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| {{quote|Mailer’s writings explicitly state the terms of the modern revolt against conventional society. It is very different from past liter- ary rebellions: it begins in the instinctual life, and it is free both from established conventions and ideological complications. Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s favorite hero, as a personality stands at the opposite pole from Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. He acts independently of all the inhibitions which allowed Prufrock to postpone action; his major impulse is both to murder and to create, to express passion through instinctive acts. He is the “marginal ego,” the dislocated and “disaffiliated” self, who tries to make a way of life from the energy and strategy of pure re- bellion.{{sfn|Hoffman|p=12}}
| | Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous character, Humbert Humbert, suggests that we possess “only words to play with”{{sfn|Appel|1972|p=456}}.Indeed we do—mere words. Yet, using such frail and fallible words, employing flawed humanity and literary genius, these authors transformed personal angst into great art—creating works that shall abide, like Mount Kilimanjaro. In so doing, each has revealed to us genuine truth—a truth that may speak to our flawed but mutual humanity. |
| In a recent article, Alex Hicks has made a strong case that we should see Advertisements as Mailer’s Künstlerroman or artist-novel—similar in scope to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and other examples. His the- sis is “that Advertisements for Myself is better appreciated as a novelistic au- tobiography than as an anthology-like collection of writings,” and he finds support for this view from Bloom, Frye, Jonathan Lethem and many others (Advertisements). The quotation from Lethem is particularly powerful, “Ad- vertisements for Myself is Mailer’s greatest book, simply because it frames the drama of the construction of this voice, the thrilling resurrection of his per- sonality as his greatest asset after the public pratfalls accompanying his sec- ond and third novels”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=14}}.Lethem saw Mailer “in the late fifties to have become a radar detector for the onset of . . . the post-modern cultural condition generally”
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Latest revision as of 21:37, 28 February 2021
Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous character, Humbert Humbert, suggests that we possess “only words to play with”.Indeed we do—mere words. Yet, using such frail and fallible words, employing flawed humanity and literary genius, these authors transformed personal angst into great art—creating works that shall abide, like Mount Kilimanjaro. In so doing, each has revealed to us genuine truth—a truth that may speak to our flawed but mutual humanity.
