The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare: Difference between revisions
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{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>''An American Dream'': The Singular Nightmare}} | {{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>''An American Dream'': The Singular Nightmare}} | ||
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{{Byline|last=Kaufmann|first=Donald L.|abstract=Mailer’s fourth novel can be read as sardonic social criticism and a dramatic critique on those nuances underlining the ambiguous values in contemporary America, on those individual roots of American aspirations and ideals. For Mailer, the collective ideal is a civilized composite of everyone’s primitive desires.{{efn|Reprinted by permission of the author. From {{cite book |last=Kaufmann |first=Donald L. |date=1969 |title=Norman Mailer: The Countdown |url= |location=Carbondale, IL |publisher=Southern Illinois UP |pages=35–50 |isbn= |author-link= }} }}|url=https://prmlr.us/ | {{Byline|last=Kaufmann|first=Donald L.|abstract=Mailer’s fourth novel can be read as sardonic social criticism and a dramatic critique on those nuances underlining the ambiguous values in contemporary America, on those individual roots of American aspirations and ideals. For Mailer, the collective ideal is a civilized composite of everyone’s primitive desires.{{efn|Reprinted by permission of the author. From {{cite book |last=Kaufmann |first=Donald L. |date=1969 |title=Norman Mailer: The Countdown |url= |location=Carbondale, IL |publisher=Southern Illinois UP |pages=35–50 |isbn= |author-link= }} }}|url=https://prmlr.us/mr01kau}} | ||
{{dc|dc=N|ew directions, even in Mailer’s fiction — }}“''An American Dream'' is a departure from practically anything I have done before.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|}} — contain vestiges of the old, and Mailer’s fourth novel can be read (as most critics and reviewers have done) as sardonic social criticism. National ideals seem under attack, as New York, Jack Kennedy, Las Vegas, Marilyn Monroe impart a satiric tone to Rojack’s dream. Just before his encounter with Barney Oswald Kelly, the current tycoon, Rojack enters the Waldorf and sees “a nineteenth-century clock, eight feet high with a bas relief of faces: Franklin, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Washington, Grant, Harrison, and Victoria; 1888 the year.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=207}} At such times, the theme of national dream turned nightmare seems as obvious as the title suggests. It instead is an outgrowth of Mailer’s great admiration of Dreiser’s ''An American Tragedy'' which represents (in Mailer’s words) an “end of a period” or “a way of looking at things.” If rewritten for the contemporary milieu, Dreiser’s book would “no longer be a tragedy; it would be a dream,” because in the last forty years, there has been a “transition in consciousness in the character of our times” which has “moved us from the state of the tragedy to the state of the dream.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|}} Here Mailer is paraphrasing an earlier idea: “there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1963|p=38}} | |||
Mailer’s ''An American Dream'' does not focus on the gross Dream of an America crisscrossed with telephone wires and television antennas, whose fad of the Sixties is the conquest of the moon. Rather Mailer’s novel, based on total cultural delicacies, is a dramatic critique on those nuances underlining the ambiguous values in contemporary America, on those individual roots of American aspirations and ideals. And what results are peculiar inversions — for does not every American male, lulled by mass media sex and violence, secretly wish to commit incest or murder his wife? Such individual fantasies become nightmares when interpreted by the cultural norm. For Mailer, the collective ideal is a civilized composite of everyone’s primitive desires. The American Dream becomes another cultural mode of regimenting the individual, of rarefying and stultifying his true nature. To exist in one’s own dream world is to avoid having one’s ideals institutionalized. Mailer’s fourth novel isolates one such dream. As his protagonist acts out his dream, the reader can see what stuff American dreams are made of — all the magic of murder and sex and a one-way trip to the moon. | Mailer’s ''An American Dream'' does not focus on the gross Dream of an America crisscrossed with telephone wires and television antennas, whose fad of the Sixties is the conquest of the moon. Rather Mailer’s novel, based on total cultural delicacies, is a dramatic critique on those nuances underlining the ambiguous values in contemporary America, on those individual roots of American aspirations and ideals. And what results are peculiar inversions — for does not every American male, lulled by mass media sex and violence, secretly wish to commit incest or murder his wife? Such individual fantasies become nightmares when interpreted by the cultural norm. For Mailer, the collective ideal is a civilized composite of everyone’s primitive desires. The American Dream becomes another cultural mode of regimenting the individual, of rarefying and stultifying his true nature. To exist in one’s own dream world is to avoid having one’s ideals institutionalized. Mailer’s fourth novel isolates one such dream. As his protagonist acts out his dream, the reader can see what stuff American dreams are made of — all the magic of murder and sex and a one-way trip to the moon. | ||
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Symbolic telephone calls extend throughout Rojack’s dream. The “catenary” appears early: “So I went into an outdoor booth, and shivering in the trapped cold air, I phoned her apartment. She was home,”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=19}} At the beginning, Rojack’s phone call to Deborah results in murder, an extreme physical act to show the possibilities of damnation or exposure inherent in external manners. At the end, Rojack’s phone call to Cherry (not “in the trapped cold air” but in desert heat) results in freedom, an extreme spiritual act to show the possibilities of salvation or survival inherent in internal manners. “In a funny way,” ''An American Dream'' is a novel of manners in which a morality of murder is internalized. Rojack can not be confused with the American Adam in a drawingroom; but, at least, he can be confused with the American Cain escaping detection all the way from New York to Las Vegas. In either case, Rojack’s higher quest (his “secret frightened romance with the phases of the moon”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=7}}) between nightmare and dream will continue. ''An American Dream''’s real denouement will occur far out of America, somewhere between the moon and Yucatan. | Symbolic telephone calls extend throughout Rojack’s dream. The “catenary” appears early: “So I went into an outdoor booth, and shivering in the trapped cold air, I phoned her apartment. She was home,”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=19}} At the beginning, Rojack’s phone call to Deborah results in murder, an extreme physical act to show the possibilities of damnation or exposure inherent in external manners. At the end, Rojack’s phone call to Cherry (not “in the trapped cold air” but in desert heat) results in freedom, an extreme spiritual act to show the possibilities of salvation or survival inherent in internal manners. “In a funny way,” ''An American Dream'' is a novel of manners in which a morality of murder is internalized. Rojack can not be confused with the American Adam in a drawingroom; but, at least, he can be confused with the American Cain escaping detection all the way from New York to Las Vegas. In either case, Rojack’s higher quest (his “secret frightened romance with the phases of the moon”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=7}}) between nightmare and dream will continue. ''An American Dream''’s real denouement will occur far out of America, somewhere between the moon and Yucatan. | ||
==Note== | ===Note=== | ||
{{Notelist}} | {{Notelist}} | ||
==Citations== | ===Citations=== | ||
{{Reflist|20em}} | {{Reflist|20em}} | ||
==References== | ===References=== | ||
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}} | {{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dial Press |page= |isbn= |author-link=Norman Mailer |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dial Press |page= |isbn= |author-link=Norman Mailer |ref=harv }} | ||