patsy—newly revealed aspects of the Cuban connection might lead one to believe so. But little more. The kindest term we might use in relation to Oswald would be something on the order of pathetic.

“Every insight we have gained of him suggests the solitary nature of his act,” Mailer finally admits (''Oswald’s Tale'' 779).

Though it is painful to admit, the sad fact is that John F. Kennedy was killed by a no-count loser who becomes significant only in his perverse luck and once-in-his-life effectiveness in destroying our collective hopes and
dreams.

===NOTES===
1. There is also a good discussion of this aspect of Jack Ruby’s personality in Gus Russo’s ''Live by the Sword'', page 499.
2. See Ragano and Raab, page 151, for further details.

===WORKS CITED===

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Crime of His Time

2021-06-27T23:38:02Z

JPridgeon: Creating the Article

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{{dc|dc=S|O, COMES NOW NORMAN MAILER IN THE YEAR 1995,}} to the High Court of Public Opinion, as he inevitably must, to wrestle with the tantalizing and sublime mystery of Lee Harvey Oswald. His pleading is entitled, ''Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery''.
Could it be otherwise for the man who took it upon himself to chronicle and interpret the zeitgeist of the American 1960s than to light at last— thirty-two years after the fact—on the subject matter that, perhaps more than any other, determined the very nature of the zeitgeist? We are talking, of course, of that pinpoint moment, just before 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas when everything changed forever. It took some time for this reality to sink in, for the march of history to catch up with the moment, but once it did, it caught up with a holy vengeance; a vengeance of near biblical proportions. The perceived cover-ups of CIA involvement in the murder, of Mafia involvement, of shady corporation involvement, the performance of the ham-handed Warren Commission, the newfound skepticism of government motives, and a president who felt a need to finish what his predecessor had begun in Southeast Asia, all contributed toward blowing out the foundations upon which a generation was built and substituted the flimsiest of materials. Skepticism regarding the Warren Report became its own litmus test of intellectual seriousness.
But for the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the ascendancy of Lyn- don Baines Johnson, how different it all might have been, how different we all might have been—the Butterfly Effect redoubling on itself down through the decades.
I came in on the trailing edge of that generation: children of the 1960s who grew up idealistic enough to believe that anything was possible and cynical enough to believe that nothing was true. It is from that background that I come to this examination, as well as from my perspectives as a Mailer devotee, a novelist, a writer on true crime, criminal justice and behavioral profiling and, particularly, as one of the cohort who remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing upon hearing that President Kennedy had been shot. Each of these qualifications, of course, brings its own biases, for at this remove, the subject is its own cultural Rorschach test that cannot be approached with any reasonable claim to objectivity.

The word “Tale” in the title, it seems to me, is crucial to the understanding of what Mailer is trying to do with this book or, as some critics have suggested, two books: the first covering Oswald’s sojourn in the Soviet Union and the second his return to the United States. In fact, Mailer divides the work into two related “volumes.” Volume One is entitled, ''Oswald in Minsk with Marina; Volume Two, Oswald in America''. By relating the story of Lee Harvey Oswald’s adult life—where he went, what he did and who he met— Mailer hopes to shed light on the two critical questions that everyone has been asking since the day Oswald himself was gunned down in full view of the television public: Did he do it? And, if so, why?

Because the author is the most audacious literary gunslinger of the age, there is always the risk, the compulsive gambler’s instinct, to bet it all on each roll of the dice. As with his oft-expressed notion that sex is not complete, is not the total existential act, without the element of sin and guilt, so the literary adventure he sets for himself is meaningless without the very real possibility of failure. He has done it over and over again—to brilliant effect in ''The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song'', to cite but two examples, and not so successfully in a number of others. But one of the many factors that solidified my tremendous admiration for Mailer, the pappable sense of excitement in his work, was just that sense of risk; that good writers should never rest on their laurels or fall back on the thing that worked last time. Whatever new book or article came out with his name on it, I always knew Mailer would be leading with his chin.

And with this monumental examination of Oswald’s short and unhappy life, it is as if he has doubled down, knowing well the difficulties he has set for himself. Like a literary Shackleton advertising the perilousness of the mission, he undertakes this adventure with little professed hope of success, at least so far as the term is commonly used. In fact, after we have accompanied him for more than five hundred pages, he stops to point out, “It is worth remembering that in life, as in other mysteries, there are no answers, only questions, but part of the pleasure of intellection is to refine the question, or discover a new one” (Mailer 515–16).

Mailer, with his enterprising and resourceful sidekick Lawrence Schiller—who had previously put together the ''Executioner'' project— travelled to Russia and spent months revisiting Oswald’s haunts in Moscow and Minsk, interviewing numerous people with whom he had come in contact, and examining newly opened KGB files. Their research finds are impressive, virtually a day-to-day account of Oswald’s actions and of those in his orbit. We read about his relationship with the In tourist guides, his half-hearted suicide attempt when informed he couldn’t stay beyond his visa, his parsimonious and quotidian routine, his pursuit of women, and his eventual courtship and almost immediately troubled marriage to Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, a pretty and flirtatious pharmacy student. In truth, Mailer’s and Schiller’s most interesting finds cast greater light on Soviet- American relations during this phase of the Cold War than they do on Oswald personally.

One particularly striking revelation is the amount of attention the Soviet intelligence apparatus devoted to such a non-noteworthy expatriate as Oswald. Apparently, they just could not figure out why a young American ex-Marine would want to relocate to Russia, except to spy. So they went to elaborate lengths to bug him, tail him, get reports and debriefs about him, all to try to figure out his game. When he courted and married Marina, was that part of the CIA’s overall plan for planting Oswald in the midst of Soviet society? Verbatim KGB transcripts detail their moments of passionate love- making as well as their far more frequent passionate arguments and marital spats. Mailer quotes liberally from these transcripts.

But the conclusion the “Organs”—as the intelligence services were colloquially known—ultimately came to is that far from being a spy, Oswald was some poor, innocuous schlep who knew he was dissatisfied with his lot in life, but not much more. Dissatisfied with capitalism and its lack of place for him, he had dreamed of becoming part of the great socialist experiment that the Soviet Union represented. Once there, however, sent from Moscow to the Byelorussian city of Minsk and assigned to drudge work in a backwater radio factory, he realized that the vast, cold Russian collectivist bureaucracy offered no more than capitalism. So he petitioned to return to his native land, along with Marina and their baby, June Lee. Save for the addition of wife and child, the twenty-year-old, dyslexic, poorly-educated product of a weirdly dysfunctional family with an undistinguished Marine Corp stint behind him, left the Soviet Union as a twenty-two-year-old of roughly the same description.

And here, I fear, is the rub. As illuminating as it is on a general level, as intriguing as the “Russified” English style is that Mailer creates, as much as it provides fascinating insights into various Soviet types, the extended Russian section of ''Oswald’s Tale'' doesn’t have all that much to do with the character’s outcome or the crime for which he became infamous. After reading through all of this, we have to ask ourselves, had Oswald not spent these two years in the Soviet Union, might the story have turned out essentially the same? Even keeping in mind all of the vagaries of the Butterfly Effect, the answer, as Hamlet so succinctly put it, is, “Very like.”

Let us be plain here. While the material on Oswald’s life in Moscow and Minsk effectively portrays a slice of the grim, gray life in the 1950s-1960s Soviet Union, it is hardly determinative in its detail regarding its protagonist. Mailer can get away with things lesser writers cannot. If he wants to show off his voluminous research into Soviet life of the time through 315 densely packed pages, then by God and by Norman, he will, and blue pencils be damned.
For Volume Two, he took a somewhat different tack, explaining, “That gap of three decades [between the assassination and the opening up of Russian society, during which there was little public debate] which had been an asset in Minsk would prove a liability in America” (Mailer 351). Instead, he quotes extensively from other sources, rather than straight reportage, in coming up with his own interpretation of events and motives, most notably the twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission itself and Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s 1977 joint biography, ''Marina and Lee''. Mailer says,

<blockquote>An attempt to come to grips with the full twenty-four years of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life seems in order, then. We have an advantage, after all! What was previously the dry material of the Warren Commission Hearings takes on more life because of our knowledge of Oswald’s behavior in Minsk. (Mailer 352)</blockquote>

Mailer goes on, falling back on his once-characteristic third-person self-referencing:

This will hardly prove to be the limit of his task. The second volume is also, as advertised, replete with speculation. How else can one deal with the leading actor? After all, Oswald was a secret agent. There is no doubt about that. The only matter unsettled is whether he was working for any service larger than the power centers in the privacy of his mind. (352)

Fair enough, except for one nagging problem. To achieve this, to settle this “matter,” to justify devoting some 791 pages of text to “the question,” it is necessary to elevate Oswald the individual to the enormity of the crime. This, in effect, becomes the moral equivalent of conspiracy theory in that it tries to explain our national trauma and give it some dimension beyond merely the act of a deranged and inadequate loner.

That feeling of inadequacy, of course, is at the very heart of the defining act, as it almost always is. But for the moment, let us deal with the phenomenon of conspiracy theory itself, for certainly it is at the root of our collective obsession with the Kennedy murder and thus the motive cause for Mailer himself to embark upon this journey.

“So long as Oswald is a petty figure,” Mailer himself points out,
<blockquote>[A]lone twisted pathetic killer who happened to be in a position to kill a potentially great President, then, as has been argued earlier in this work, America is cursed with an absurdity. There was no logic to the event and no sense of balance in the universe. Historical absurdity (like the war in Vietnam) breeds social disease. (606)</blockquote>

Two paragraphs later he poses the central question:

<blockquote>Did Lee Harvey Oswald kill JFK, and if he did, was he a lone
gunman or a participant in a conspiracy? (606)</blockquote>

It is as if by redeeming Oswald as a man of deep and compelling character he can redeem all of us who have suffered for the crime. He nets it out even further in the next paragraph:
<blockquote>If a figure as large as Kennedy is cheated abruptly of his life, we feel better, inexplicably better, if his killer is also not without size. Then, to some degree, we can also mourn the loss of possibility in the man who did the deed. Tragedy is vastly preferable to absurdity. Such is the vested interest that adheres to perceiving Oswald as a tragic and infuriating hero (or, if you will, anti-hero) rather than as a snarling little wife abuser or a patsy.(607)</blockquote>

But that, in the end, is just what Oswald was. And what Mailer does manage to show us through both volumes of ''Oswald’s Tale'', I would suggest, is that this character who was unhappy with the American capitalist system, turned out to be equally unhappy with the Soviet socialist system, as he would have been with the Cuban revolution-oriented system, had he ultimately been allowed to emigrate there as he wished. And that is why Mailer cannot make ''Oswald’s Tale'' into ''The Executioner’s Song'', no matter how much effort, no matter how much detail he puts into it.

In preparing for this piece, I went back to the original reviews, which were decidedly mixed. What surprised me far more than the bundle of raves and brickbats that often greeted a Mailer work were the repeated descriptions of Oswald as “complex” and “deep.” Huh? What am I missing? I just don’t get it.
The portrait Mailer paints as Oswald’s own self-image is the typical one assassins project—of losers convinced of their own greatness and entitlement, who know they will be lauded by history for this great act that will put society back on the right track. The problem is that Oswald’s small and taw- dry life does not lend itself to large questions, as does Gary Gilmore’s equally sordid but more interesting and intellectually challenging existence. By insisting that the sentence of death handed down to him by a Utah jury and judge be carried out with all deliberate speed, Gilmore created high existential drama and challenged the basic integrity of our jurisprudential system and all of its related players. Oswald, on the other hand, remained a legitimate nobody until two days before his own untimely death and no effort of retroactively imposed moral gravitas can change that.

In his masterful essay on ''The Executioner’s Song'', Christopher Ricks extols Mailer for what we might call his negative capability: for not making any of the characters mouthpieces or surrogates for himself as author. But in ''Oswald’s Tale'', circumstances force him to do just the opposite and, if not become a mouthpiece, at least serve as an emotional sounding board for what Oswald may have been thinking and feeling. The problem is, the banal and often pathetic Oswald is not up to being a Mailerian hero.

In ''Executioner'', Mailer illuminates a man determined to fulfill the destiny of his damned soul. In ''Oswald'', he treats a man searching for his own exalted destiny within the milieus of the two superpowers he ultimately rejects. The word “soul” doesn’t come up much in any discussion of Lee Harvey Oswald. In ''Executioner'', every character plays his or her own unique and vital role. Since 1963, an army of assassination theorists has been trying to connect all the characters into some kind of coherent mosaic, without notable success.

So instead of a protagonist who interacts with and affects an entire cast of characters around him, what emerges is a near archetypal case study of a social misfit, a personality that is one of the prime building blocks of the assassin personality.

As former Special Agent and FBI behavioral profiling pioneer John Douglas and I outlined in our 1999 book, ''The Anatomy of Motive'' (215–250), this assassin personality has been well studied and defined by law enforcement professionals in both the FBI and Secret Service, among other agencies, and forensically oriented psychiatrists. These personalities tend to be white male loners with self-esteem problems—no surprises there—and functional paranoiacs. By this we mean that they operate under a highly organized or methodical delusional system that helps them explain their marginalized social standing or position in society. In Oswald’s case, this was further fed by the books he devoured on Marxist and socialist theory. They have trouble keeping jobs and feel they are not appreciated for their true talents. They tend to latch on to “causes” that lend them some higher purpose. And indeed, Oswald became the entire New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an offshoot of the New York-based organization to which Mailer early lent his name. If Oswald couldn’t be a socialist hero in a country like Russia, well past its days of revolutionary fervor, then he would become one for Cuba, still in the midst of its revolution and facing his other nemesis, the big, bad USA. Yet in almost all cases except for the rare, rock- ribbed true believer, the political component is merely window dressing to justify the rage and violent behavior and the unfairness that the target is a celebrity or important person, and the potential assassin is not. There is strong evidence, detailed by Gus Russo and Stephen Molton in their definitive 2008 book, ''Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder'', that both Marina and Lee identified heavily with Jack Kennedy. It is therefore reasonable to infer that one motivation for the murder was Oswald’s psychological need to control/destroy the thing he could never be, a key component, for example, in Mark David Chapman’s 1980 murder of John Lennon (Douglas and Olshaker, Obsession 234–235). And like Chapman, Oswald was at least perceptive enough to understand what every would-be assassin understands: that the act, if successful, will twin him forever with the great or evil personage whose life he robs. And for most of these guys, that is sufficient reward in itself.

It is striking how many assassin types choose their targets for completely capricious reasons, or change their focus once the quest begins. Arthur Bremer, who gunned down and permanently paralyzed Alabama Governor George Wallace in Laurel, Maryland, during the 1972 Presidential primary season, had first set his sights on President Richard Nixon. When he found that the chief executive’s security was too tight, he settled for a more accessible nationally known figure. Likewise, Oswald first tried to assassinate local Texas right-winger and vociferous anti-communist General Edwin Walker and Oswald was despondent when the attempt got virtually no press coverage.

Assassins are often gun fetishists, another means of empowering an inadequate personality. Remember the image of Oswald posed in his backyard proudly, brandishing his Italian-made Mannlicher Carcano 6.5 bolt-action clip-fed rifle. Diaries are common, going back at least to the days of John Wilkes Booth, as witness Bremer and Robert Kennedy’s killer Sirhan B. Sirhan. And here again, Lee Oswald fits the bill. Mailer gives us a good flavor of the bland and poorly-written nature of the entries, peppered with the occasional vehement rant.

With regard to Oswald being involved in a larger effort, let me take the liberty of quoting myself in The Anatomy of Motive:

</blockquote>Oswald’s not the kind of person you’d bring into a conspiracy, even as a dupe, because you couldn’t trust him. If you’re an agent of some sort, you’re not going to try to develop someone like Oswald. He’s too unreliable, too unpredictable, too much of a flake. He’s got too many personal problems, plus he’s not that smart. I don’t believe that any secret cabal could have known enough about behavioral psychology back in 1963 to choose someone who so perfectly conformed to the lone assassin profile to be their front man. (249)</blockquote>

So the larger mystery, perhaps, is that there has been so much doubt all these years about the perpetration of the crime. Again, let us be straightforward: All evidence points to Lee Harvey Oswald having done the deed and having acted alone—personality, proximity, ballistics, you name it. I don’t expect to convince the hardcore doubters in an article of this length, but then neither have they been convinced by entire books that detail all of the compelling evidence and logic.

Could he possibly have accomplished the hit: a slowly moving target at 88 yards with benefit of a four-power scope? On a good day, certainly, as the Secret Service repeatedly demonstrated with their own tests and recreations. He was considered an average shot in the Marine Corps, but that still puts him far above the general population of shooters. And the oft-quoted 5.6- second window to get off the three shots is basically a made-up number whose background we need not deal with here. Even the so-called “magic bullet” of the ardent conspiratists has a logical explanation. Given how Kennedy and Texas Governor John Connolly were actually seated in the Lincoln limousine, it would have been a truly magic bullet if it had not struck Connolly. Mailer finally admits:
<blockquote>[E]ach bullet, and the wound it causes, has an inter-relationship as unique as a fingerprint or a signature .... By the logic of such an argument, the proof of the magic bullet is that it happened. One cannot introduce the odds after the fact. (''Oswald’s Tale'' 777)</blockquote>
Or, as one veteran homicide investigator once told me, “Every bullet is a magic bullet.” Trying to predict its path and ultimate effect after firing verges into the realm of chaos theory.

This only underscores the hard truth that most public tragedies, whether we are speaking of a bridge collapse, the accidental death of a celebrity, or the murder of a head of state, result not from one large factor, but from a series of elements going unpredictably wrong. They are built on a tenuous string of contingency. Had not the wrought iron tie bars on the Tay Rail Bridge not been badly designed and poorly maintained, had not the wind-loading considerations been better understood, had not a heavy train been passing over just as a storm gust blew up, then seventy-five good Scottish souls would not have lost their lives in the Firth of Tay in December 1879. Had not Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed decided to leave the Ritz Hotel for his Paris apartment that night in August 1997, and had their inebriated driver not been trying to outrun the paparazzi, and had he not driven into that tunnel and swerved and had Diana been wearing a seat belt and had the French emergency services rushed her to the emergency room rather than trying to stabilize her on the scene and . . . well, we all get the picture. By the same token, had not the tubercular Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip not despaired of shooting Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand after his compatriots missed with their bomb that June day in 1914, causing the motorcade to change plans and Princip to go get himself a sandwich, and had he not emerged from Schiller’s Delicatessen just as the archduke’s car was turning around in front of him to correct an unpredictable wrong turn, then World War I might not have been triggered and the entire history of the twentieth century would have been unrecognizably different. Again, to quote from ''Anatomy'':

<blockquote>Any successful assassin has to get lucky. Oswald was lucky in many ways, among them that Kennedy directed that the clear bubble top not be placed on the presidential limousine. Another was that the president was wearing a brace for his bad back. Had he not been, he might have been thrown forward by the first bullet and out of the critical line of fire. It’s always a confluence of unrelated coincidences. (249)</blockquote>

Take into account the coincidence of Oswald being fired from a job he liked and securing a lesser position at the Texas School Book Depository and then, as Mailer quotes Priscilla Johnson McMillan:

<blockquote>[T]he uncanny selection of a route that would carry the President right under his window could mean only one thing. Fate has singled him out to do the dangerous but necessary task which had been his destiny all along which would cause him to go down in history. (McMillan 573; qtd. in Mailer, ''Oswald’s Tale'' 781)

If you add to that Oswald’s well-established frustrated romantic overtures on the night of November 21 to a wife who is no longer living with him and the anger and despair that might have engendered in an already angry and desperate individual, then you come to appreciate the kind of karmic capriciousness through which history often declares itself. This moment was Oswald’s one last desperate stab at “normal” life and love, and Marina rebuffed him. In Mailer’s universe, everyone is searching—vainly—for love, and if they don’t find it in one form, they’ll pursue it in another. As one per- son close to the investigation put it to me in a decidedly earthy syllogism, “If Oswald had gotten laid on Thursday night, JFK would have gotten laid on Friday night.”

And it is in scenes like the aforementioned Marina’s bedroom, despite the unredeemable shallowness of the character he has to work with, where Mailer is at his speculative literary and psychological best. After that unfortunate rejection, Mailer tells us:

<blockquote>Oswald has reached that zone of serenity that some men attain before combat, when anxiety is deep enough to feel like quiet exaltation: You are finally going into an action that will be equal in dimension to the importance of your life. (666)</blockquote>

As far as a conspiracy, anyone who has read ''Harlot’s Ghost'', Mailer’s wonderful and unruly—and incomplete—epic novel of the CIA, must suspect that he cannot be more than half serious about such a bureaucratic behemoth being able to keep such a monumental secret. As to other groups— Mafia, corporate cabals, whatever—I think that has been effectively addressed by Gerald Posner (among others) in his 1993 book ''Case Closed'', from which Mailer also liberally quotes. He didn’t have the benefit of Vincent Bugliosi’s exhaustively detailed book, ''Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy'', which essentially demolishes the conspiracy theories. He also didn’t have Gus Russo’s and Stephen Molton’s ''Brothers in Arms'', or Russo’s earlier work on the assassination, ''Live by the Sword'', though even if he had, I doubt they would have diverted Mailer from his course. At the beginning of Volume Two he writes:

<blockquote>Let me propose, then, that a mystery of the immense dimensions of Oswald’s case will, in the writing, create a form of its own somewhere between fiction and non-fiction.... The author’s musings become some of the operative instruments. Of course, speculation is often an invaluable resource of the novelist. The result can be seen, therefore, as a special species of non-fiction that can be put under the rubric of mystery. (353)</blockquote>

Now, the terms “fiction” and “non-fiction” have certainly lost a large measure of their rigidity, at least since the publication of The Armies of the Night with its game-changing subtitle, History as a Novel/The Novel as History. It became, under Mailer’s alchemy, a completely elastic and protean description to be expropriated by a multitude of less talented writers for their own purposes. But with Oswald, even Mailer has to strain at the distinction in order to keep up a modicum of suspense regarding the central “mystery”; i.e., whether Oswald did it and whether anyone else was involved.

Mailer just can’t resist the temptation of the conspiracy theory—the better angel of any decent thriller novelist but a minefield for a non-fiction reporter. He indulges in all manner of wild speculation in an ongoing exer- cise that is akin to, and has roughly the same odds of success as, trying to prove who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Dragging in the possibility that Oswald was an FBI informer, for example, even though there is no evidence to sup- port it, is to cast the speculative net so wide that it loses any semblance of logic or appearance of serious investigation. We wade through a morass of “could haves,” “would haves” and “might haves” that go so far as to suggest Oswald’s homosexuality through the body position of a murdered fellow Marine that there is no evidence Oswald had anything to do with. I can imagine Mailer delighting at the very premise.

And, of course, the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby under the very noses of the Dallas Police makes the case for conspiracy all the more enticing. That, in large measure, is the X-factor that transforms the story and adds to the tragedy the added dimension of paranoia. To his credit, Mailer does spend a chapter of considerable length exploring this possibility—mainly that the Mafia put Jack up to it—before concluding, along with Gerald Posner, that it just doesn’t add up. There were just too many variables involved, many having to do with Ruby chancing to be at the right place at the right time, like Princip getting his sandwich just as the archduke’s open car was correcting its wrong turn.

In the end, Mailer is willing to conclude that Ruby acted out of a combination of genuine admiration for President Kennedy, compassion for Jackie and wanting to save her the trauma of an Oswald trial, and as a response to the vitriolic ad in the ''Dallas Morning News'' that had welcomed Kennedy to Dallas. That ad had been taken out by a Jewish member of the John Birch Society named Bernard Weissman and suggested that the president was a Communist supporter. Ruby was appalled when he saw the ad and fretted that it tarnished the entire Jewish community of Dallas. Mailer quotes Posner:

<blockquote>“If I had planned this I couldn’t have had my timing better,” [Ruby] bragged.“It was one chance in a million... I guess I just had to show the world that a Jew has guts.” (Posner 396–97; qtd. in Mailer 757)</blockquote>

Do these three sentiments make logical sense as a motive for shooting Oswald? Only within their own paranoid context. And that is just the point. Like Oswald, the down and out Ruby, on the verge of bankruptcy, was operating out of his own ethical/heroic fantasy. In fact, by the time Chief Justice Earl Warren goes to Dallas to interview him, Ruby’s Jewish persecution paranoia has reached the psychotic level (734–40)

And recognizing a great factoid, a term Norman invented in 1972 (Marilyn 18), when he hears one, Mailer concludes the chapter citing Posner’s quoting of a close friend who testified that Ruby would never have left his beloved dog Sheba in his car “ ‘if he knew he was going to shoot Oswald and end up in jail’ ” (Posner 392; qtd. in Mailer, ''Oswald’s Tale'' 758). Sometimes, as Freud noted, “A cigar is just a cigar.” And sometimes, ordinary, practical considerations trump overarching conspiracies.

What Mailer does show is that once the assassination had taken place, numerous parties, while not in command of the whole truth or the big picture, certainly had their own reasons to want to stop others from getting any of it, lest it lead to what they feared might be the rest of the truth. The pro- and anti-Castro elements, the mob, the Soviets, all feared some of their own people might have been close enough to the action to maybe be involved. And if that were found out, there would be hell to pay. On the other hand, certain factions thought they could benefit by association. Mailer brings up Mob Lawyer by Frank Ragano, Santo Trafficante’s attorney. Ragano makes “it clear that [New Orleans mob kingpin Carlos] Marcello and Trafficante certainly wanted [Teamsters Union boss and Robert Kennedy archenemy] Jimmy Hoffa to believe they were responsible for the act” (Mailer 741)

On one level, the great mystery at the center of the Oswald story is that there is any substantial mystery left at all. The evidence of this one man’s involvement in the assassination is overwhelming on every level, and there has never been a credible piece of evidence linking any other individual or group to the murder. As far as I am concerned, Gus Russo, at first singly and then ten years later with Stephen Molton, has answered the final important questions, based on newly-released documents, eyewitness interviews and meticulously gathered and triangulated research. By filling in such gaps as what Oswald was doing in Mexico City in September 1963 and whom he met with, Russo confirms what Mailer can only speculate—that Oswald did have contact with Cuban officials and that he did express his intent, “to kill that bastard! I’m going to kill Kennedy!” (310). Contrary to the official line and general perception, the Kennedy administration had not curtailed their attempts to kill Castro and overthrow his regime after the peaceful settlement of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. It is therefore far from surprising that Cuban intelligence would be sympathetic to anyone offering to return the favor.

But perhaps the most interesting part of Russo’s narrative is that the Cubans, who had been informed originally about Oswald by the Russian secret service organs when he quit the Soviet Union, essentially took the declaration in stride, wished him luck, and never took him very seriously. He was not the kind of guy you would pick or rely on to carry out a high-level hit. Although, according to Russo, they did give him assurances that if he did manage to pull off the operation, they would be there to rescue him and whisk him off to Cuba, which might explain Oswald’s declaration after capture that he was a “patsy.”
Russo and Molton suggest, and this very well might be the case, that the Warren Commission was purposely kept in the dark and steered away from such critical avenues of inquiry as the Cuban connection because new President Lyndon Johnson and other high government officials were deeply worried that any suggestion that Castro and Cuba were behind the assassination would lead to a public bloodlust for the overthrow of the regime, which in turn would lead to another nuclear stakes confrontation with the Russians. Having seen how narrowly World War III was avoided just 13 months before, and being one of the few people in the administration old enough to remember World War I and the living hell that Gavrilo Princip unwittingly unleashed on Europe, it was a chance Johnson was not willing to take. The result, unavoidably it seems, were the seeds of doubt that ultimately blossomed into full-blown distrust of the government and everything it undertook.

It is fascinating to note that this was an idea Mailer could easily wrap his mind around, and did so in the form of drama years before Russo collected the facts that could bear it out. For the April 1992 issue of ''Vanity Fair'', Mailer penned a mordant two-character drama entitled, “Earl and Lyndon: An Imaginary Conversation,” in which he had the ever-persuasive LBJ strong- arm Chief Justice Warren into accepting the commission chairmanship to assure the public’s faith in government integrity. Once he gets Warren’s assurance, Johnson outlines all the areas the commission is to stay away from.

It is this kind of literary agitprop and street theater that takes us back to the Norman Mailer of the 1960s, of ''The Armies of the Night'', W''hy Are We in Vietnam? and Miami and the Siege of Chicago'', and makes us remember why we wanted to rally around him. By the end of ''Oswald’s Tale'', it is as if he has added his own coda to the era. The time for bombast, for conspiracies and paranoia and the storming of the barricades is over. Now is the time for sober reflection of an era that seems long ago.

Those of us even marginally old enough to remember will recall that the election of JFK was supposed to launch the New Frontier of the hopeful 1960s. As it turned out, it was actually JFK’s death that launched the 1960s and we were soon waist-deep in the Big Muddy. As he had before and would do again in his long and prodigious career, Norman Mailer tried mightily to make sense out of those years with ''Oswald’s Tale''. But as he demonstrated so effectively in ''Harlot’s Ghost'', which he quotes from in Oswald to support some of his own theses, history is elusive, even to those who have lived it. For the rest, it can be all but unknowable.

Unfortunately, hanging the mantle of the age on the thin shoulders of Lee Harvey Oswald is not a cloak even a tailor as gifted as Mailer can cut to fit this demonstrably small and unheroic figure. Wife abuser—certainly. Patsy—newly revealed aspects of the Cuban connection might lead one to believe so. But little more. The kindest term we might use in relation to Oswald would be something on the order of pathetic.

“Every insight we have gained of him suggests the solitary nature of his act,” Mailer finally admits (''Oswald’s Tale'' 779).

Though it is painful to admit, the sad fact is that John F. Kennedy was killed by a no-count loser who becomes significant only in his perverse luck and once-in-his-life effectiveness in destroying our collective hopes and
dreams.

===NOTES===
1. There is also a good discussion of this aspect of Jack Ruby’s personality in Gus Russo’s ''Live by the Sword'', page 499.
2. See Ragano and Raab, page 151, for further details.

===WORKS CITED===

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

2021-06-27T21:15:18Z

JPridgeon: Fixing source mistake

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{{Byline|last=Mosser |first=Jason |abstract=How does Norman Mailer define the terms “novel” and “history” in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer
configures all three genres in remarkably original ways.| url=https://prmlr.us/mr03mos }}

{{dc|dc=I|n ''The Armies of the Night''}}, Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,” “denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another.”{{sfn|Smith|2003|p=191}} How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

{{quote|[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed.{{sfn|Lennon|2006|p=97}} }}

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form''.{{sfn|Burke|1974|pp=138–164}} Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “to ''get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning.”{{sfn|Burke|1974|pp=147–48}} Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:
{{quote|[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision.{{sfn|Burke|1974|p=148}} }}

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” {{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|p=148}}. By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=236}}. Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

<blockquote>[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)</blockquote>

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=243-4}}

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” {{sfn|Gutman|1975|p=162}}. Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=86}}. Mailer says that
<blockquote>the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=281}})</blockquote>

History, Mailer says, is “interior” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=281}}, indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=130}}. Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=65}}. He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” {{sfn|Smith|2003|p=187}}. Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” {{sfn|Hellmann|1981|p=37}}. Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=66}}. Mailer says that

<blockquote>if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History.{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=66}}</blockquote>

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=65}}, Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=20}}: no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=273}}. Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself {{sfn|Gutman|1975|p=167}}. Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=48}}. The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” {{sfn|Trachtenburg|1968|p=701}}. Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. {{sfn|Bufithis|1978|p=94}}

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=280}}. He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=281}}. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=284}}. The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=284}}. “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=284}}. The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=285}}. Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=299-305}}. Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=304}}. Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=306}}.

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

<blockquote>Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)</blockquote>

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

<blockquote>Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.</blockquote>

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” {{sfn|Hollowell|1977|p=100}}(100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=101}}, but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

<blockquote>Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. {{sfn|Gutman|1975|p=171}}</blockquote>

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” {{sfn|Schroeder|1992|p=104-05}}. In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” {{sfn|Berthoff|1971|p=327}}, but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

===Citations===
{{Reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* {{cite book |last= Adams|first= Laura|date= 1976|title= ''Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Athens:Ohio|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Bakhtin|first= M.M.|date= 1981|title= ''The Dialogic Imagination''|url= |location= Austin: U of Texas P,|publisher= Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Berthoff|first= Warner|date= 1971|title= “Witness and Testament: Two Contemporary Classics.” ''New Literary History 2''|url= |location= |publisher= |pages= 311-27|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Bufithis|first= Philip H.|date= 1978|title= ''Norman Mailer''|url= |location= New York|publisher= Frederick Ungar, Modern Literature Monographs|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Burke|first= Kenneth|date= 1974|title= "The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. 3rd ed."|url= |location= Berkeley: U of California P|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Chomsky last 2= S. Herman|first= Noam first 2= Edward|date= 1988|title= "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media"|url= |location= New York|publisher= Pantheon Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Gutman|first= Stanley T.|date= 1975|title= ''Mankind in Barbary: The Individual and Society in the Novels of Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Hanover: UP of New England|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hellmann|first= John|date= 1981|title= ''Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction''|url= |location= Urbana: U of Illinois P|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hollowell|first= John|date= 1977|title= ''Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel''|url= |location= Chapel Hill:U of North Carolina P|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Lennon|first= Michael J.|date= 2006|title= Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian?” ''Journal of Modern Literature 30.1''|url= |location= |publisher= |pages= 91-103|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1968|title= ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History''|url= |location= New York: New American Library|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Schroeder|first= Eric James|date= 1992|title= “Norman Mailer: The Hubris of the American Dream.” "Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers"|url= |location= Westport, CT|publisher= Praeger|pages= 91-105|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Smith|first= Kathy|date= 2003|title= “Norman Mailer and the Radical Text.” ''Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Philadelphia: Chelsea House|publisher= Ed. Harold Bloom, Bloom’s Modern Critical Views|pages= 181-196|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Trachtenberg |first=Alan |date=May 27, 1968 |title=Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon |url= |magazine=The Nation |pages=701–702 |access-date= |ref=harv }} Rev. of ''The Armies of the Night'', by Norman Mailer.

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

2021-06-27T21:12:09Z

JPridgeon: Fixing Sources

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/Genre-Bending in ''The Armies of the Night''}}
{{Working}}
{{MR03}}
{{Byline|last=Mosser |first=Jason |abstract=How does Norman Mailer define the terms “novel” and “history” in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer
configures all three genres in remarkably original ways.| url=https://prmlr.us/mr03mos }}

{{dc|dc=I|n ''The Armies of the Night''}}, Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,” “denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another.”{{sfn|Smith|2003|p=191}} How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

{{quote|[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed.{{sfn|Lennon|2006|p=97}} }}

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form''.{{sfn|Burke|1974|pp=138–164}} Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “to ''get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning.”{{sfn|Burke|1974|pp=147–48}} Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:
{{quote|[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision.{{sfn|Burke|1974|p=148}} }}

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” {{sfn|Bakhtin|1981|p=148}}. By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=236}}. Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

<blockquote>[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)</blockquote>

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=243-4}}

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” {{sfn|Gutman|1975|p=162}}. Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=86}}. Mailer says that
<blockquote>the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=281}})</blockquote>

History, Mailer says, is “interior” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=281}}, indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” {{sfn|Adams|1976|p=130}}. Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=65}}. He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” {{sfn|Smith|2003|p=187}}(187). Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” {{sfn|Hellmann|1981|p=37}}. Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=66}}. Mailer says that

<blockquote>if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History.{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=66}}</blockquote>

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=65}}, Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=20}}: no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=273}}. Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself {{sfn|Gutman|1975|p=167}}. Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=48}}. The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” {{sfn|Trachtenburg|1968|p=701}}. Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. {{sfn|Bufithis|1978|p=94}}

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=280}}. He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=281}}. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=284}}. The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=284}}. “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=284}}. The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=285}}. Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=66}}(299–305). Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says ({{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=304}}. Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=306}}.

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

<blockquote>Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)</blockquote>

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

<blockquote>Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.</blockquote>

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” {{sfn|Hollowell|1977|p=100}}(100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=101}}, but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

<blockquote>Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. {{sfn|Gutman|1975|p=171}}</blockquote>

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” {{sfn|Schroeder|1992|p=104-05}}. In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” {{sfn|Berthoff|1971|p=327}}, but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

===Citations===
{{Reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* {{cite book |last= Adams|first= Laura|date= 1976|title= ''Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Athens:Ohio|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Bakhtin|first= M.M.|date= 1981|title= ''The Dialogic Imagination''|url= |location= Austin: U of Texas P,|publisher= Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Berthoff|first= Warner|date= 1971|title= “Witness and Testament: Two Contemporary Classics.” ''New Literary History 2''|url= |location= |publisher= |pages= 311-27|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Bufithis|first= Philip H.|date= 1978|title= ''Norman Mailer''|url= |location= New York|publisher= Frederick Ungar, Modern Literature Monographs|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Burke|first= Kenneth|date= 1974|title= "The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. 3rd ed."|url= |location= Berkeley: U of California P|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Chomsky last 2= S. Herman|first= Noam first 2= Edward|date= 1988|title= "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media"|url= |location= New York|publisher= Pantheon Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Gutman|first= Stanley T.|date= 1975|title= ''Mankind in Barbary: The Individual and Society in the Novels of Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Hanover: UP of New England|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hellmann|first= John|date= 1981|title= ''Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction''|url= |location= Urbana: U of Illinois P|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hollowell|first= John|date= 1977|title= ''Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel''|url= |location= Chapel Hill:U of North Carolina P|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Lennon|first= Michael J.|date= 2006|title= Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian?” ''Journal of Modern Literature 30.1''|url= |location= |publisher= |pages= 91-103|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1968|title= ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History''|url= |location= New York: New American Library|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Schroeder|first= Eric James|date= 1992|title= “Norman Mailer: The Hubris of the American Dream.” "Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers"|url= |location= Westport, CT|publisher= Praeger|pages= 91-105|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Smith|first= Kathy|date= 2003|title= “Norman Mailer and the Radical Text.” ''Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Philadelphia: Chelsea House|publisher= Ed. Harold Bloom, Bloom’s Modern Critical Views|pages= 181-196|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Trachtenberg |first=Alan |date=May 27, 1968 |title=Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon |url= |magazine=The Nation |pages=701–702 |access-date= |ref=harv }} Rev. of ''The Armies of the Night'', by Norman Mailer.

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

2021-06-27T20:29:27Z

JPridgeon: test for source

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{{Byline|last=Mosser |first=Jason |abstract=How does Norman Mailer define the terms “novel” and “history” in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer
configures all three genres in remarkably original ways.| url=https://prmlr.us/mr03mos }}

{{dc|dc=I|n ''The Armies of the Night''}}, Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,” “denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another.”{{sfn|Smith|2003|p=191}} How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

{{quote|[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed.{{sfn|Lennon|2006|p=97}} }}

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form''.{{sfn|Burke|1974|pp=138–164}} Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “to ''get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning.”{{sfn|Burke|1974|pp=147–48}} Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:
{{quote|[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision.{{sfn|Burke|1974|p=148}} }}

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” {{sfn|Bakhtin|1974|p=148}}. By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon (Mailer 236). Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

<blockquote>[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)</blockquote>

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. (243–4)

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” (162). Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” (86). Mailer says that
<blockquote>the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. (281)</blockquote>

History, Mailer says, is “interior” (281), indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” (130). Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” (65). He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” (187). Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” (37). Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge” (Mailer 66). Mailer says that

<blockquote>if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History. (66)</blockquote>

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” (65), Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” (20): no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” (273). Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself (167). Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” (Mailer 48). The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” (701). Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. (94)

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” (280). He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing (281). Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” (284). The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely (284). “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says (284). The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” (285). Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail (299–305). Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says (304). Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers (306).

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

<blockquote>Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)</blockquote>

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

<blockquote>Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.</blockquote>

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” (100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil (101), but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

<blockquote>Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. (171)</blockquote>

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

===Citations===
{{Reflist|15em}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* {{cite book |last= Adams|first= Laura|date= 1976|title= ''Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Athens:Ohio|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Bakhtin|first= M.M.|date= 1981|title= ''The Dialogic Imagination''|url= |location= Austin: U of Texas P,|publisher= Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Berthoff|first= Warner|date= 1971|title= “Witness and Testament: Two Contemporary Classics.” ''New Literary History 2''|url= |location= |publisher= |pages= 311-27|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Bufithis|first= Philip H.|date= 1978|title= ''Norman Mailer''|url= |location= New York|publisher= Frederick Ungar, Modern Literature Monographs|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Burke|first= Kenneth|date= 1974|title= "The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. 3rd ed."|url= |location= Berkeley: U of California P|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Chomsky last 2= S. Herman|first= Noam first 2= Edward|date= 1988|title= "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media"|url= |location= New York|publisher= Pantheon Books|pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Gutman|first= Stanley T.|date= 1975|title= ''Mankind in Barbary: The Individual and Society in the Novels of Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Hanover: UP of New England|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hellmann|first= John|date= 1981|title= ''Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction''|url= |location= Urbana: U of Illinois P|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Hollowell|first= John|date= 1977|title= ''Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel''|url= |location= Chapel Hill:U of North Carolina P|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Lennon|first= Michael J.|date= 2006|title= Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian?” ''Journal of Modern Literature 30.1''|url= |location= |publisher= |pages= 91-103|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1968|title= ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History''|url= |location= New York: New American Library|publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Schroeder|first= Eric James|date= 1992|title= “Norman Mailer: The Hubris of the American Dream.” "Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers"|url= |location= Westport, CT|publisher= Praeger|pages= 91-105|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Smith|first= Kathy|date= 2003|title= “Norman Mailer and the Radical Text.” ''Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Philadelphia: Chelsea House|publisher= Ed. Harold Bloom, Bloom’s Modern Critical Views|pages= 181-196|ref=harv }}
* {{cite magazine |last=Trachtenberg |first=Alan |date=May 27, 1968 |title=Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon |url= |magazine=The Nation |pages=701–702 |access-date= |ref=harv }} Rev. of ''The Armies of the Night'', by Norman Mailer.

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

2021-06-23T05:06:26Z

JPridgeon:

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{{Byline|last=Mosser|first=Jason |abstract=Genre-Bending,}}

{{dc|dc=I|N THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT}}, Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,”“denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another” (191). How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

<blockquote>[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed. (97)</blockquote>

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form'', (138–164). Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “''to get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning” (147–8). Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:

<blockquote>[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision. (148)</blockquote>

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (Bakhtin 324). By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon (Mailer 236). Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

<blockquote>[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)</blockquote>

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. (243–4)

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” (162). Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” (86). Mailer says that
<blockquote>the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. (281)</blockquote>

History, Mailer says, is “interior” (281), indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” (130). Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” (65). He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” (187). Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” (37). Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge” (Mailer 66). Mailer says that

<blockquote>if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History. (66)</blockquote>

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” (65), Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” (20): no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” (273). Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself (167). Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” (Mailer 48). The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” (701). Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. (94)

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” (280). He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing (281). Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” (284). The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely (284). “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says (284). The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” (285). Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail (299–305). Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says (304). Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers (306).

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

<blockquote>Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)</blockquote>

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

<blockquote>Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.</blockquote>

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” (100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil (101), but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

<blockquote>Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. (171)</blockquote>

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* {{cite book |last= Adams|first= Laura|date= 1976|title= ''Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Athens:Ohio|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Bakhtin|first= M.M.|date= 1981|title= ''The Dialogic Imagination''|url= |location= Austin: U of Texas P,|publisher= Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist|pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Berthoff|first= Warner|date= 1971|title= “Witness and Testament: Two Contemporary Classics.” ''New Literary History 2''|url= |location= |publisher= |pages= 311-27|ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Bufithis|first= Philip H.|date= 1978|title= ''Norman Mailer''|url= |location= New York|publisher= Frederick Ungar, Modern Literature Monographs|pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Burke|first= Kenneth|date= 1974|title= "The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. 3rd ed."|url= |location= Berkeley: U of California P|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Chomsky last 2= S. Herman|first= Noam first 2= Edward|date= 1988|title= "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media"|url= |location= New York|publisher= Pantheon Books|pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Gutman|first= Stanley T.|date= 1975|title= ''Mankind in Barbary: The Individual and Society in the Novels of Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Hanover: UP of New England|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Hellmann|first= John|date= 1981|title= ''Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction''|url= |location= Urbana: U of Illinois P|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Hollowell|first= John|date= 1977|title= ''Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel''|url= |location= Chapel Hill:U of North Carolina P|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Lennon|first= Michael J.|date= 2006|title= Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian?” ''Journal of Modern Literature 30.1''|url= |location= |publisher= |pages= 91-103|ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1968|title= ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History''|url= |location= New York: New American Library|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Schroeder|first= Eric James|date= 1992|title= “Norman Mailer: The Hubris of the American Dream.” "Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers"|url= |location= Westport, CT|publisher= Praeger|pages= 91-105|ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Smith|first= Kathy|date= 2003|title= “Norman Mailer and the Radical Text.” ''Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Philadelphia: Chelsea House|publisher= Ed. Harold Bloom, Bloom’s Modern Critical Views|pages= 181-196|ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Trachtenberg|first= Alan|date= 27 May 1968|title= “Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon.” ''Rev. of The Armies of the Night, by Norman Mailer''|url= |location= |publisher= ''The Nation''|pages= 701-702|ref= }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

2021-06-23T05:05:51Z

JPridgeon: /* Works Cited */

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{{Byline|last=Mosser|first=Jason |abstract=Genre-Bending,}}

{{dc|dc=I|N THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT}}, Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,”“denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another” (191). How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

<blockquote>[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed. (97)</blockquote>

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form'', (138–164). Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “''to get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning” (147–8). Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:

<blockquote>[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision. (148)</blockquote>

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (Bakhtin 324). By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon (Mailer 236). Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

<blockquote>[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)</blockquote>

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. (243–4)

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” (162). Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” (86). Mailer says that
<blockquote>the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. (281)</blockquote>

History, Mailer says, is “interior” (281), indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” (130). Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” (65). He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” (187). Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” (37). Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge” (Mailer 66). Mailer says that

<blockquote>if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History. (66)</blockquote>

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” (65), Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” (20): no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” (273). Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself (167). Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” (Mailer 48). The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” (701). Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. (94)

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” (280). He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing (281). Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” (284). The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely (284). “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says (284). The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” (285). Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail (299–305). Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says (304). Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers (306).

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

<blockquote>Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)</blockquote>

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

<blockquote>Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.</blockquote>

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” (100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil (101), but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

<blockquote>Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. (171)</blockquote>

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* {{cite book |last= Adams|first= Laura|date= 1976|title= ''Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Athens:Ohio|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Bakhtin|first= M.M.|date= 1981|title= ''The Dialogic Imagination''|url= |location= Austin: U of Texas P,|publisher= Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist|pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Berthoff|first= Warner|date= 1971|title= “Witness and Testament: Two Contemporary Classics.” ''New Literary History 2''|url= |location= |publisher= |pages= 311-27|ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Bufithis|first= Philip H.|date= 1978|title= ''Norman Mailer''|url= |location= New York|publisher= Frederick Ungar, Modern Literature Monographs|pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Burke|first= Kenneth|date= 1974|title= "The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. 3rd ed."|url= |location= Berkeley: U of California P|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Chomsky last 2= S. Herman|first= Noam first 2= Edward|date= 1988|title= "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media"|url= |location= New York|publisher= Pantheon Books|pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Gutman|first= Stanley T.|date= 1975|title= ''Mankind in Barbary: The Individual and Society in the Novels of Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Hanover: UP of New England|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Hellmann|first= John|date= 1981|title= ''Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction''|url= |location= Urbana: U of Illinois P|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Hollowell|first= John|date= 1977|title= ''Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel''|url= |location= Chapel Hill:U of North Carolina P|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Lennon|first= Michael J.|date= 2006|title= Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian?” ''Journal of Modern Literature 30.1''|url= |location= |publisher= |pages= 91-103|ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1968|title= ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History''|url= |location= New York: New American Library|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Schroeder|first= Eric James|date= 1992|title= “Norman Mailer: The Hubris of the American Dream.” "Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers"|url= |location= Westport, CT|publisher= Praeger|pages= 91-105|ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Smith|first= Kathy|date= 2003|title= “Norman Mailer and the Radical Text.” ''Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Philadelphia: Chelsea House|publisher= Ed. Harold Bloom, Bloom’s Modern Critical Views|pages= 181-196|ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Trachtenberg|first= Alan|date= 27 May 1968|title= “Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon.” ''Rev. of The Armies of the Night, by Norman Mailer''|url= |location= |publisher= ''The Nation''|pages= 701-702|ref= }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

2021-06-23T05:04:55Z

JPridgeon:

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{{Byline|last=Mosser|first=Jason |abstract=Genre-Bending,}}

{{dc|dc=I|N THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT}}, Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,”“denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another” (191). How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

<blockquote>[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed. (97)</blockquote>

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form'', (138–164). Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “''to get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning” (147–8). Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:

<blockquote>[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision. (148)</blockquote>

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (Bakhtin 324). By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon (Mailer 236). Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

<blockquote>[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)</blockquote>

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. (243–4)

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” (162). Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” (86). Mailer says that
<blockquote>the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. (281)</blockquote>

History, Mailer says, is “interior” (281), indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” (130). Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” (65). He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” (187). Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” (37). Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge” (Mailer 66). Mailer says that

<blockquote>if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History. (66)</blockquote>

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” (65), Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” (20): no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” (273). Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself (167). Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” (Mailer 48). The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” (701). Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. (94)

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” (280). He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing (281). Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” (284). The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely (284). “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says (284). The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” (285). Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail (299–305). Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says (304). Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers (306).

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

<blockquote>Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)</blockquote>

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

<blockquote>Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.</blockquote>

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” (100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil (101), but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

<blockquote>Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. (171)</blockquote>

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* {{cite book |last= Adams|first= Laura|date= 1976|title= ''Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Athens:Ohio|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Bakhtin|first= M.M.|date= 1981|title= ''The Dialogic Imagination''|url= |location= Austin: U of Texas P,|publisher= Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist|pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Berthoff|first= Warner|date= 1971|title= “Witness and Testament: Two Contemporary Classics.” ''New Literary History 2''|url= |location= |publisher= |pages= 311-27|ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Bufithis|first= Philip H.|date= 1978|title= ''Norman Mailer''|url= |location= New York|publisher= Frederick Ungar, Modern Literature Monographs|pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Burke|first= Kenneth|date= 1974|title= "The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. 3rd ed."|url= |location= Berkeley: U of California P|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Chomsky last 2= S. Herman|first= Noam first 2= Edward|date= 1988|title= "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media"|url= |location= New York|publisher= Pantheon Books|pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Gutman|first= Stanley T.|date= 1975|title= ''Mankind in Barbary: The Individual and Society in the Novels of Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Hanover: UP of New England|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Hellmann|first= John|date= 1981|title= ''Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction''|url= |location= Urbana: U of Illinois P|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Hollowell|first= John|date= 1977|title= ''Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel''|url= |location= Chapel Hill:U of North Carolina P|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Lennon|first= Michael J.|date= 2006|title= Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian?” ''Journal of Modern Literature 30.1''|url= |location= |publisher= |pages= 91-103|ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1968|title= ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History''|url= |location= New York: New American Library|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Schroeder|first= Eric James|date= 1992|title= “Norman Mailer: The Hubris of the American Dream.” "Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers"|url= |location= Westport, CT|publisher= Praeger|pages= 91-105|ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Smith|first= Kathy|date= 2003|title= “Norman Mailer and the Radical Text.” ''Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Philadelphia: Chelsea House|publisher= Ed. Harold Bloom, Bloom’s Modern Critical Views|pages= 181-196|ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Trachtenberg|first= Alan|date= 27 May 1968|title= “Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon.” ''Rev. of The Armies of the Night, by Norman Mailer''|url= |location= |publisher= ''The Nation''|pages= 701-702|ref= }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

2021-06-23T05:01:26Z

JPridgeon: Work Cited

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{{Byline|last=Mosser|first=Jason |abstract=Genre-Bending,}}

{{dc|dc=I|N THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT}}, Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,”“denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another” (191). How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

<blockquote>[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed. (97)</blockquote>

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form'', (138–164). Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “''to get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning” (147–8). Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:

<blockquote>[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision. (148)</blockquote>

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (Bakhtin 324). By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon (Mailer 236). Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

<blockquote>[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)</blockquote>

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. (243–4)

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” (162). Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” (86). Mailer says that
<blockquote>the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. (281)</blockquote>

History, Mailer says, is “interior” (281), indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” (130). Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” (65). He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” (187). Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” (37). Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge” (Mailer 66). Mailer says that

<blockquote>if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History. (66)</blockquote>

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” (65), Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” (20): no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” (273). Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself (167). Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” (Mailer 48). The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” (701). Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. (94)

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” (280). He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing (281). Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” (284). The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely (284). “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says (284). The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” (285). Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail (299–305). Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says (304). Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers (306).

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

<blockquote>Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)</blockquote>

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

<blockquote>Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.</blockquote>

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” (100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil (101), but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

<blockquote>Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. (171)</blockquote>

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

* {{cite book |last= Adams|first= Laura|date= 1976|title= ''Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Athens:Ohio|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Bakhtin|first= M.M.|date= 1981|title= ''The Dialogic Imagination''|url= |location= Austin: U of Texas P,|publisher= Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist.|pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Berthoff|first= Warner|date= 1971|title= “Witness and Testament: Two Contemporary Classics.” ''New Literary History 2''|url= |location= |publisher= |pages= 311-27|ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Bufithis|first= Philip H.|date= 1978|title= ''Norman Mailer''|url= |location= New York|publisher= Frederick Ungar, Modern Literature Monographs|pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Burke|first= Kenneth|date= 1974|title= "The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. 3rd ed."|url= |location= Berkeley: U of California P|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Chomsky last 2= S. Herman|first= Noam first 2= Edward|date= 1988|title= "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media"|url= |location= New York|publisher= Pantheon Books|pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Gutman|first= Stanley T.|date= 1975|title= ''Mankind in Barbary: The Individual and Society in the Novels of Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Hanover: UP of New England|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Hellmann|first= John|date= 1981|title= ''Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction''|url= |location= Urbana: U of Illinois P|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Hollowell|first= John|date= 1977|title= ''Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel''|url= |location= Chapel Hill:U of North Carolina P|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Lennon|first= Michael J.|date= 2006|title= Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian?” ''Journal of Modern Literature 30.1''|url= |location= |publisher= |pages= 91-103|ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1968|title= ''The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History''|url= |location= New York: New American Library|publisher= |pages= |ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Schroeder|first= Eric James|date= 1992|title= “Norman Mailer: The Hubris of the American Dream.” "Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers"|url= |location= Westport, CT|publisher= Praeger|pages= 91-105|ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Smith|first= Kathy|date= 2003|title= “Norman Mailer and the Radical Text.” ''Norman Mailer''|url= |location= Philadelphia: Chelsea House|publisher= Ed. Harold Bloom, Bloom’s Modern Critical Views|pages= 181-196|ref= }}

* {{cite book |last= Trachtenberg|first= Alan|date= 27 May 1968|title= “Mailer on the Steps of the Pentagon.” ''Rev. of The Armies of the Night, by Norman Mailer''|url= |location= |publisher= ''The Nation''|pages= 701-702|ref= }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

2021-06-23T04:11:55Z

JPridgeon:

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

2021-06-23T04:09:43Z

JPridgeon:

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{{Working}}
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{{Byline|last=Mosser|first=Jason |abstract=Genre-Bending,}}

{{dc|dc=I|N THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT}}, Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,”“denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another” (191). How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

<blockquote>[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed. (97)</blockquote>

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form'', (138–164). Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “''to get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning” (147–8). Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:

<blockquote>[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision. (148)<blockquote/>

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (Bakhtin 324). By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon (Mailer 236). Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

<blockquote>[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)</blockquote>

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. (243–4)

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” (162). Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” (86). Mailer says that
<blockquote>the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. (281)</blockquote>

History, Mailer says, is “interior” (281), indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” (130). Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” (65). He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” (187). Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” (37). Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge” (Mailer 66). Mailer says that

<blockquote>if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History. (66)</blockquote>

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” (65), Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” (20): no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” (273). Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself (167). Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” (Mailer 48). The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” (701). Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. (94)

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” (280). He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing (281). Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” (284). The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely (284). “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says (284). The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” (285). Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail (299–305). Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says (304). Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers (306).

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

<blockquote>Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)</blockquote>

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

<blockquote>Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.</blockquote>

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” (100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil (101), but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

<blockquote>Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. (171)</blockquote>

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

2021-06-23T04:06:00Z

JPridgeon: Fixing Block Quotes

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{{dc|dc=I|N THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT}}, Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,”“denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another” (191). How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

<blockquote>[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed. (97)<blockquote>

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form'', (138–164). Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “''to get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning” (147–8). Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:

<blockquote>[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision. (148)<blockquote>

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (Bakhtin 324). By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon (Mailer 236). Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

<blockquote>[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)<blockquote>

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. (243–4)

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” (162). Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” (86). Mailer says that
<blockquote>the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. (281)<blockquote>

History, Mailer says, is “interior” (281), indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” (130). Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” (65). He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” (187). Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” (37). Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge” (Mailer 66). Mailer says that

<blockquote>if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History. (66)<blockquote>

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” (65), Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” (20): no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” (273). Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself (167). Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” (Mailer 48). The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” (701). Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. (94)

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” (280). He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing (281). Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” (284). The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely (284). “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says (284). The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” (285). Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail (299–305). Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says (304). Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers (306).

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

<blockquote>Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)<blockquote>

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

<blockquote>Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.<blockquote>

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” (100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil (101), but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

<blockquote>Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. (171)<blockquote>

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

2021-06-23T03:51:57Z

JPridgeon:

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{{dc|dc=I|N THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT}}, Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,”“denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another” (191). How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed. (97)

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form'', (138–164). Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “''to get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning” (147–8). Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:

[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision. (148)

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (Bakhtin 324). By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon (Mailer 236). Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. (243–4)

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” (162). Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” (86). Mailer says that
the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. (281)

History, Mailer says, is “interior” (281), indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” (130). Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” (65). He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” (187). Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” (37). Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge” (Mailer 66). Mailer says that

if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History. (66)

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” (65), Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” (20): no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” (273). Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself (167). Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” (Mailer 48). The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” (701). Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. (94)

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” (280). He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing (281). Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” (284). The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely (284). “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says (284). The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” (285). Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail (299–305). Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says (304). Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers (306).

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” (100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil (101), but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. (171)

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

2021-06-22T13:55:24Z

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{{dc|dc=I|N THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT}}, Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,”“denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another” (191). How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed. (97)

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form'', (138–164). Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “''to get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning” (147–8). Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:

[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision. (148)

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (Bakhtin 324). By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon (Mailer 236). Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. (243–4)

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” (162). Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” (86). Mailer says that
the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. (281)

History, Mailer says, is “interior” (281), indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” (130). Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” (65). He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” (187). Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” (37). Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge” (Mailer 66). Mailer says that

if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History. (66)

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” (65), Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” (20): no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” (273). Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself (167). Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” (Mailer 48). The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” (701). Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. (94)

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” (280). He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing (281). Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” (284). The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely (284). “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says (284). The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” (285). Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail (299–305). Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says (304). Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers (306).

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” (100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil (101), but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. (171)

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

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''IN THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT'', Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,”“denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another” (191). How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed. (97)

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form'', (138–164). Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “''to get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning” (147–8). Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:

[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision. (148)

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (Bakhtin 324). By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon (Mailer 236). Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. (243–4)

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” (162). Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” (86). Mailer says that
the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. (281)

History, Mailer says, is “interior” (281), indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” (130). Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” (65). He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” (187). Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” (37). Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge” (Mailer 66). Mailer says that

if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History. (66)

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” (65), Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” (20): no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” (273). Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself (167). Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” (Mailer 48). The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” (701). Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. (94)

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” (280). He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing (281). Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” (284). The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely (284). “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says (284). The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” (285). Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail (299–305). Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says (304). Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers (306).

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” (100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil (101), but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. (171)

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

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{{dc|dc=''I-N THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT'', }} Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,”“denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another” (191). How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed. (97)

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form'', (138–164). Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “''to get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning” (147–8). Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:

[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision. (148)

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (Bakhtin 324). By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon (Mailer 236). Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. (243–4)

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” (162). Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” (86). Mailer says that
the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. (281)

History, Mailer says, is “interior” (281), indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” (130). Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” (65). He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” (187). Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” (37). Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge” (Mailer 66). Mailer says that

if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History. (66)

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” (65), Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” (20): no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” (273). Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself (167). Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” (Mailer 48). The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” (701). Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. (94)

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” (280). He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing (281). Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” (284). The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely (284). “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says (284). The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” (285). Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail (299–305). Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says (304). Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers (306).

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” (100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil (101), but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. (171)

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

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''IN THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT'', Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,”“denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another” (191). How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed. (97)

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form'', (138–164). Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “''to get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning” (147–8). Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:

[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision. (148)

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (Bakhtin 324). By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon (Mailer 236). Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. (243–4)

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” (162). Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” (86). Mailer says that
the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. (281)

History, Mailer says, is “interior” (281), indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” (130). Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” (65). He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” (187). Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” (37). Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge” (Mailer 66). Mailer says that

if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History. (66)

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” (65), Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” (20): no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” (273). Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself (167). Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” (Mailer 48). The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” (701). Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. (94)

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” (280). He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing (281). Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” (284). The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely (284). “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says (284). The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” (285). Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail (299–305). Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says (304). Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers (306).

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” (100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil (101), but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. (171)

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

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In the armies of the night'', Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,”“denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another” (191). How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed. (97)

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form'', (138–164). Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “''to get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning” (147–8). Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:

[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision. (148)

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (Bakhtin 324). By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon (Mailer 236). Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. (243–4)

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” (162). Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” (86). Mailer says that
the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. (281)

History, Mailer says, is “interior” (281), indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” (130). Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” (65). He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” (187). Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” (37). Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge” (Mailer 66). Mailer says that

if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History. (66)

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” (65), Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” (20): no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” (273). Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself (167). Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” (Mailer 48). The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” (701). Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. (94)

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” (280). He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing (281). Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” (284). The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely (284). “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says (284). The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” (285). Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail (299–305). Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says (304). Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers (306).

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” (100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil (101), but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. (171)

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

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{{dc|dc''I|n the armies of the night'',}} Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,”“denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another” (191). How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed. (97)

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form'', (138–164). Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “''to get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning” (147–8). Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:

[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision. (148)

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (Bakhtin 324). By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon (Mailer 236). Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. (243–4)

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” (162). Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” (86). Mailer says that
the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. (281)

History, Mailer says, is “interior” (281), indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” (130). Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” (65). He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” (187). Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” (37). Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge” (Mailer 66). Mailer says that

if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History. (66)

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” (65), Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” (20): no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” (273). Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself (167). Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” (Mailer 48). The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” (701). Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. (94)

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” (280). He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing (281). Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” (284). The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely (284). “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says (284). The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” (285). Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail (299–305). Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says (304). Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers (306).

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” (100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil (101), but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. (171)

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

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JPridgeon: Fixing Byline and Abstract

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''In the armies of the night'', Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,”“denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another” (191). How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed. (97)

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form'', (138–164). Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “''to get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning” (147–8). Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:

[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision. (148)

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (Bakhtin 324). By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon (Mailer 236). Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. (243–4)

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” (162). Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” (86). Mailer says that
the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. (281)

History, Mailer says, is “interior” (281), indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” (130). Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” (65). He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” (187). Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” (37). Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge” (Mailer 66). Mailer says that

if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History. (66)

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” (65), Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” (20): no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” (273). Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself (167). Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” (Mailer 48). The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” (701). Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. (94)

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” (280). He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing (281). Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” (284). The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely (284). “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says (284). The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” (285). Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail (299–305). Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says (304). Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers (306).

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” (100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil (101), but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. (171)

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

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''In the armies of the night'', Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,”“denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another” (191). How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed. (97)

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form'', (138–164). Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “''to get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning” (147–8). Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:

[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision. (148)

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (Bakhtin 324). By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon (Mailer 236). Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. (243–4)

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” (162). Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” (86). Mailer says that
the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. (281)

History, Mailer says, is “interior” (281), indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” (130). Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” (65). He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” (187). Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” (37). Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge” (Mailer 66). Mailer says that

if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History. (66)

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” (65), Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” (20): no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” (273). Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself (167). Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” (Mailer 48). The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” (701). Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. (94)

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” (280). He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing (281). Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” (284). The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely (284). “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says (284). The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” (285). Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail (299–305). Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says (304). Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers (306).

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” (100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil (101), but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. (171)

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night

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''In the armies of the night'', Norman Mailer recreates his participation in an anti-Vietnam War march that took place in Washington D.C. in October, 1967. Mailer subtitles Book/Part One ''History as a Novel'', and Book/Part Two ''the Novel as History'', but he ultimately begs the questions, what part is which, and which part is what? Are both parts both? Kathy Smith astutely observes that the “as” in Mailer’s subtitles, “History as a Novel” and “the Novel as History,”“denotes a metaphorical relationship between history and fiction, implying not only that history is ''like'' fiction, and vice versa, but that one always contains the other. . . . Mailer uses ‘as’ to complicate the terms, allowing them to merge into one another” (191). How does Mailer define the terms novel and history in the context of his literary journalism? Literary journalism is certainly the only generic label that completely fits. Further, if we take the text to be a work of New Journalism, then what part is journalism, as opposed to what parts are fiction and history, and how do we distinguish among the genres? Mailer bends all three to suit his purposes.

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

[A] fundamental dichotomy between the novel and all forms of narrative nonfiction, history and journalism especially. For Mailer the novel is spontaneous, resonant and intended to illumine questions. History and journalism are pre-digested, concrete and intended to provide answers to questions they raise. Novels are open, immediate, and overbearing; they intensify consciousness and difficulties of moral choice. History and journalism are lucid and organized; their outcomes are usually predetermined by selected evidence; they deliver buttressed conclusions. In the novel everything is slightly murky, swirling, and when meaning does emerge, it does so in a flash of brilliant intuition. Conversely, history and journalism are courts where evidence is presented systematically; at the end of the trial, the accretion of linked fact is overwhelming and indisputable. Fiction for Mailer is “the high road,” and its plots are complex and usually open-ended. History and journalism are the low road and their plots are ordered and predictable. Time in the novel accelerates and then dawdles; it moves at no certain speed. In history and journalism, time has been bought and labeled; time has already been consumed. (97)

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form'', (138–164). Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “''to get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning” (147–8). Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:

[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision. (148)

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (Bakhtin 324). By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon (Mailer 236). Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

[I]f you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job—it is the tower which takes months to build. So the Novelist working in secret collaboration with the Historian has perhaps tried to build with his novel a tower fully equipped with telescopes to study—at the greatest advantage—our own horizon. Of course, the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped, but the instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error; what supports the use of them now is that our intimacy with the master builder of the tower, and the lens grinder of the telescopes (yes, even the machinist of the barrels) has given some advantage for correcting the error of the instruments and the imbalance of his tower. May that be claimed of many histories? In fact, how many novels can be put so quickly to use? (For the novel—we will permit ourselves this parenthesis—is, when it is good, the personification of a vision which will enable one to comprehend the other visions better; a microscope—if one is exploring the pond; a telescope upon a tower if you are scrutinizing the forest.)

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. (243–4)

Mailer’s extended metaphor contains three parts: the horizon represents the demonstration activities themselves, the forest represents the biased and distorted accounts provided to the American public by the corporate media; the tower, telescope, and microscope represent Mailer’s own consciousness and by extension his text which allow the reader to view the horizon over the forest. Mailer’s insistence that one must “build” the tower emphasizes that the text is something shaped or made by the writer’s own personality. The tower, telescope, and microscope, then, come to stand not only for Mailer’s text, but for the reporter himself. By pointing out that “the tower is crooked, and the telescopes warped,” Mailer acknowledges the imperfection or subjectivity of his vision. Mailer’s admission that his perceptual apparati are imperfect is a rhetorical consideration; paradoxically, Mailer protects himself from charges of personal bias by openly admitting his biases. Then, as Stanly T. Gutman says, “the reader can easily become aware of the biases and weaknesses of Mailer’s vision and thus compensate for them” (162). Mail- er’s claim that the “instruments of all sciences—history so much as physics—are always constructed in small or large error,” based on the discovery of modern physics that even scientific observation factors in some degree of relativity, further corrects the “error” and “imbalance” of his perceptual instruments by calling attention to them. Once the reader understands that the writer’s perspective is determined by his personality and ideological biases (frankly acknowledged, if not foregrounded, throughout the text), the reader may calculate those factors into an understanding of both text and event. Mailer’s subjectivity also frees him from the obligation, shared by many journalists and historians, to appear objective and disinterested; he can then dramatize the event as he chooses. The corporate news media cannot share Mailer’s candor about the role they play in shaping events, for it is in their interest to appear disinterested; the pretense of objectivity, as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky point out in ''Manufacturing Consent'', allowed the mass media in the U.S. to run an effective propaganda campaign in support of the Vietnam war (1).

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” (86). Mailer says that

the novel must replace history at precisely that point where experience is sufficiently emotional, spiritual, psychical, moral, existential, or supernatural to expose the fact that the historian in pursuing the experience would be obliged to quit the clearly demarcated limits of historical inquiry. (281)

History, Mailer says, is “interior” (281), indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

By referring to himself in ''Armies'' in the third person, as “Mailer,” the narrator not only situates himself as protagonist; he also creates a certain distance, sometimes ironic, sometimes ambiguous, between himself and his experience. At the same time, as Laura Adams suggests, Mailer seems to believe that “journalists and historians are incapable of handling the ambiguous” (130). Ambiguity suggests an ability to entertain multiple perspectives, a negative capability, in Romantic terms, as well as a sensitivity to nuance and connotation. Exploring that ambiguity, Mailer asks of his persona: “is he finally comic, a ludicrous figure with mock-heroic associations; or is he not unheroic, and therefore embedded somewhat tragically in the comic? Or is he both at once, and all at once?” (65). He goes on to suggest that there may be no answers to these questions, just as the ambiguity of the event itself may never be resolved. Kathy Smith argues that in ''Armies'' “the self ’s preemption of the story, the self ''as'' story, is the only strategy that can precipitate a radical rethinking of how history provides cohesive explanations of ambiguous events” (187). Mailer indeed suggests that history is an ambiguous and dynamic process, not static. The significance of events, therefore, must continually be reassessed, and from as many points of view as possible. If he conceives of contemporary history as fundamentally ambiguous, even absurd, his role as participant is similarly ambiguous and absurd, in Mailer’s view.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” (37). Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge” (Mailer 66). Mailer says that

if the event took place in one of the crazy mansions, or indeed ''the'' crazy house of history, it is fitting that any ambiguous comic hero of such a history should be not only off very much to the side of the history, but that he should be an egotist of the most startling misproportions ... yet in command of a detachment classic in severity ... Such egotism being two-headed, thrusting itself forward the better to study itself, finds itself therefore at home in a house of mirrors ... Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History. (66)

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” (65), Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

One element of the text’s dramatic structure results from the fact—often referred to by Mailer—that the march had no “center” (20): no individual or group of individuals was completely in charge; no definite route had been decided upon in advance. Mailer’s direct participation in an unpredictable and uncertain event points to an important difference between his account and other, more straightforward historical accounts which, he says, “can assume that certain ... dramatic issues were never in doubt” (273). Mailer incorporates his uncertainty, anxiety and fear into the text heuristically, determining the text’s structure in the act of writing. As Gutman remarks, the writing of ''Armies'' represents “a search for meaning,” one that has “no known end but only a guideline for its investigation,” to seek the meaning of the experience in the experience itself (167). Indeed, the uncertainty of the outcome feeds Mailer’s appetite for the existential moment: “we are up, face this, all of you,” he tells the crowd assembled at the Ambassador Theater, “against an existential situation—we do not know how it is going to turn out, and what is even more inspiring of dread is that the government doesn’t know either” (Mailer 48). The “dread” produced by existential uncertainty raises a dramatic question Mailer asks repeatedly throughout the text: will the march result in violence? The fear of a violent response on behalf of the police or military creates some of the text’s dramatic tension.

Many critics writing on ''Armies'' have found Book One more interesting than Book Two. Alan Trachtenburg asserts that “Taken by itself, Book Two is not nearly so persuasive or compelling a piece of writing as the earlier part, from which it takes its aesthetic justification as counterpart. It seems too much a muted coda, adding information but not really extending insight and feeling beyond Book One” (701). Bufithis also maintains that there is a stylistic difference between Books One and Two:

When Mailer departs from his novelistic rendering of material, the book loses its thrust. The narrative-descriptive style, in which explicit details triumphantly cohere with implicit moral movements, gives way to the oracular-ruminative style which dotes on abstractions and cultural ''cum'' philosophical questions. (94)

As I am attempting to show, however, the entire text dramatizes the March on the Pentagon, and Book Two is not devoid of drama. The key difference between the two books is in the degree to which Mailer actually participates in the events described. In Book One, Mailer personally witnesses everything he writes about. His direct participation accounts for the higher degree of emotional involvement; therefore, his language is more poetic, more emotionally-charged. Book Two is based much more, although not exclusively, on secondary research; the higher degree of detachment causes a corresponding decrease in emotionally-charged prose. In Book Two, Chapters 2–5 deal with the months of planning leading up to the march, including negotiations and compromises between various leftist factions and between the protestors and the U.S. government. There is little drama here. Mailer’s concern is less with his own responses and impressions than with facts external to himself and gathered by way of research, precisely the method he himself associates with historiography. Mailer’s lack of participation in the events related in Book Two affects his style; it becomes plain, unself-conscious, prosaic. No longer emotionally involved, Mailer’s narrative voice loses its passion, its sense of conviction and engagement. There is less indictment of right- and left-wing positions, more conjecture regarding strategies of negotiation. The narrator continues to analyze events, but the analysis becomes less philosophical, less metaphorical.

However, if the opening chapters of Book Two are less self-consciously dramatic than Book One—both in terms of the nature of the events described and the narrator’s reaction to those events—Book Two, Chapter 6 quickens the dramatic pace. All of the events related up to this point lead to the principal confrontation between demonstrators and U.S. troops in front of the Pentagon. Mailer begins Book Two, Chapter 6 with the following assertion: “It is on this particular confrontation that the conceit one is writing a history must be relinquished” (280). He explains that if “the first book is a history in the guise or dress or manifest of a novel ... the second is a real or true novel ... presented in the style of a history,” thus blurring the distinction between the two forms of writing (281). Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does, indeed, become more novelistic from this point on: the narrative drive shifts into a higher gear, and Mailer’s imagination goes to work. The narrator is then able to dramatize certain details of the action not because he personally witnessed them, having by this point been arrested and incarcerated, but because his participation in the march up to the arrest was sufficient to enable him to recreate the mood of the proceedings.

Book Two introduces a new dramatic conflict: in Book Two, Chapter 6, the confrontation between troops and demonstrators becomes, in part, a political struggle between working class and urban middle class youth. This conflict comes as a surprise, as Mailer notes: “It would take the rebirth of Marx for Marxism to explain definitively this middle class condemnation of an imperialist war in the last Capitalist nation, this working class affirmation” (284). The narrator muses on this apparent contradiction, reasoning that the students own neither property nor the means of production and so are cut off from the real source of power, and yet their education has provided them with the critical framework to reflect upon their own powerless- ness and alienation; they are, therefore, the most critical of their government’s policies. The working class, by contrast, “is loyal to friends, not ideas,” so alienation is less likely (284). “No wonder the Army bothered them not a bit,” Mailer says (284). The working class has the authority and the guns, but the urban middle class feels it has the moral advantage. Mailer imaginatively recreates the message the urban middle class youth brings to the troops: “I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit. I am stealing your balls” (285). Later, however, in a dramatic reversal, the antagonistic forces of the U.S. Military reassert their dominance. After dark, when many of the protestors have left the grounds of the Pentagon, the Military rotates its forces; the troops form a wedge and begin moving through the crowd to separate it, kicking and clubbing at the demonstrators. Mailer quotes several accounts of “The Battle of the Wedge” which describe the violence and brutality in graphic detail (299–305). Mailer points out that much of the violence was directed at women, in what he interprets as a symbolic attempt on the part of the Military to emasculate the male demonstrators; the working class youth “had plucked all stolen balls back,” he says (304). Various demonstrators point out that the Military had no legal right to attack protestors acting under the protection of a permit. Mailer states that “[t]he Army had been guilty of illegal activity and knew it,” appealing to the moral indignation of his readers (306).

Book Two, Chapter 10 concerns the repercussions of the march and follows up on continued protest activities. Many of the activists served extended prison sentences and were brutally mistreated for non-cooperation with their incarcerators. In the following passage, Mailer dramatizes their
experience:

Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat nor drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. (315)

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

Whole crisis of Christianity in America that the military heroes were on one side, and the unnamed saints on the other! Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God. Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil. Who by now could know where was what? Liars con- trolled the locks.

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. (316–7)

John Hollowell interprets this final chapter as the dramatic conflict between Manichean opposites: “All of the opposed forces—totalitarianism and democracy, age and youth, technology and humanism, the Devil’s curse and God’s grace—come together on a weekend in October 1967” (100). Mailer suggests these “opposed forces” through the use of balance and antithesis, the controlling stylistic principle of the final chapter: “the military heroes were on one side, the unnamed saints on the other”; America was “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled . . . now a beauty of leprous skin”; “the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the will to turn—was then the will of God ... If the locks did not turn, then the will of the people was the will of the Devil.” Finally, by asking whether America will give birth to “the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has ever known” or “a new world brave and tender, artful and wild,” Mailer personifies America as “She,” a woman about to give birth, in order to phrase a highly complex question in concrete, humanly compelling terms. To dramatize the uncertainty of the outcome, Mailer asks a series of rhetorical questions. The first question, “Who by now could know where was what?” is followed by an answer: “Liars controlled the locks.” In this instance, Mailer employs a rhetorical device called ''sermocinatio'' in which he answers his own question in order to express his doubt and frustration. Mailer then asks of America, “she will probably give birth . . . and to what?” This question is followed not by an answer but by more questions, compounding the dramatic tension. We see in this passage further evidence of Mailer’s heuristic method, the interjection “no” suggesting a mind attempting to come to terms with the uncertainty of the moment. Closing with a series of short, quick sentences in the imperative mood,“Brood on that country that expresses our will ... Let the bugle blow ... Rush to the locks ... Deliver us from our curse,” Mailer emphasizes the urgent need for direct action.

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil (101), but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

Though [Mailer] had always believed that struggle between opposing forces is the condition of existence, he had also affirmed a need for synthesis between opposing forces to resolve, if only temporarily, the struggle at the core of all existence. What he is claiming here [in this passage quoted above] is that in con- temporary America there seems little possibility of synthesis, and that the dynamics of dialectical process have deteriorated into unresolvable antithesis. Opposites may not longer be reconciled; what appears to lie ahead is the effort of each half of a divided society to destroy the other. (171)

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

User:JPridgeon

2021-05-30T21:38:21Z

JPridgeon: Created page with "Jordan Pridgeon is a 22 year old Graphic Artist attending Middle Georgia State University. She is a senior and will be graduating with her Bachelors in New Media and Communica..."

Jordan Pridgeon is a 22 year old Graphic Artist attending Middle Georgia State University. She is a senior and will be graduating with her Bachelors in New Media and Communications this fall. Jordan has a passion for creating designs that stand out and set businesses apart from the rest. She currently is the Editor-in-Chief for Middle Georgia State’s newspaper, ''The Statement,'' and also works on the ''Fall Line Review'' as the Layout Editor. Jordan makes all of her designs herself and hand draws many of them. She hopes to start her own branding company by the end of the year.