The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Jive-Ass Aficionado: Why Are We in Vietnam? and Hemingway's Moral Code: Difference between revisions

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 language play as we saw in ''Ulysses'', all tinged with the “color” that put "Ulysses" on trial in America for obscenity. But Mailer’s novel is also richly evocative of that other great modernist writer, Ernest Hemingway.
-Hemingway was conspicuously singled-out with a few adjectives when Mailer told an interviewer six years earlier that if he has “one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read” (''Conversations'' 76).A close reading reveals
+Hemingway was conspicuously singled-out with a few adjectives when Mailer told an interviewer six years earlier that if he has “one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read” (''Conversations'' 76){{sfn|Hemingway|1986}}.A close reading reveals
 that Why Are We in Vietnam? may actually be that novel, but I’ll leave it to future critics to explore how it would have appealed to the sensibilities of the other writers mentioned. I’m going to focus on Hemingway, because apart from echoes of Joyce’s style, his influence here seems most prevalent.
-As Laura Adams observes, “three of the most powerful influences on Mailer’s scheme of things have been war and Ernest Hemingway and the intersection of the two” (173){{sfn|Mailer|1976}}. Mailer told an interviewer that Hemingway’s death made him feel “a little weaker” (''Conversations'' 71), no doubt because he had felt a connection. Like Hemingway, Mailer wrote about boxing, he
+As Laura Adams observes, “three of the most powerful influences on Mailer’s scheme of things have been war and Ernest Hemingway and the intersection of the two” (173){{sfn|Mailer|1976}}. Mailer told an interviewer that Hemingway’s death made him feel “a little weaker” (''Conversations'' 71){{sfn|Hemingway|1986}}, no doubt because he had felt a connection. Like Hemingway, Mailer wrote about boxing, he
 wrote about bullfighting, he talked tough, he hung out with tough friends, he went to war, he wrote about war, he backed the underdog, he infuriated feminist#{{pg|194|195}}
-take special delight in writing fiction that shocked readers or showcased his “insider” knowledge. “Hemingway and Fitzgerald are important imaginative figures in my life,” Mailer told the ''Washington Post Book World'' in 1971, explaining that “in Hemingway and Fitzgerald, it’s the sensuous evocation of things. The effect on the gut is closer to poetry” (''Conversations'' 189).
+take special delight in writing fiction that shocked readers or showcased his “insider” knowledge. “Hemingway and Fitzgerald are important imaginative figures in my life,” Mailer told the ''Washington Post Book World'' in 1971, explaining that “in Hemingway and Fitzgerald, it’s the sensuous evocation of things. The effect on the gut is closer to poetry” (''Conversations'' 189){{sfn|Hemingway|1986}}.
 ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' Mailer seems to have borrowed a number of
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 <blockquote>I, D.J., am trapped in a Harlem head which has gone so crazy that I think I am sitting at a banquet in the Dallas ass white-ass manse remembering Alaska am in fact a figment of a Spade gone ape in the mind from outrageous frustrates wasting him and so now living in an imaginary white brain. . . .(Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' 58)</blockquote>{{pg|196|pg 197}}
 As Adams notes,“Although D.J. can ‘see right through shit’[49], he is not
-emancipated (he is only a ‘presumptive philosopher’[93], and the reader has no alternative but to confront the narrative’s white noise” (127). Hemingway famously remarked, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it” (Hemingway, ''Conversations'' 128). Though D.J. has enough “radar” to make connections between corporate power,“yes men,” sexual acts, hunting, power-brokering, commercialism, and politics, he seems as affected by society’s white noise as he hopes his own “broadcasts” will be on readers, listeners, anyone within psychic earshot. And his voice deliberately shifts so many times that it is hard for anyone to get a “fix” on him. Hemingway’s In Our Time, not coincidentally, produced a similar effect. Michael Reynolds puts it best: “Eliot used so many voices in The Wasteland that it was hard to say when he was speaking. When Hemingwayfinished in our time, he achieved something of the same effect” (125). The same is true with D.J., whose narrative voice encompasses a disc jockey’s Hipster talk and bemused take on society, philosophical riffs from a deep thinker, more standard narration, and anger-fueled rants that suggest a
+emancipated (he is only a ‘presumptive philosopher’[93], and the reader has no alternative but to confront the narrative’s white noise” (127). Hemingway famously remarked, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it” (Hemingway, ''Conversations'' 128){{sfn|Hemingway|1986}}. Though D.J. has enough “radar” to make connections between corporate power,“yes men,” sexual acts, hunting, power-brokering, commercialism, and politics, he seems as affected by society’s white noise as he hopes his own “broadcasts” will be on readers, listeners, anyone within psychic earshot. And his voice deliberately shifts so many times that it is hard for anyone to get a “fix” on him. Hemingway’s In Our Time, not coincidentally, produced a similar effect. Michael Reynolds puts it best: “Eliot used so many voices in The Wasteland that it was hard to say when he was speaking. When Hemingwayfinished in our time, he achieved something of the same effect” (125). The same is true with D.J., whose narrative voice encompasses a disc jockey’s Hipster talk and bemused take on society, philosophical riffs from a deep thinker, more standard narration, and anger-fueled rants that suggest a
 disturbed side we suspect will come out in full flower once D.J. finds himself in Vietnam: “That’s how they talk in the East, up in those bone Yankee ass Jew circumcised prick Wall Street palaces—take it from D.J.—he got psychic transistors in his ear (one more gift of the dying griz) which wingding on all-out pickup each set of transcontinental dialogues from the hearts of the prissy-assed and the prigged. Fungatz, radatz, and back to piss” (Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' 151). Yet, the more he gets close to his father or describes the hunt in detail, the more D.J. settles into a less provocative, more evocative narration that comes closer to a standard issue voice, if there is such a thing:
 <blockquote>On and on they go for half an hour, talking so close that D.J.can even get familiar with Rusty’s breath which is all right.It got a hint of middle-aged fatigue of twenty years of doing all the little things body did not want to do, that flat sour of the slightly used up, and there’s a hint of garlic or onion, and tobacco, and twenty years of booze gives a little permanent rot to the odor coming off the lining of the stomach. . . . (133)</blockquote>{{pg|197|198}}