The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night: Difference between revisions

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In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

      

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.

===Works Cited===

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