The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today: Difference between revisions

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 {{quote|His secret is that he sees himself as one of the pillars of the firmament, yeah, man—he reads the world’s doom in his own fuckup. If he is less great than God intended him to be, then America is in Trouble.}}
+One cannot help wondering whether ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'', unruly and overwhelming, is not at least as much a symptom of our “Trouble” as a cure for it.
+Throughout the past decade Mailer has made the world of the hipster the stuff of his sermons—novels, essays, and plays—as well as the style of his personal life. He calls it “a muted cool religious revival,” and a better description (at least of his ''intentions'') would be hard to find. He is Zarathustra coming down from the mountain with his vision of the hero; he is Dostoevsky reminding us that “God and the Devil are fighting, and the battleground is the heart of man!”; he is a Puritan minister informing us that pain may be good, for to suffer is to be given the opportunity to grow and prepare for the mystery of death and the perils of hell; he is a preacher frustrated by his congregation’s blind faith in innocence at a time in history when innocence is not only a lie but a crime; he is a seer trying to jar complacent men into an awareness of the despair that lies beneath their conventions; he is Toynbee telling us that if a civilization stagnates, it will die, that if a nation is to survive, it must respond to the reality of challenge; and he is Jonathan Swift couching his eschatological message in the language and imagery of scatology.
+It is true that Mailer’s own faith in the validity of his message is not absolute. He has admitted that “the hipster gambles that he can be terribly, tragically wrong, and therefore be doomed to Hell.” But Mailer is a gambler, and so he continues to preach, to reiterate the old verities with a new twist, opening himself to the charge of anachronism, refusing to accept the “modern,” the valueless objectivity of the novels of Robbe-Grillet, the impersonal detachment of the music of Milton Babbitt, and the faceless hotels of Conrad Hilton. He will not give up like Hemingway’s Lieutenant Henry, who trusts only in the names of bridges, cities, and battles; Mailer chooses instead still to believe in God, Love, Heroism, Courage, and Death. His life and work are a contradiction of the message contained in one of his own poems:
+{{quote|''Never''<br />''contemplate''<br />''nothing''<br />''said''<br />''the saint.''}}
 === Notes ===
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