User:CDucharme/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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What are we to make of a carefully wrought fictional scene in which the Hitlers, before young Adi even comes into the world, adventure past ordinary naughty sex into pedal-to-the-metal analingus? In foregrounding sex acts of this sort in a book purportedly about radical evil, Mailer risks being discussed in terms of radical eccentricity.{{efn|Ron Rosenbaum, author of ''Explaining Hitler'',, warns Mailer against pursuing, in a rumored sequel to ''The Castle in the Forest'', a sexual explanation of Hitler’s evil. See his essay “The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer” for a convincing admonition about the limits of psycho-sexual explanations of Hitler.}} Or, one could say that approaching radical evil through sexual obscenity is artistically obscene. However we put it, the novel intentionally jars the reader just as much as ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), and the central narrative device of ''that'' novel was an act of fellatio between two ghosts in a tomb. Here is the sex act between Alois and Klara that Mailer’s young Hitler witnesses: We may remember that the last time we saw Alois, he was burying his nose and lips in Klara’s vulva, his tongue as long and demonic as a devil’s phallus. (Be it said: we are not without our contributions to these arts.) Alois was certainly being aided by us. Never before had he given himself so completely to this exercise, and quickly he had become good at it, and so quickly that no explanation is possible unless we are given credit as well. (Which is why we speak of the Evil One when joining in the act—we do have the power to pass these lubricious gifts to men and women even when we are not attempting to convert them into clients.) (98)

What shall we make of this? One possible response will be to link Mailer’s use of the Holocaust with that of Sylvia Plath. One could say each author uses the pain of others to provide historical ballast to pain that is really individual. It would be the height of egotism to use the deaths of six million in order to hide the idiosyncrasy of one’s pain or the eccentricity of one’s ideas.

What shall we make of this? One possible response will be to link Mailer’s use of the Holocaust with that of Sylvia Plath.{{efn|See Gubar for a discussion of attacks on Plath for reducing the Holocaust to a metaphor.}} One could say each author uses the pain of others to provide historical ballast to pain that is really individual. It would be the height of egotism to use the deaths of six million in order to hide the idiosyncrasy of one’s pain or the eccentricity of one’s ideas.

Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. He consistently presented himself as an author with an important vision, one worthy of “the mind of Joyce” or Melville, since the mid-1950s, and critics debated whether he ever wrote his ''Ulysses'' or ''Moby Dick''. Mailer’s personal ambition, however, was never in question.

The cosmological vision has been reiterated in all of Mailer’s major works, including ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (1991), and ''The Gospel according to the Son'' (1997). In each of these novel’s (if we allow for ''The Executioner’s Song'' as a “nonfiction novel”), the struggle between divine forces explains the relation between apparently insignificant actors in ways that factor out what Mailer calls “the Absurd.” The divinity potential of quotidian existence is the binding material in Mailer’s cosmos, with “divinity” meaning extraordinary, magical, and foundational. The experience of the divine overlaps with the extraordinary in the manner of aesthetic wonder, and this commonality allows Mailer to find God in the aesthetic aspects of sexual experience, but the divine must be more than ''merely'' extraordinary. The experience of divinity, which some people achieve and many do not, transcends ordinary experience, meaning that, in Mailer’s Romantic articulation, there is a hierarchy of knowing, and that only some (heroic) persons are able to glimpse the magical foundations of being. Such a vision requires huge risks, which explains why many would prefer not to see what Mailer’s heroic seers may encounter, and those who take such risks are not necessarily good people.

The cosmological vision has been reiterated in all of Mailer’s major works, including ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (1991), and ''The Gospel according to the Son'' (1997).{{efn|See Lennon’s “Mailer’s Cosmology” for a discussion of Mailer’s cosmological foundation, which is relatively stable across the decades from the mid-Sixties through Mailer’s final work.}} In each of these novel’s (if we allow for ''The Executioner’s Song'' as a “nonfiction novel”), the struggle between divine forces explains the relation between apparently insignificant actors in ways that factor out what Mailer calls “the Absurd.” The divinity potential of quotidian existence is the binding material in Mailer’s cosmos, with “divinity” meaning extraordinary, magical, and foundational. The experience of the divine overlaps with the extraordinary in the manner of aesthetic wonder, and this commonality allows Mailer to find God in the aesthetic aspects of sexual experience, but the divine must be more than ''merely'' extraordinary. The experience of divinity, which some people achieve and many do not, transcends ordinary experience, meaning that, in Mailer’s Romantic articulation, there is a hierarchy of knowing, and that only some (heroic) persons are able to glimpse the magical foundations of being. Such a vision requires huge risks, which explains why many would prefer not to see what Mailer’s heroic seers may encounter, and those who take such risks are not necessarily good people.

In ''Ancient Evenings'', which was composed during the Carter presidency, the weak, vacillating pharaoh Ramses IX must decide whether or not to trust the protagonist Menenhetet, a figure who has earned scorn in his attempts to accumulate visionary power through experiments with scatological ceremonies and incest. In this novel Mailer stages his idea that we must make “bargains with evil” into a historical setting that could be called “Before Good and Evil.” Mailer’s setting predates the monotheistic moral codes that undergird our language of morality, thus showing the Eurocentric view to be, in Chakrabarty’s terms, “provincial.” This incarnation of the Mailer vision is, then, radically Manichean, since the Egyptian gods are not centered by a transcendent notion of the Good, against which an evil force defines itself. One could, through cosmological backformation, interpret the theomachy between Osiris and Set as a war between good and evil. In any event, the nature of goodness is never really in question. Artistically modulated growth—a middle way between stagnation and the uncontrolled growth of cancer—has always been the sign of health in Mailer’s universe. Mailer’s praise of Osiris resonates exactly with the adaptations of John Dewey’s “live creature.”

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“Yessir.” (Harlot’s Ghost 340)

As George Bush put it in the wake of the 9/11 (2001) attack on the World Trade Center, you are either with us or you are against us. You are either with God or the Devil. The tendency and aim of such a formulation is to make everyone into a “yes-man,” just like the CIA analyst in the quotation above who quickly says “Yessir” to Harlot, Mailer’s architect of American postwar paranoia. In The Gospel according to the Son, Mailer resists the equal-and-opposite fallacy, argumentum ad Jesus, in which one identifies self-with-Jesus-with-Goodness. Mailer despises the ways in which the Bush White House rolls together what Dieter of The Castle in the Forest calls “cheap patriotism” and “cheap prayer” (386), but in ''The Gospel'' according to the Son Mailer wishes not to attack a “cheap” Jesus but to imagine an authentic one. Mailer’s authentic Jesus (as opposed to the authentic Jesus of mainstream Christians) is one who cannot know for sure what the effects of his actions will be. Though Jesus narrates his own gospel, Mailer denies us a text on which to build a fundamentalist worldview. Here is how Brian McDonald presents the narrative uncertainty in “Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the ‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel according to the Son”'': The story, Mailer’s Jesus reassures us, “is true,” but like a careful witness testifying under oath he is quick to add the caveat, “at least to all that I recall” (Gospel 2).

As George Bush put it in the wake of the 9/11 (2001) attack on the World Trade Center, you are either with us or you are against us. You are either with God or the Devil. The tendency and aim of such a formulation is to make everyone into a “yes-man,” just like the CIA analyst in the quotation above who quickly says “Yessir” to Harlot, Mailer’s architect of American postwar paranoia. In The Gospel according to the Son, Mailer resists the equal-and-opposite fallacy, argumentum ad Jesus, in which one identifies self-with-Jesus-with-Goodness. Mailer despises the ways in which the Bush White House rolls together what Dieter of The Castle in the Forest calls “cheap patriotism” and “cheap prayer” (386), but in ''The Gospel'' according to the Son Mailer wishes not to attack a “cheap” Jesus but to imagine an authentic one.{{efn|See ''Why Are We at War?'' if you doubt Mailer despises the mentality and policies of the Bush administration.}} Mailer’s authentic Jesus (as opposed to the authentic Jesus of mainstream Christians) is one who cannot know for sure what the effects of his actions will be. Though Jesus narrates his own gospel, Mailer denies us a text on which to build a fundamentalist worldview. Here is how Brian McDonald presents the narrative uncertainty in “Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the ‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel according to the Son”'': The story, Mailer’s Jesus reassures us, “is true,” but like a careful witness testifying under oath he is quick to add the caveat, “at least to all that I recall” (Gospel 2).

Mailer’s critics ravaged him for presuming to write in the voice of Jesus, and Mailer clearly anticipates the charge when he has ''his'' Jesus say with nice condescension that the four synoptic gospels were good as far as they went, but they went too far. Mailer’s novelistic hubris, if it should be called that, is in presuming to know the views of God and the Devil and everything in between, but it is presumptuous of the critic to assume that Mailer is ever unaware of the effects of ego, as it is an important theme in all of the “epic” works here discussed: When one has become an overseer of death who holds the power to liquidate masses of people, one is also in great need of a very hard shell to the ego in order to feel no intimate horror over the price to one’s soul. Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification—patriotism! That is still the most dependable instrument for guiding the masses, although it may yet be replaced by revealed religion. We love fundamentalists. Their faith offers us every promise of developing into the final weapon of mass destruction. (405–406)

Dieter provocatively ranks Hitler as a “statesmen,” thus restating the A. J. P. Taylor argument that Hitler would have been counted a great statesmen if only he had died at the right time, but the honorific word is inverted when we see, in context, that the necessary condition for being a statesman is an ego, a psychic callous to protect one’s sleep from meaningful knowledge of one’s actions. When Dieter stirs in “patriotism” and fundamentalism, it becomes clear that Mailer’s Hitler has been used as a “cudgel” to beat George W. Bush, a president who has been most politely described as “incurious” regarding the facts of the world. “Cudgel,” in ''The Castle in the Forest'', is the name devils such as Dieter give to the Angels, who cause beings pain in their sleep when their actions are hateful rather than loving.

Dieter provocatively ranks Hitler as a “statesmen,” thus restating the A. J. P. Taylor argument that Hitler would have been counted a great statesmen if only he had died at the right time, but the honorific word is inverted when we see, in context, that the necessary condition for being a statesman is an ego, a psychic callous to protect one’s sleep from meaningful knowledge of one’s actions.{{efn|Readers would be wrong to assume that Mailer is agreeing with A. J. P. Taylor. It is part of Dieter’s worldview and it is in his personal interest to defend the kind of egotism that is an insulation against subtle awareness of the feelings of others. Lest we think—as his typical detractors certainly would—that Mailer is defending egotism of this sort, we should recall the image of Ramses II after the Battle of Kadesh, the pharaoh taking care to heft every single amputated hand of the vanquished Hittite soldiers while the rest of the army enjoy the spoils of war in the most libidinal way. Mailer’s Ramses II is, in this one respect at least, the ethical antipode to contemporary leaders who, according to Dieter’s own political realism, must ''necessarily'' shield themselves from awareness of the consequences of their actions.}} When Dieter stirs in “patriotism” and fundamentalism, it becomes clear that Mailer’s Hitler has been used as a “cudgel” to beat George W. Bush, a president who has been most politely described as “incurious” regarding the facts of the world.{{efn|Cenk Uygur, a blogger from ''The Huffington Post'', has entitled his column on President

Bush’s lack of curiosity “The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush.”}} “Cudgel,” in ''The Castle in the Forest'', is the name devils such as Dieter give to the Angels, who cause beings pain in their sleep when their actions are hateful rather than loving.

Antithetical elements call attention to one another, reminding readers of nothing so much as the presence of the author himself. Think back to Mailer’s character Roth in ''The Naked and the Dead'', and of Stephen Richards Rojack walking the parapet in ''An American Dream''. Mailer’s writings are full of intentional impasses and voracious chasms. Readers who cannot make the leap will quickly fly from the page and declare Mailer unreadable. How are we to make the leap from the pure (if uncertain) speech of Jesus back to the vulva of Hitler’s mother? Mailer’s narratives are visionary landscapes designed to engulf some readers while allowing others the chance to develop in admittedly idiosyncratic ways—but it is a mindless response to note Mailer’s stylistic self-reference without noting the antipodal contextualization of his stylistic “egotism.”

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In genuinely frightening ways that inter-leaven the literary and the wicked, Mailer exacerbates our moral consciences; American literature has not been as darkly funny since Twain’s ''Letters from the Earth''. Twain’s and Mailer’s are good stories, and deep!

Mailer’s laughter in The Castle in the Forest is not the raucous, adolescent laughter of America’s 1960s black humor fiction, a laughter that is always implicitly the laughter of an overly stable know-it-all we. We laugh at the bureaucrats in ''Catch-22''. There’s an unsettling oddity to Mailer’s style, though, an awareness that, like Dieter’s, Mailer’s humor is both on the mark and a bit to one side of the main stream of events. Mailer does not pretend to be in the ethical center, and the rude, cruel, and invasive qualities of his “diabolical” narrative technique are, he will not let us forget, essential elements in our own conventional mind-set. The castle in Mailer’s forest, the redemptive beauty that makes the pain and failures of such unappreciated masterpieces as Ancient Evenings and The Castle in the Forest bearable, is always a repetition and ever-free variation of a cavalier wit. As it is in the moment in which Adolf tortures his brother with literature, Mailer’s humor is genuinely funny and, at exactly the same time, resoundingly grim. Put- ting his own idea that our best is often closest to our worst into the mouth of Himmler, Mailer turns into the pain of his own humor and allows—encourages, actually—the nasty identifications his harshest critics made of himself and his work, that he was violent and cruel and “patriarchal” in the sense in which patriarchy is a synonym for Fascism. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to this cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably ''alone''.

Mailer’s laughter in The Castle in the Forest is not the raucous, adolescent laughter of America’s 1960s black humor fiction, a laughter that is always implicitly the laughter of an overly stable know-it-all ''we''.{{efn|One could say that Yossarian is a character who must act from isolation even when he crucially chooses to act for the sake of others, but I would still characterize the laughter aroused by the novel as more social. This we carried over quite smoothly

from the novel to the film ''M*A*S*H'' and to the buddy-scenarios of the television version as well. Consider the narrative situation of ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'', Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo narrative: however iconoclastic and anarchic the voice of Raoul Duke, this road novel depends for it’s effects on internalizing the “we,” so Duke is accompanied by Dr. Gonzo, his Samoan attorney (who is based on Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Mexican-American political activist). If we look through ''Castle'' carefully, we will see that Mailer has, again and again, done without the protections of an imaginary men’s club.}} We laugh at the bureaucrats in ''Catch-22''. There’s an unsettling oddity to Mailer’s style, though, an awareness that, like Dieter’s, Mailer’s humor is both on the mark and a bit to one side of the main stream of events. Mailer does not pretend to be in the ethical center, and the rude, cruel, and invasive qualities of his “diabolical” narrative technique are, he will not let us forget, essential elements in our own conventional mind-set. The castle in Mailer’s forest, the redemptive beauty that makes the pain and failures of such unappreciated masterpieces as Ancient Evenings and The Castle in the Forest bearable, is always a repetition and ever-free variation of a cavalier wit. As it is in the moment in which Adolf tortures his brother with literature, Mailer’s humor is genuinely funny and, at exactly the same time, resoundingly grim. Put- ting his own idea that our best is often closest to our worst into the mouth of Himmler, Mailer turns into the pain of his own humor and allows—encourages, actually—the nasty identifications his harshest critics made of himself and his work, that he was violent and cruel and “patriarchal” in the sense in which patriarchy is a synonym for Fascism. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to this cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably ''alone''.{{efn|None of this article could have been written if I had not been told the joke about lawyers and sharks by Professor Winfried “the Hun” Schleiner of UC Davis twenty years ago.}}

===Notes===