Mythic Mailer in An American Dream: Difference between revisions

No one knows exactly where myth originates. The aesthetic beauty of the ancient Greek and Roman myths attests to human beings' desire to create meaning and harmony in our existence. This need arises from our deepest emotions (Cassirer 24). Different degrees of emotion lead to multiple levels of myth. Chase categorizes them in three ways: folktales and folklore, legends, and "the myth proper, an explanation or dramatization of nature or society" (36). A modem myth would most easily incorporate this last category because the word "modern" implies a break from the past, whereas folktales and legends are often ties to the past.

''<u>An American Dream</u>'' is a dramatization of 20th-century New York City. This intensely urban conglomerate talks on mythic dimensions as the setting for Mailer's mythic dialectic: the existential strengths of good and evil. Chase addresses the need for mythic literature to encompass this dialectic: "the creative artist must recapture a certain magical quality, a richness of imagery, a deeper sense of primeval forces, a larger order of aesthetic experience" (110). In ''<u>An American Dream</u>'', Mailer develops a modern myth which incorporates all these elements. By placing Rojack in New York City, Mailer puts his hero in a well-known urban area. This setting creates an antithetical environment from which Rojack can flee towards the ultimate spatial end, the jungles of South America. Tony Tanner emphasizes Mailer's incorporation of metaphor in the settings:

<blockquote>Although the novel takes place in contemporary America, through the use of metaphor it opens on to every kind of presocial reality--the Jungle, the forest, the desert, the swamp, the ocean-bed. This metaphorical activity in the writing is so insistent that it provides a dimension of experience as real as that provided by the very detailed documentation of settings and scenes in contemporary New York. (358)</blockquote>

The setting in which Rojack conducts his battle delineates the quality of his materialistic life, successful by contemporary New York City standards. New York City is often considered by New Yorkers, at least, ( and Mailer is one) to contain the essence of America. In ''<u>An American Dream</u>'', this essence is corrupt, so that Rojack is forced to flee the city and head West just as the pilgrims fled west from the stifling decadence of old Europe to the promise of the new land, America. In this country, New England has come to represent the old world. When Rojack heads West, he is seeking spiritual renewal in the innocence of our youngest region in terms of European settlement of the continent. In Missouri, a state from which 19th-century pilgrimages often started, he visits an old friend, a doctor, who invites him to observe an autopsy. The corpse is rotten and the gangrenous odor overwhelms Rojack. His description of the smell ominously echoes the rotten health of the country. The man had been suffering from cancer, to Rojack a disease synonymous with evil, but he had died from a secondary infection: