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 {{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>A New Politics of Form in ''Harlot's Ghost''}}
 {{MR02}}
-{{Byline|last=Anshen|first=David|abstract=A reading of ''Harlot’s Ghost'' in relation to Mailer’s efforts to use fiction writing to reveal contradictions at the heart of American society and challenge American ideology, particularly in relation to the Cold War. The novel resists making overt judgments on events. The novel’s form and its political and social content are unified in their challenge to the dominant societal narratives about America and how these narratives are traditionally told.||url=https://prmlr.us/mr08ansh}}
+{{Byline|last=Anshen|first=David|abstract=A reading of ''[[Harlot’s Ghost]]'' in relation to {{NM}}’s efforts to use fiction writing to reveal contradictions at the heart of American society and challenge American ideology, particularly in relation to the Cold War. The novel resists making overt judgments on events. The novel’s form and its political and social content are unified in their challenge to the dominant societal narratives about America and how these narratives are traditionally told.||url=https://prmlr.us/mr08ansh}}
+{{quote|width=50%|“The sour truth is that I am imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=17}} }}
+{{quote|“Please do not understand me too quickly.”|author=Norman Mailer|source=quoting [[w:Andre Gide|Andre Gide]] in the epigraph to ''[[The Deer Park]]''.}}
+{{dc|dc=N|orman Mailer was one of the most ambitious writers}} of our time. He had enormous faith in the power of writing to influence and change society and to alter the quality of human life. Despite the controversies that swirled around his public figure, he should be more recognized for the scope of his efforts to use his writing to transform America. With bravado, courage, and a bit of recklessness, he has repeatedly proclaimed his ''personal'' ambition to place himself, as a writer, in the company of literary giants and thereby remedy what he believes are America’s literary deficiencies, while also promising that he is about to write a novel that will create the “revolution in consciousness”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=17}} which he believes is necessary to rejuvenate a stagnant America,{{efn|See again {{harvtxt|Mailer|1959}} as well as essays in {{harvtxt|Mailer|1966}} and {{harvtxt|Mailer|1982}}. This point recurs throughout his writing.}} through writing the “great American novel” which will “tell the truth of our times.” Undoubtedly, however, this effort has been fraught with difficulties; as [[w:Carl Rollyson|Carl Rollyson]] explains in his biography of Mailer: “In the forty years since ''[[The Naked and the Dead]]'' Mailer has been searching for a way to write the great panoramic American novel. . . . America had seemed too complex for any single novelist—no matter how mature—to take on.”{{sfn|Rollyson|1991|p=359}} His last, sustained effort to reveal America through a work of fiction is the long historical novel about the CIA, ''Harlot’s Ghost''. However, this novel has been overlooked as the culmination of Mailer’s project of a fictional representation of America and therefore largely ignored as the important work of politically engaged fiction that I believe it is.{{efn|One of the many critics who argue this way is {{harvtxt|Nielson|1997}}, who sums up her conclusion about Mailer’s politics based on ''Harlot’s Ghost'' and ''[[Oswald’s Tale]]'' by stating, “What an examination of the persistent presence of Kennedy in their writings tends to suggest is that, for all Mailer’s non-conformism, his oeuvre serves to ultimately uphold the defining myths of the society which he describes, while that of Vidal works to undermine them.”{{sfn|Nielson|1997|p=23}} While her analysis of the episodes featuring [[William Kennedy|Kennedy]] in Mailer’s work and [[w:Gore Vidal|Vidal]]’s is persuasive in showing that Mailer’s writings on Kennedy are more positive than Vidal’s, this doesn’t justify, in my opinion, the broad conclusions she draws. On the other hand, the major critic who has treated ''Harlot’s Ghost'' as a whole, John {{harvtxt|Whalen-Bridge|1995}} argues persuasively that Mailer’s novel debunks the “myth of the American Adam.” This “myth” described by R.W.B. Lewis (and others) concerns alleged American “innocence” which Whalen-Bridge convincingly demonstrates is undermined by the novel. Whalen-Bridge is the major scholar that has written in detail on ''Harlot’s Ghost'' and draws the conclusion that “His [Mailer’s DA] fictional interpretation of American intelligence work does more than any other work of literature to help readers gain access to ‘the imagination of the state.{{' "}} Unfortunately, few others have recognized the critical features of the novel. See also {{harvtxt|Whalen-Bridge|1998}}. Others who don’t believe the novel is critical of the CIA include {{harvtxt|Glenday|1995}} who, in his biography states categorically that the novel “doesn’t set out be, then, a critique of the CIA”{{sfn|Glenday|1995|p=131}} and {{harvtxt|Dearborn|1999}}.}} This is undoubtedly because the novel presents a strange puzzle; both its content and form need careful consideration before its significance can be understand.
+My essay offers a reading of the novel in relation to Mailer’s efforts to use fiction writing to reveal contradictions at the heart of American society and challenge American ideology, particularly in relation to the [[w:Cold War|Cold War]], while offering an explanation for the unorthodox formal features. In contrast to most critics who have written on the novel, I believe that ''Harlot’s Ghost'' presents a fierce indictment of America during the Cold War and after, which is intensified by the unconventional form.{{efn|I would place this novel alongside masterpieces of Cold War literature such as [[w:Robert Coover|Coover]], [[w:E. L. Doctorow|Doctorow]] and [[w:Don Delillo|Delillo]] below. All of these novels challenge the conventions of traditional literary realism and present radical formal structures.}} Indeed, I hope to show that the novel’s importance and significance, the truth it tells about American society, lies in what might appear its utter failure, both as a novel and a judgment on the history and politics, namely the way the novel fails to cohere as a novel. The novel refuses overt judgments on the events narrated. Paradoxical as it may seem, I will argue that the ''failure'' of traditional novelistic form and resolution creates a dialectic between reader and text allowing important revelations about American society to emerge which make the novel a success in telling the “truth of our times.” The truths revealed are precisely that the issues of the novel, which concern the meaning of the Cold War and the struggle between capitalism and its challenges, are not over and that instead of “the end of history” (to use [[w:Francis Fukiyama|Francis Fukiyama]]’s famous phrase) we are still plunged into unresolved history. Therefore, the novel’s form and its political and social content are unified in their challenge to the dominant societal narratives about America and how these narratives are traditionally told.
+===Notes===
+{{Notelist}}
 ===Citations===
-{{Reflist}}
+{{Reflist|15em}}
 ===Works Cited===
-{{Refbegin|indent=yes|40em}}
+{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}
 * {{cite book |last=Adorno |first=Teodor |date=1978 |title=Aesthetics and Politics |url= |location=New York |publisher=Verso |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite book |last=Benjamin |first=Walter |translator-last1=Bostock |translator-first1=Anna |chapter=The Author as Producer |date=1998 |title=Understanding Brecht |url= |location=New York |publisher=Verso |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
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 * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1982 |title=Pieces and Pontifications |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite book |last=McHale |first=Brian |date=1992 |title=Constructing Postmodernism |url= |location=London and New York |publisher=Routledge |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
-* {{cite journal |last=Nielson |first=Heather |title=Jack's Ghost: Reappearances of John Kennedy in the work of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer |url= |journal=American Studies International |volume=35 |issue=3 |date=1997 |pages=23-24 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite journal |last=Nielson |first=Heather |title=Jack's Ghost: Reappearances of John Kennedy in the work of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer |url= |journal=American Studies International |volume=35 |issue=3 |date=1997 |pages=23-41 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite book |last=Rollyson |first=Carl |date=1991 |title=The Lives of Norman Mailer |url= |location=New York |publisher=Paragon House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite journal |last=Whalen-Bridge |first=John |title=The Myth of American Adam in Late Mailer |url= |journal=Connotations |volume=5 |issue=2-3 |date=1995 |pages=304-321 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite book |last=Whalen-Bridge |first=John |author-mask=1 |date=1998 |title=Fiction and the American Self |url= |location=Urbana |publisher=University of Illinois P |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
 {{Refend}}
+{{Review}}
+{{DEFAULTSORT:New Politics of Form in Harlot's Ghost, A}}
+[[Category:Articles (MR)]]