User:NrmMGA5108/sandbox: Difference between revisions

In between vulgar recollections of sexual intercourse, Mailer exposes his narrator’s perspicacity with philosophical asides, most notably his diatribe on masculinity. After explaining failed plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, the narrator describes Hugh Tremont Montague, his boss and “guru in ‘’machismo’’” (196, Dec. 1988, emphasis original). Hugh’s hyper-masculinity reflects the “only spiritual art that American men and boys practice dependably”; the narrator claims that “we do not hope to peer into the pond of revelation so much as to pass through the iron gate of virility” (196, Dec. 1988). Hugh also happened to be married to Kittredge. When the narrator began his affair with Kittredge, he felt “like a hermit crab just moved into a more impressive carapace, and waiting to be dislodged” (196, Dec. 1988). Very high echelon in the CIA, Hugh worked with double and triple agents and participated in athletic activities. Hugh was a vision of virility until the narrator witnessed him “stove in at the waist,” after a rock-climbing accident (196, Dec. 1988). Seeing the man that gave him “life courses in grace under pressure” weakened and crying caused an “abrasion on the flesh of memory” (196, Dec. 1988). The narrator reacted to his boss’s demise by forcing his relationship with Kittredge to “climb from the dungeon of its inception” (196, Dec. 1988). The crippling of the narrator’s masculinity model “sentenced” him to maintain their relationship and drove him “spend hours slopping and sliding” on Chloe’s “overfriendly breasts” (197, Dec. 1988). Interspersing Hugh’s crumbling hypermasculinity with explicit sex scenes and intellectual commentary turns the narrator into a Hemingway code hero.

In order to maintain a sense of coherence within the narrator’s stream- of-consciousness, Mailer consistently returns to the icy road metaphor, making the short piece allegorical in nature. For the narrator, the dangers of driving on “a night as terrible as this—with sleet on the cusp of freezing” become inextricably linked with the dangers of monogamy (197, Dec. 1988). Toward the end of the story, the narrator “suddenly” realizes what he had been missing in his marriage: “a wife who could allow you to live not only with herself but with ten other women she could remind you of” (198, Dec. 1988). Mailer abruptly ends the piece with the narrator remembering his pledge of honesty to his wife. The narrator’s unknown plight must have left ‘’Playboy’’ readers questioning the validity of taking a vow, as well as the

slippery nature of conducting an affair. The story and its ending leave readers with a model of masculinity akin to ‘’Playboy’’’s model of an upwardly mobile, educated, heterosexual man.

In comparison to some of Hemingway’s fiction in which castrated heroes do not always abide by the code, Mailer’s ‘’Playboy’’ fiction offers a range of masculinity models for readers. According to Robert Caserio’s editorial introduction to the ‘’Journal of Modern Literature’’, Mailer’s later fiction represents a “‘queering’ of his picture of masculinity,” and the novel ‘’Ancient Evenings’’, in particular, suggests a “surrender and uncoupling” of Mailer’s ideas about masculinity and moral bravery (v, vi). In comparison to his 1960s works, like ‘’An American Dream and Why are We in Vietnam?, Ancient Evenings’’ deals with homosexuality in “tolerant and even erotic fashion” (Dearborn 121). The novel’s protagonist narrator, a eunuch in a large harem, is anally penetrated and the most politically powerful man in the novel “gave Himself up to the little queens as if He were a woman” (124, April 1983). In an interview with John Whalen-Bridge regarding his later works, Mailer admits that, until ‘’Ancient Evenings’’, he did not recognize homosexuality as “an element in all men” and has since come to understand homosexuality as “a bigger theme than [he] ever gave it credit for being” (vi). This change in views regarding sexuality suggests that Mailer revised his masculinist ideal in his later fiction and the ‘’Playboy’’ excerpt of ‘’Ancient Evenings’’ illustrates this revision. Magazine readers might have expected selections from the 700-page-plus novel to be more in line with ‘’Playboy’’’s heterosexual agenda, but Mailer chose to include scenes that deal with “a spectrum of male motivation leading from homosexuality to machismo” (Lennon 331). Within the ‘’Playboy’’ excerpts of ‘’Ancient Evenings’’, Mailer explores power relationships between men and depicts various masculinity models.

Similar to the excerpts from ‘’Ancient Evenings’’, Mailer’s “Trial of the War- lock” deviates slightly from the model of masculinity presented in ‘’Playboy’’’s strictly heterosexual editorial features. The story offers a “readable” “screen treatment” of J. K. Huysmans’s ‘’La Bas’’ (Turner 333). Mailer appropriates the novel’s protagonist, Durtal, to revisit the 1891 fictional account of how Gilles de Rais transitions from being Joan of Arc’s second-in-command to a documented serial killer and practitioner of Satanism. The story seems to contain all of ‘’Playboy’’’s necessary criteria: the hero is not castrated; he has no problem with blood or Satan—so he is obviously courageous. After swearing off sexual relations for religious reasons, Durtal becomes involved in a