User:KWatson/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including

All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''

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''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora (195). For Breines, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers (195). Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact” (qtd. in Dearborn). With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough

Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian American, Irish American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.

@@ Line 73: / Line 73: @@
-All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including
+All of this is to say that the voices of Mailer’s characters (including the character “Norman Mailer,” who becomes a formal entity in ''The Armies of''
+page break
+''the Night'', but who was roaming the streets of America and Europe at least since the publication of ''The Naked and the Dead'') are a response to the anxiety of sounding too Jewish. The adenoidal voice Mailer hears in his first documentary, the unsure voice of the Brooklyn Jew, transforms into a cacophony of accents—Southern, Irish, Italian, Brooklyn—which together make Mailer’s voice the voice of immigrant America. Paul Breines writes that discursive constructions of Jewish weakness arise from and refer to the rootlessness of the Diaspora (195). For Breines, tough Jewishness is a performance on the part of secular Jews that is largely associated with Zionism, and its creation first of tough Jewish pioneers, and then, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, of tough Israeli soldiers (195). Mailer, however, described his relationship to Judaism in this way: “I am a Jew out of loyalty to the underdog. I would never say I was not a Jew, but I took no strength from the fact” (qtd. in Dearborn). With this in mind, Mailer’s voice is a tough
+Jewish voice, but one that revises Breines’ toughness by drawing strength from a composite of immigrant voices, rooted, if at all, in American soil rather than Israeli. Mailer brings these immigrant voices together to construct a hybrid masculinity that is not only part white Negro and part tough Jew, but that is also comprised of Italian American, Irish American, Southern, and Texan parts, among others. Thus, Mailer simultaneously makes and unmakes Jewish masculinity by borrowing from other masculinities in the process of making himself into a palimpsest.