The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Jive-Ass Aficionado: Why Are We in Vietnam? and Hemingway's Moral Code: Difference between revisions

That’s exactly how Why Are We in Vietnam? is structured with similar effects that it has on the reader. Just as Hemingway’s short stories focused onNick and the personal lives of people “in his time,”while the vignettes served as newspaper-headline reminders of the violent, larger world that was affecting individual psyches, so, too, Mailer’s highly personalized and detailed narrative of sixteen-year-old D.J.’s hunting trip with his father, his father’s business associates, and his best friend Tex in the rugged Brooks Range of Alaska is intercut with “Intro Beeps” that serve the same function and add “rhythm” as did Hemingway’s vignettes. The chapters in ''Why Are We in''

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''Vietnam?'' focus on the story of the hunting trip, while the Intro Beeps are digressively vocal ''tour de forces'' that give Mailer the chance to evoke a broader world by allowing D.J. the freedom to rant about things outside the constraints of narrative. For one thing, the Intro Beeps feature the narrator as an eighteen-year-old, so there is a broader prospective already involved. D.J. at eighteen is wiser than D.J. at sixteen, who is recalled in the main narrative. In the Intro Beeps D.J. thinks and “speaks” in an even more pronounced stream-of-consciousness while at a dinner party his parents throw for him the night before he and Tex are scheduled to ship out to fight in Vietnam. It is in these numbered Intro Beeps where D.J., unfettered by storytelling, can rant and ramble about more general and abstract topics like the teachings of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher who warned that the media and the constant bombardment of pop culture messages would have a deleterious effect on the human condition (Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' 8).

It is these big-picture concerns that surface mostly in the Intro Beeps and do indeed remind the reader of a world outside the hunting narrative of the novel, just as listening to a radio dee-jay makes one aware of the source and also other listeners—a “broadcast” that is simultaneously reaching a larger world. And that in itself can be unsettling. “As D.J. suggests,” one critic observes, “society acts as a kind ofsuccubus upon the unconscious of Americans so that ‘you never know what vision has been humping you through the night’” (Wenke 123).

now living in an imaginary white brain. . . .(Mailer, ''Why Are We

in Vietnam?'' 58)

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As Adams notes,“Although D.J. can ‘see right through shit’[49], he is not

Wasteland that it was hard to say when he was speaking. When Hemingway

finished in our time, he achieved something of the same effect” (125). The

twenty years of booze gives a little permanent rot to the odor

coming off the lining of the stomach. . . . (133)

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That the multiple voices and structure of ''Why Are We in Vietnam''? derive from ''In Our Time'' seems even more likely when one considers Mailer’s ending. Curiously, like Hemingway, Mailer also breaks his final narrative installment—Chapters Ten and Eleven—into two, although there is no logical reason for doing so. The tenth chapter ends, “And the boys slept” (197); the eleventh begins, “And woke up in three hours. And it was black, and the fire near to out” (199), in what is most probably a reference to Hemingway’s narrative divisions for “Big-Two Hearted River”—inexplicable to the reading public unless, of course, one considers Hemingway’s desire to incorporate all of the vignettes from ''in our time''. Here, Mailer apparently has a little joke at Hemingway’s expense, breaking up the narrative but then actually drawing attention to the break by juxtaposing the two chapters with no Intro Beep between them, using conjunctions to show they should or could have been one, and positioning the final Intro Beep at the very end of the novel, the way that Hemingway ended his book. By so doing, Mailer engages in an intertextual dialogue with his literary “papa,” as he does with other literary forebears in the interlocutory sections.

from the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer: ‘Give peace in our

time, O Lord’” (5)—Mailer took the title of an address that President Lyndon Johnson gave at Johns Hopkins University in the spring of 1965 (“Why We Are inVietnam”), in which Johnson presented his case for American involvement, then turned Johnson’s explanatory title into a question . . .which, of course, it was becoming by the spring of 1966 when Mailer began ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' Why was America in Vietnam, and more importantly,

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of their respective limitations” (45-46)—which helps to explain why the

bestselling novel to come out of the Vietnam War era wasn’t any of the realistic accounts that generated support for the anti-war movement, but rather Robin Moore’s ''The Green Berets,'' published in 1965. This flag-waving novel that lionized the Special Forces reached Number 5 on the bestseller list in hardcover, and when it appeared in paperback that same year, “buyers at drugstore racks made it what ''80 Years of Best-Sellers'' calls‘ the phenomenon of the year, with 1,200,000 printed in only two months,’” Hellman writes. It inspired former Green Beret Barry Sadler to record his “Ballad of the Green Berets,” which vaulted to Number 1 on the Billboard charts and “reportedly induced so many enlistments of young men hoping to become Green Berets that the Selective Service was able to suspend draft calls during the first four months of 1966” (Hellman 53).