The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/A New Politics of Form in Harlot's Ghost: Difference between revisions

My essay offers a reading of the novel in relation to Mailer’s efforts to use fiction writing to reveal contradictions at the heart of American society and challenge American ideology, particularly in relation to the Cold War, while offering an explanation for the unorthodox formal features. In contrast to

most critics who have written on the novel, I believe that ''Harlot’s Ghost'' presents a fierce indictment of America during the Cold War and after, which is intensified by the unconventional form.{{efn|3. I would place this novel alongside masterpieces of Cold War literature such as Coover, Doctorow and Delillo below. All of these novels challenge the conventions of traditional literary realism and present radical formal structures.}} Indeed, I hope to show that the novel’s importance and significance, the truth it tells about American society, lies in what might appear its utter failure, both as a novel and a judgment on the history and politics, namely the way the novel fails to cohere as a novel. The novel refuses overt judgments on the events narrated. Paradoxical as it may seem, I will argue that the ''failure'' of traditional novelistic form and resolution creates a dialectic between reader and text allowing important revelations about American society to emerge which make the novel a success in telling the “truth of our times.” The truths revealed are precisely that the issues of the novel, which concern the meaning of the Cold War and the struggle between capitalism and its challenges, are not over and that instead of “the end of history” (to use Francis Fukiyama’s famous

phrase) we are still plunged into unresolved history. Therefore, the novel’s form and its political and social content are unified in their challenge to the dominant societal narratives about America and how these narratives are traditionally told.