The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today: Difference between revisions
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This is not to imply that Mailer has abandoned his urgent message; practically all his obsessions of the 6o’s are here: sex, love, lust, heroism, cowardice, power, God, and the Devil. If Mailer has added anything new to his philosophy, it lies in the expansion of his idea as sexual freedom and it is expressed through the pimp Marion Faye, who “follows sex to the end, turns queer, bangs dogs, and sniffs toes.” But in the figure of Herman Teppis (or | This is not to imply that Mailer has abandoned his urgent message; practically all his obsessions of the 6o’s are here: sex, love, lust, heroism, cowardice, power, God, and the Devil. If Mailer has added anything new to his philosophy, it lies in the expansion of his idea as sexual freedom and it is expressed through the pimp Marion Faye, who “follows sex to the end, turns queer, bangs dogs, and sniffs toes.” But in the figure of Herman Teppis (or | ||
“H.T.”), a Hollywood mogul in the tradition of Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn, genuine humor replaces heavy rhetoric and caustic wit. In the desert of endless debates over who is—and who is not—a genius in bed, Teppis’s pronouncements are oases. | “H.T.”), a Hollywood mogul in the tradition of Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn, genuine humor replaces heavy rhetoric and caustic wit. In the desert of endless debates over who is—and who is not—a genius in bed, Teppis’s pronouncements are oases. | ||
{{quote|You know what an artist is? He's a crook. They even got a Frenchman now, you know what, he picks people’s pockets at society parties. They say he’s the greatest writer in France. No wonder they need a dictator, those crazy French. I could never get along with the French.}} | |||
But Mailer pays a price for his success in the comic mode. One laughs so hard at Teppis that one keeps right on laughing, even at the tortured, self-searching characters—spokesmen all for traditional Maileresque values—one is meant to take seriously. If there is a lesson to be learned from this play, it is that comedy may be suitable to many dramatic modes, including tragedy, but that it has no place at all in eschatological homily. | |||
After a pop play perhaps one should have expected, or at least have been prepared for, a pop novel from Mailer’s pen. Nevertheless, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' comes as a shock. Radical as the ideas contained in them may have been, Mailer’s earlier novels were more or less conservative in form: except for ''Barbary Shore'', they were all clearly in the mainstream of the realist-naturalist tradition. But in ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' ordered syntax has yielded to the total liberation of the word; intricate plot structure has given way to hallucinatory fantasy; fully realized characters living in what we know as the real world have been replaced by the protean apparitions in Mailer’s mind; the last trace of ratiocination has been obliterated by a relentless bombardment of sensual impressions and apocalyptic utterances. Dreiser and Farrell have disappeared in favor of Joyce, Faulkner, Burroughs, McLuhan, and Norman O. Brown. | |||
At one point or another virtually every theory Mailer has ever had appears—but now with an important difference. Rather than preaching his messages baldly as in the past, Mailer drops them mockingly. And the mockery is directed both at himself and at those he would edify. | |||
{{quote|The world is going shazam, hahray harout, fart in my toot, air we breathe is the prez, present dent, and god has always wanted more from man than man has wished to give him. Zig a zig a zig. That is why we live in dread of god.}} | |||
=== Notes === | === Notes === | ||
{{notelist}} | {{notelist}} | ||