The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in The Castle in the Forest: Difference between revisions

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 First, a disclaimer is in order. ''Castle'' can be read in the context of the retributive charivari of Purim without exaggerating the novel’s Jewish dimensions or Mailer’s engagement with Judaism.{{efn|For various and valuable insights into Mailer’s role as a Jewish writer, see Bernstein,{{sfn|Bernstein|2007}} Cappell,{{sfn|Cappell|2007}} and Siegel.{{sfn|Siegel|2007}}}} In fact, it is instructive to consider ''Castle'' in the light of a very different tradition, what one might call the ''locus classicus'' of retributive justice in Western literature, Canto 28 of Dante’s ''Inferno''. There the pilgrim-poet encounters Bertran de Born who, {{pg|305|306}}having severed filial ties between a father and son, is condemned to carry his own severed head. Holding the head by the hair and swinging it like a lantern, Bertran offers a gloss on his gruesome condition: "''Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso''" (In me you may observe fit punishment). {{efn|Dante, ''Inferno'', 142.{{sfn|Dante Aligieri|2000|p=142}} For explication and sources, see the commentary to 28. 142 in Hollander, ''Princeton Dante Project''.{{sfn|Hollander|2010|p=142}}}} While scholars disagree on the extent to which the penal code of hell is based the principle of ''contrapasso'', it clearly underlies the punishment of Ugolino and Ruggieri in Canto 33.{{efn|For a comprehensive summary of the issues involved in determining whether all the condemned souls receive condign punishment, see Armour.{{sfn|Armour|2000}}}} Recounting how in life he and his sons were imprisoned by Ruggieri and left to starve, Ugolino implies that hunger drove him to cannibalize his children. So now in hell he is condemned to gnaw forever on the head of Ruggieri; the punishment is superbly efficient, at once echoing the crime and exacting vengeance for it. Dante’s ''contrapasso'', his vision of the precise and punctilious infernal justice of retribution, informs the ''Purim-shpil'' extravagance of ''Castle''. Mailer’s close examination of Hitler’s life—the bibliography appended to the novel is extensive—puts mockery in the service of strict accounting, the measure for measure of condign punishment.
-For fifty years he had been waiting to write about Hitler, Mailer said in an interview.{{sfn|Lennon|2007}} During that time, as the Third Reich has been examined and reexamined and incorporated into popular culture, Hitler has become, for the general population, more a figure of speech than a historical reality. The psychic havoc (Mailer’s term in ''Advertisements for Myself'' ) caused by the Second World War has morphed into cliché with the concomitant psychic pall, and the condition extends well beyond the Jewish community. So as the historical Hitler dominated most of Europe and caused the deaths of millions, the figurative Hitler still has the power to thwart discourse—mention his name and it kills the conversation.{{efn|For a concise exposition of still unanswered questions about Hitler’s regime, see Lukacs,{{sfn|Lukacs|2010}} especially 86–108.}} And in the bleak confusion and bold incompetence of American political life at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that name was invoked with alarming frequency (deployed, curiously enough, by both ends of the political spectrum).
+For fifty years he had been waiting to write about Hitler, Mailer said in an interview.{{sfn|Mailer|23 Feb 2007}} During that time, as the Third Reich has been examined and reexamined and incorporated into popular culture, Hitler has become, for the general population, more a figure of speech than a historical reality. The psychic havoc (Mailer’s term in ''Advertisements for Myself'' ) caused by the Second World War has morphed into cliché with the concomitant psychic pall, and the condition extends well beyond the Jewish community. So as the historical Hitler dominated most of Europe and caused the deaths of millions, the figurative Hitler still has the power to thwart discourse—mention his name and it kills the conversation.{{efn|For a concise exposition of still unanswered questions about Hitler’s regime, see Lukacs,{{sfn|Lukacs|2010}} especially 86–108.}} And in the bleak confusion and bold incompetence of American political life at the beginning of the twenty-first century, that name was invoked with alarming frequency (deployed, curiously enough, by both ends of the political spectrum).
 Taking on the trope of Hitler, the aging Mailer returns to the prophetic mode of his younger self, who believed his vocation lay in becoming “''consecutively more disruptive, more dangerous, and more powerful.''”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=22}} He remains a disruptive writer, making his readers uncomfortable. But ever the great experimentalist of the narrative voice, he chooses now to speak with the mellow cadences of folktale, telling how ''das Waldschloss'', the castle in the forest, came to be where there was neither cas-{{pg|306|307}}tle nor forest, but only the adamantine irony of inmates from Berlin imprisoned in a concentration camp where there had once been a potato field. We do not learn about this ''Waldschloss'' until the end of the novel, when we have already passed through the other adamantine irony of a tale told to avenge crimes committed more than sixty years before. The long delay has its advantage. As we know from an old adage invoked in Mailer’s ''Harlot’s Ghost'': “OSS working undercover in Italy, 1943, did encounter the following piece of Sicilian wisdom: ‘Revenge is a dish that people of taste eat cold.’” {{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=813}} The time is ripe for low temperature retribution.