The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in The Castle in the Forest: Difference between revisions

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 <blockquote>You don’t know what it is to have six million of your people killed when there are only twelve million of them on earth. You don’t know the profound and fundamental stunting of existence that got into the blood cells of every Jew after Hitler had done his work. (Norman Mailer to Jack Abbott, 18 April 1979)</blockquote>
 When I heard that Mailer had written a fictional biography of Hitler, I made up my mind not to read it. The idea was offensive. At this late date, the life of Adolf Hitler did not merit another examination, least of all in a novel, which would entail an imaginative engagement with the Führer’s private fears, desires, hopes, and dreams. Who wanted to spend time in close communion with that repellent psyche? Not I. Born in post-war Vienna to parents who were Holocaust survivors from Poland, I could say that I had already shared far too much of my life with Hitler.
+Distaste is one thing, curiosity another. And I was just curious enough about ''Castle in the Forest'' to read J. M. Coetzee’s essay in the ''New York Review''. A review seemed like a good compromise: appraisal and analysis instead of direct contact. But as it turned out, Coetzee made such a strong argument for the seriousness of the enterprise that I reconsidered my opinion. The novel might have some merit after all. Yet I was in no hurry to read it. Months passed, and then one early spring day, as my husband and I were strolling through a bookstore, he picked a copy of ''Castle in the Forest'' off a shelf. “Here,” he said, “I’ll get this for you. It’s a Purim gift.”
+This autobiographical vignette serves a purpose: there was uncanny pre- science in linking Purim to ''Castle in the Forest''. The holiday celebrates the salvation of the Persian Jews in the Fifth Century BCE from a plot by Haman, the king’s evil advisor, to have the entire community slaughtered. The Book of Esther tells how, with the help of her kinsman Mordechai, she uses her wits and her beauty to foil Haman’s plans. By the king’s decree, victors and victims undergo a swift reversal of fortune. Haman’s plot recoils back on him and he ends up on the very same gallows he had prepared for Mordechai. Meanwhile, the Jews of the realm, permitted to arm themselves, attack and kill Haman’s followers. For the Jews, sorrow is turned to joy and a day of mourning to a festival.
+The only boisterous holiday in the Hebrew calendar, Purim is not unlike Carnival in using masks and costumes and giving license to rowdy behavior. That the history of the Jews is replete with other plots against them that do not end so well does not diminish the festivity of Purim; perhaps it only increases it. Through the feasting and merrymaking, the retribution against Haman is reenacted as mockery. Most Americans in urban areas are probably familiar with the special Purim pastries, poppy seed or fruit-filled triangular tarts called ''hamantaschen'', Haman’s pockets, made popular by Eastern European Jewish immigrants. In the synagogue, the holiday is celebrated by a public reading of the Scroll (Megillah) of Esther, during which the congregation deploys noisemakers (called ''greggers'' in Yiddish) to drown out the name of Haman whenever it is said aloud in the reading of the text. As the Hebrew curse has it, Haman’s name is blotted out —
+except to denote pastry. Among Ashkenazi Jews, the festivities traditionally included a ''Purim-shpil'', a folk play based on the Purim story or contemporary subjects.<ref>For a study of the reception of a Purim-shpil performed in the aftermath of World War II, see Aronowicz. For a general discussion of the Yiddish folk dramas performed at Purim, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and “''Purim-Shpil'',” ''Encyclopaedia Judaica''.</ref> Crossing genre borders, I now propose to read ''Castle'' as a type of Purim entertainment, a ''shpil'' in long prose narrative form that carries the heavy burden of invoking not a catastrophe averted but a catastrophe perpetrated.
+First, a disclaimer is in order. ''Castle'' can be read in the context of the retributive charivari of Purim without exaggerating the novel’s Jewish dimensions or Mailer’s engagement with Judaism.<ref>For various and valuable insights into Mailer’s role as a Jewish writer, see Bernstein, Cappell, and Siegel.</ref> In fact, it is instructive to consider ''Castle'' in the light of a very different tradition, what one might call the ''locus classicus'' of retributive justice in Western literature, Canto 28 of Dante’s ''Inferno''. There the pilgrim-poet encounters Bertran de Born who, having severed filial ties between a father and son, is condemned to carry his own severed head. Holding the head by the hair and swinging it like a lantern, Bertran offers a gloss on his gruesome condition: "''Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso''" (In me you may observe fit punishment).<ref>Dante, ''Inferno'', 142. For explication and sources, see the commentary to 28. 142 in Hollander, ''Princeton Dante Project''.</ref> While scholars disagree on the extent to which the penal code of hell is based the principle of ''contrapasso'', it clearly underlies the punishment of Ugolino and Ruggieri in Canto 33.<ref>For a comprehensive summary of the issues involved in determining whether all the condemned souls receive condign punishment, see Armour.</ref>  Recounting how in life he and his sons were imprisoned by Ruggieri and left to starve, Ugolino implies that hunger drove him to cannibalize his children. So now in hell he is condemned to gnaw forever on the head of Ruggieri; the punishment is superbly efficient, at once echoing the crime and exacting vengeance for it. Dante’s ''contrapasso'', his vision of the precise and punctilious infernal justice of retribution, informs the ''Purim-shpil'' extravagance of ''Castle''. Mailer’s close examination of Hitler’s life—the bibliography appended to the novel is extensive—puts mockery in the service of strict accounting, the measure for measure of condign punishment.
+For fifty years he had been waiting to write about Hitler, Mailer said in an interview (Lennon 2007). During that time, as the Third Reich has been examined and reexamined and incorporated into popular culture, Hitler has become, for the general population, more a figure of speech than a historical reality. The psychic havoc (Mailer’s term in ''Advertisements for Myself'' ) caused by the Second World War has morphed into cliché with the concomitant psychic pall, and the condition extends well beyond the Jewish community. So as the historical Hitler dominated most of Europe and caused the deaths of millions, the figurative Hitler still has the power to thwart discourse—mention his name and it kills the conversation.<ref>For a concise exposition of still unanswered questions about Hitler’s regime, see Lukacs, especially 86–108.</ref> And in the bleak confusion and bold incompetence of American political life at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that name was invoked with alarming frequency (deployed, curiously enough, by both ends of the political spectrum).
+Taking on the trope of Hitler, the aging Mailer returns to the prophetic mode of his younger self, who believed his vocation lay in becoming “''consecutively more disruptive, more dangerous, and more powerful''" (''Advertisements for Myself'' 22). He remains a disruptive writer, making his readers uncomfortable. But ever the great experimentalist of the narrative voice, he chooses now to speak with the mellow cadences of folktale, telling how ''das Waldschloss'', the castle in the forest, came to be where there was neither castle nor forest, but only the adamantine irony of inmates from Berlin imprisoned in a concentration camp where there had once been a potato field. We do not learn about this ''Waldschloss'' until the end of the novel, when we have already passed through the other adamantine irony of a tale told to avenge crimes committed more than sixty years before. The long delay has its advantage. As we know from an old adage invoked in Mailer’s ''Harlot’s Ghost'': “OSS working undercover in Italy, 1943, did encounter the following piece of Sicilian wisdom: ‘Revenge is a dish that people of taste eat cold.’” (''HG'' 813). The time is ripe for low temperature retribution.
+Mailer’s instrument of revenge is the novel’s first person narrator, the gregarious, ingratiating, and ambitious devil, incarnated as Dieter the S.S. Officer (renamed D.T. during his residence in America—but of that sojourn we are told very little), who played a leading role in fostering, encouraging, and fashioning Hitler. While his boss, the Evil One, or Maestro, has turned his attention to modern technology, Dieter takes the opportunity to avenge a demotion by betraying the covert demonic organization that employed him and reveal how a boy born to an obscure Austrian peasant family became his most famous client. Barbara Probst Solomon has noted that, deliberately or not, in ''The Castle in the Forest'' Mailer “has turned the tables on Hitler. Hitler’s demonic portrait of the Jews, his obsession with their bloodlines, their presumed inherited characteristics, had to be ingested from sources close to him. And Mailer hunts down Adi’s family with the same obsessiveness and belief in inherited characteristics that Hitler did to the Jews” (225). Going far beyond subjecting the Hitler family to intense scrutiny, Mailer has contrived to give them an antagonistic writer of an unauthorized biography, a Kitty Kelley gone wild, or—the temptation to say this is irresistible—the biographer from hell. And so Dieter is.
+Even earnest biographers run the risk of appropriating the lives of their subjects. For Dieter appropriation is the goal, as we learn from his teasing discussion of the narrative’s genre: “It is more than a memoir and certainly has to be most curious as a biography since it is as privileged as a novel ” (79). He may argue against the common belief that demonic possession is total but he can also boast of his mastery of the subject: “I live with the confidence that I am in a position to understand Adolf. For the fact is that I know him. I must repeat. I know him top to bottom” (9). On the basis of his successful cultivation of Hitler as a client of the Maestro, Dieter rose through the ranks of the infernal hierarchy, and in telling the story afterwards, the demoted (can we call him fallen?) devil is not about to give up his rights to the life of a celebrity. Hitler is still Dieter’s intellectual property, one might say, but the vengeance is only incidentally his. Primarily it is ours.
+Dieter’s knowledge of his client is indeed extensive. He generously offers readers copious data accessible only to devils (and novelists) about Hitler’s incestuous genealogy, odious conception, and bullied and bullying childhood. He takes pains to describe the workings of infernal plots and ploys to intervene in human life. Yet nothing about the information he imparts tells us why Hitler turned out as he did—why a dysfunctional family, nasty sibling rivalry, and a failed beekeeping venture, unpleasant as they are, should lead to dictatorship, world war, and genocide. For not providing an explanation for Hitler’s evil, Mailer was criticized by some reviewers (Gross, for example). They missed the point, I believe. Such criticism presupposes that ''Castle'' should have offered the kind of catharsis-through-information that one finds in murder mysteries. Yet if we knew what caused Hitler to do what he did, would his deeds suddenly become less horrific?<ref>For an interesting perspective on the impossibility of establishing causal relations in ''Castle'' and elsewhere, see Fleming.</ref> It is worth noting that even in ''The Executioner’s Song'', where Mailer is dealing with a mundane criminal, there is also no catharsis-through-information. We wait for Gary Gilmore to explain his motive, to say why he murdered the two men he robbed. But he never does.
+As though anticipating the objections of his critics, Mailer has Dieter tease us with details whose later historical echo is unmistakable. Relating how Alois Hitler’s beekeeping mentor, der Alte, set fire to one of his hives, Dieter casually mentions that the young Adi happened to be present but takes care to describe the boy’s sadistic excitement: “His toes tingled, his heart shook in its chamber, he did not know whether to scream or to roar with laughter” (263). Since der Alte burns the hive in obedience to instructions sent to him in a dream by the very same Dieter and the boy likewise has been instructed by dream to be at the old man’s farm, can we conclude that this is a formative moment? The devil demurs with a shrug. He had just come back from creating mayhem in Russia, he tells us, and he was not up to the task of dealing with the mind of this particular six-year old (the six-year old who interests us more than the entire Russian royal family). If we were expecting to derive some intellectual or emotional satisfaction from that proffered datum about the young Hitler’s fascination with fiery death and mass slaughter, we are disappointed. Dieter denies us the pleasure.
+A balder instance is the large ''Hakenkreuz'' carved into the gate of the monastery school the young Adi attends. At this point the swastika is not yet an abhorrent political symbol; it is merely the coat of arms of an Abbot von Hagen who may have enjoyed the punning allusion to his name. The gate is the scene of an episode in which the nine-year-old Hitler, caught smoking by one of his teachers who happens to be an important client of the infernal powers, has a chance to hone his skills in manipulation and gives up the idea of becoming a priest. Yet as soon as Dieter brings the tantalizing description of the school archway to our attention, he warns us against rushing to conclusions: “Not too much, I hasten to add, should be made of this. Von Hagen’s swastika was subtly carved, and so offered no striking suggestion of the phalanxes yet to march beneath that symbol. Nonetheless, there it was, a crooked cross” (341-42). The carving is and is not significant; it does and does not foreshadow the goose-stepping hordes.
+Although Dieter has a pronounced impish edge, he does not dangle provocative details before his readers merely to amuse himself at their expense. Ambiguity comes with the secret agent’s territory. The nature of his work requires him to move from one blind stratagem to another, rely on sources of varying credibility, and grasp the opportunities that come with occasional bits of good luck. The outcome is always unpredictable and always obscure; cause and effect are blurred.
+The infernal organization to which Dieter belongs is, after all, a literary descendant of the CIA in ''Harlot’s Ghost'', and it is instructive to remember Harry Hubbard’s limited knowledge about the Company (as the agents call their organization) and its manifold machinations against its ostensible enemy, the KGB. Applying the same kind of intellectual limitations to his private life, Hubbard remains unaware of the state of his own floundering marriage. Wandering for decades in a maze of disguises, disinformation, cryptonyms, letters, messages, and fragments of poetry, he finally tries to extricate himself by writing a memoir in two disjointed manuscripts, Alpha and Omega (the other twenty-two letters of the Greek alphabet coming between them, it is unlikely the two parts will ever fit together). Hubbard’s hapless ignorance is institution-wide. Hugh Montague may be the master of literary cryptograms, but his monologue after the Kennedy assassination reveals (in a moment of black humor) his true ignorance as he tries to cover his tracks without knowing precisely where his tracks are. His desperate self-vindication is worthy of one of Robert Browning’s soliloquizing madmen. Always more vulnerable than his superior, Harry even worries that through the convoluted webs of intrigue he has set in motion, he himself might ultimately be culpable.<ref>For the “radical indeterminacy” of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', see Anshen, 457.</ref>
+A supernatural veneer is, evidently, no protection against the ethos of ignorance inherent in covert agencies. Dieter is better informed than Harry only in that, Socratically, he knows how little he knows, admitting (while still status conscious): “I am about as much endowed beyond an accomplished scholar as he in turn is more knowledgeable than a clod from a poorly endowed school” (236). To the agent who must traverse the murky terrain of the human mind, that academic advantage counts for very little. And, again, like his human counterpart, Dieter is deliberately kept ignorant by his employer: “In truth, I do not know much about hell. I am not even certain it exists. The Maestro has kept us, after all, in enclaves. We are not supposed to know what we do not need to know” (385). Dieter must entertain the possibility that the Maestro is not even the Devil himself, but merely another one of the many infernal bureaucrats. Compartmentalization keeps the agents wandering in the labyrinth of their assigned enclaves.
+Dieter is, then, no better than a CIA agent at charting his own success or foreseeing the future course of history (and perhaps the Maestro and his archenemy, the Dummkopf, are also limited in this respect). After the young Adi helps his father gas a hive of sick bees, the boy is sent a dream etching in which he is given an assignment to count the dead insects. Laying them out in rows, he takes pride in counting four thousand dead before the dream is interrupted. But again Dieter adds a caveat against hasty conclusions and reiterates the uncertainty of the outcome:
+<blockquote>Here, I would warn the reader not to make too much of the gassing nor the body count. It is not to be understood as the unique cause of all that came later. For a dream-etching... leaves but a dot upon your psyche, a footprint to anticipate a future sequence of development that may or may not come to pass in future decades. Most dream-etchings are not unlike the abandoned foundations one can see on the outskirts of Third World cities. Left to molder for lack of further funds, they lie there, excavations on a scraggly field. (201)</blockquote>
+As spies plant information and pay informants, so devils etch dreams, but not all of their schemes come to fruition.
+=== NOTES ===