The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Jive-Ass Aficionado: Why Are We in Vietnam? and Hemingway's Moral Code: Difference between revisions
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''Vietnam?'' focus on the story of the hunting trip, while the Intro Beeps are digressively vocal ''tour de forces'' that give Mailer the chance to evoke a broader world by allowing D.J. the freedom to rant about things outside the constraints of narrative. For one thing, the Intro Beeps feature the narrator as an eighteen-year-old, so there is a broader prospective already involved. D.J. at eighteen is wiser than D.J. at sixteen, who is recalled in the main narrative. In the Intro Beeps D.J. thinks and “speaks” in an even more pronounced stream-of-consciousness while at a dinner party his parents throw for him the night before he and Tex are scheduled to ship out to fight in Vietnam. It is in these numbered Intro Beeps where D.J., unfettered by storytelling, can rant and ramble about more general and abstract topics like the teachings of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher who warned that the media and the constant bombardment of pop culture messages would have a deleterious effect on the human condition (Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' 8). | ''Vietnam?'' focus on the story of the hunting trip, while the Intro Beeps are digressively vocal ''tour de forces'' that give Mailer the chance to evoke a broader world by allowing D.J. the freedom to rant about things outside the constraints of narrative. For one thing, the Intro Beeps feature the narrator as an eighteen-year-old, so there is a broader prospective already involved. D.J. at eighteen is wiser than D.J. at sixteen, who is recalled in the main narrative. In the Intro Beeps D.J. thinks and “speaks” in an even more pronounced stream-of-consciousness while at a dinner party his parents throw for him the night before he and Tex are scheduled to ship out to fight in Vietnam. It is in these numbered Intro Beeps where D.J., unfettered by storytelling, can rant and ramble about more general and abstract topics like the teachings of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher who warned that the media and the constant bombardment of pop culture messages would have a deleterious effect on the human condition (Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' 8). | ||
It is these big-picture concerns that surface mostly in the Intro Beeps and do indeed remind the reader of a world outside the hunting narrative of the novel, just as listening to a radio dee-jay makes one aware of the source and also other listeners—a “broadcast” that is simultaneously reaching a larger world. And that in itself can be unsettling. “As D.J. suggests,” one critic observes, “society acts as a kind ofsuccubus upon the unconscious of Americans so that ‘you never know what vision has been humping you through the night’” (Wenke 123). | It is these big-picture concerns that surface mostly in the Intro Beeps and do indeed remind the reader of a world outside the hunting narrative of the novel, just as listening to a radio dee-jay makes one aware of the source and also other listeners—a “broadcast” that is simultaneously reaching a larger world. And that in itself can be unsettling. “As D.J. suggests,” one critic observes, “society acts as a kind ofsuccubus upon the unconscious of Americans so that ‘you never know what vision has been humping you through the night’” (Wenke 123). | ||
Although the white noise of media forms a powerful current that runs | |||
through the whole of D.J.’s Intro Beeps, the young narrator also weaves in his musings about bullfighting, machismo, existential dread, and Freudian theories on the centrality of sex and sexual issues. It is also in these Intro Beeps where Mailer teases readers by having D.J. insist, as early as Beep 4, that he may not be a white, young, and virile genius from Texas after all—maybe he’s really the voice of Black America: | |||
<blockquote>I, D.J., am trapped in a Harlem head which has gone so crazy | |||
that I think I am sitting at a banquet in the Dallas ass white-ass | |||
manse remembering Alaska am in fact a figment of a Spade gone | |||
ape in the mind from outrageous frustrates wasting him and so | |||
now living in an imaginary white brain. . . .(Mailer, ''Why Are We | |||
in Vietnam?'' 58) | |||