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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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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). 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). 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
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 feminists, he was suspicious of governmental structures, and he seemed to
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#|195#}}
{{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).


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That’s exactly how Why Are We in Vietnam? is structured with similar effects that it has on the reader. Just as Hemingway’s short stories focused onNick and the personal lives of people “in his time,”while the vignettes served as newspaper-headline reminders of the violent, larger world that was affecting individual psyches, so, too, Mailer’s highly personalized and detailed narrative of sixteen-year-old D.J.’s hunting trip with his father, his father’s business associates, and his best friend Tex in the rugged Brooks Range of Alaska is intercut with “Intro Beeps” that serve the same function and add “rhythm” as did Hemingway’s vignettes. The chapters in ''Why Are We in''
That’s exactly how Why Are We in Vietnam? is structured with similar effects that it has on the reader. Just as Hemingway’s short stories focused onNick and the personal lives of people “in his time,”while the vignettes served as newspaper-headline reminders of the violent, larger world that was affecting individual psyches, so, too, Mailer’s highly personalized and detailed narrative of sixteen-year-old D.J.’s hunting trip with his father, his father’s business associates, and his best friend Tex in the rugged Brooks Range of Alaska is intercut with “Intro Beeps” that serve the same function and add “rhythm” as did Hemingway’s vignettes. The chapters in ''Why Are We in''
{{pg|195|196#}}
{{pg|195 #|196 #}}
''Vietnam?'' focus on the story of the hunting trip, while the Intro Beeps are digressively vocal ''tour de forces'' that give Mailer the chance to evoke a broader world by allowing D.J. the freedom to rant about things outside the constraints of narrative. For one thing, the Intro Beeps feature the narrator as an eighteen-year-old, so there is a broader prospective already involved. D.J. at eighteen is wiser than D.J. at sixteen, who is recalled in the main narrative. In the Intro Beeps D.J. thinks and “speaks” in an even more pronounced stream-of-consciousness while at a dinner party his parents throw for him the night before he and Tex are scheduled to ship out to fight in Vietnam. It is in these numbered Intro Beeps where D.J., unfettered by storytelling, can rant and ramble about more general and abstract topics like the teachings of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher who warned that the media and the constant bombardment of pop culture messages would have a deleterious effect on the human condition (Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' 8).
''Vietnam?'' focus on the story of the hunting trip, while the Intro Beeps are digressively vocal ''tour de forces'' that give Mailer the chance to evoke a broader world by allowing D.J. the freedom to rant about things outside the constraints of narrative. For one thing, the Intro Beeps feature the narrator as an eighteen-year-old, so there is a broader prospective already involved. D.J. at eighteen is wiser than D.J. at sixteen, who is recalled in the main narrative. In the Intro Beeps D.J. thinks and “speaks” in an even more pronounced stream-of-consciousness while at a dinner party his parents throw for him the night before he and Tex are scheduled to ship out to fight in Vietnam. It is in these numbered Intro Beeps where D.J., unfettered by storytelling, can rant and ramble about more general and abstract topics like the teachings of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher who warned that the media and the constant bombardment of pop culture messages would have a deleterious effect on the human condition (Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' 8).
It is these big-picture concerns that surface mostly in the Intro Beeps and do indeed remind the reader of a world outside the hunting narrative of the novel, just as listening to a radio dee-jay makes one aware of the source and also other listeners—a “broadcast” that is simultaneously reaching a larger world. And that in itself can be unsettling. “As D.J. suggests,” one critic observes, “society acts as a kind ofsuccubus upon the unconscious of Americans so that ‘you never know what vision has been humping you through the night’” (Wenke 123).
It is these big-picture concerns that surface mostly in the Intro Beeps and do indeed remind the reader of a world outside the hunting narrative of the novel, just as listening to a radio dee-jay makes one aware of the source and also other listeners—a “broadcast” that is simultaneously reaching a larger world. And that in itself can be unsettling. “As D.J. suggests,” one critic observes, “society acts as a kind ofsuccubus upon the unconscious of Americans so that ‘you never know what vision has been humping you through the night’” (Wenke 123).
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now living in an imaginary white brain. . . .(Mailer, ''Why Are We
now living in an imaginary white brain. . . .(Mailer, ''Why Are We
in Vietnam?'' 58)
in Vietnam?'' 58)
{{pg|196 #|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 Hemingway
finished 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 lit�tle 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)
{{pg|197 #|198 #}}
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