User:Kamyers/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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{{Byline|last=Toback|first=James|note=This essay first appeared in ''Commentary'' magazine in 1967}}

{{quote|“I’m a lily-white devil . . . . I’m just the future, in love with myself, that’s the future. I got twenty faces, I talk the tongues, I’m a devil . . . . I’m cut off from my own lines, I try to speak from my heart and it gets snatched.”}}

If Mailer’s encounter with Liston faintly suggested repressed homosexuality transformed into manly fortitude, Rojack’s encounter with Shago positively smacks of it. Like Shago, he has Cherry, and his immediate concern after intercourse is in comparison. He can hardly hide his elation when she implies that he was better, a predictable response when one recalls his reaction the night before to Cherry’s paean to Shago’s sexual prowess. Her emphasis on the word “stud” had made Rojack uneasy.

{{quote|The word went in like a blow to the soft part of my belly. There was something final in the verdict as if there were a sexual round robin where the big people played. All the big Negroes and the big whites.}}

Like Mailer, Rojack lives his life as if it were some dark experiment which has gradually but relentlessly gained the upper hand so that he is free to act only within its prescribed limits. Again like Mailer, Rojack is paying the price for a lifelong habit of thinking in metaphor; image (like God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell) has become reality, and that reality has become a master demanding undivided attention. It is a reality of dreams, and the dreams in ''An American Dream'' are endless: the sexual dreams of Don Juan, the Alger dream of the self-made man, the outsider’s dream of the inside, the Mafia’s dream of money and power, the square’s dream of the life of the hipster, and the hipster’s dream of death. None of these dreams has turned entirely into nightmare, but each has gone sour, like the soul of the nation which fabricated them. But the saddest dream of all is Stephen Rojack’s (and perhaps Mailer’s) dream of sanity.

{{quote|I was caught. I wanted to escape from that intelligence which let me know of murders in one direction and conceive of [love] from the other, I wanted to be free of magic, the tongue of the devil, the dread of the Lord, I wanted to be some sort of rational man again . . . But I could not move.}}

But what if, unlike Mailer and Rojack, one is ''not'' obsessed with psychopathic extremes? What if one’s patience expires at exhibitions of braggadocio? What if one appreciates wit (of which there is some) but loves humor (of which there is none)? Probably one would call ''An American Dream'' a joke, and a bad joke at that. The infantile demand for intermediate and complete attention; the insistence on being taken seriously, literally, and on his own terms at all times; the inability to treat his agony with even a suggestion of laughter or a trace of irony; the sloppy inconsistency of much of the dialogue; and, finally, the sheer loudness that informs the whole novel, a tone alternating between agitation and hysteria—all this works to tire, frustrate, and, at times, infuriate even the most sympathetic reader.

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 {{Byline|last=Toback|first=James|note=This essay first appeared in ''Commentary'' magazine in 1967}}
-{{quote|“I’m a lily-white devil . . . . I’m just the future, in love with myself, that’s the future. I got twenty faces, I talk the tongues, I’m a devil . . . . I’m cut off from my own lines, I try to speak from my heart and it gets snatched.”}}
-If Mailer’s encounter with Liston faintly suggested repressed homosexuality transformed into manly fortitude, Rojack’s encounter with Shago positively smacks of it. Like Shago, he has Cherry, and his immediate concern after intercourse is in comparison. He can hardly hide his elation when she implies that he was better, a predictable response when one recalls his reaction the night before to Cherry’s paean to Shago’s sexual prowess. Her emphasis on the word “stud” had made Rojack uneasy.
-{{quote|The word went in like a blow to the soft part of my belly. There was something final in the verdict as if there were a sexual round robin where the big people played. All the big Negroes and the big whites.}}
-Like Mailer, Rojack lives his life as if it were some dark experiment which has gradually but relentlessly gained the upper hand so that he is free to act only within its prescribed limits. Again like Mailer, Rojack is paying the price for a lifelong habit of thinking in metaphor; image (like God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell) has become reality, and that reality has become a master demanding undivided attention. It is a reality of dreams, and the dreams in ''An American Dream'' are endless: the sexual dreams of Don Juan, the Alger dream of the self-made man, the outsider’s dream of the inside, the Mafia’s dream of money and power, the square’s dream of the life of the hipster, and the hipster’s dream of death. None of these dreams has turned entirely into nightmare, but each has gone sour, like the soul of the nation which fabricated them. But the saddest dream of all is Stephen Rojack’s (and perhaps Mailer’s) dream of sanity.
-{{quote|I was caught. I wanted to escape from that intelligence which let me know of murders in one direction and conceive of [love] from the other, I wanted to be free of magic, the tongue of the devil, the dread of the Lord, I wanted to be some sort of rational man again . . . But I could not move.}}
 But what if, unlike Mailer and Rojack, one is ''not'' obsessed with psychopathic extremes? What if one’s patience expires at exhibitions of braggadocio? What if one appreciates wit (of which there is some) but loves humor (of which there is none)? Probably one would call ''An American Dream'' a joke, and a bad joke at that. The infantile demand for intermediate and complete attention; the insistence on being taken seriously, literally, and on his own terms at all times; the inability to treat his agony with even a suggestion of laughter or a trace of irony; the sloppy inconsistency of much of the dialogue; and, finally, the sheer loudness that informs the whole novel, a tone alternating between agitation and hysteria—all this works to tire, frustrate, and, at times, infuriate even the most sympathetic reader.