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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 {{pg 199 # |200 #}}
 external devastation mirrors the interior landscape of his war-ravaged soul. No mention of the war is necessary.
+Mailer accomplishes nearly the same thing by titling his book with a blunt
+question and then appearing to avoid it for the length of the entire narrative. “Vietnam” is mentioned only once in the book . . . and on the final page, in the final sentence. It is almost as if the character of D.J. took on a life of his own and steamrolled in whatever direction his voice could take him, and to whatever end. The mention of the word is, in fact, so shocking by the time we hear it that it almost has the feel of authorial intrusion. And Mailer was well aware of the gap that could be created between a strong fictional character living in the text and the author himself. As he wrote in an essay on “Miller and Hemingway”:
+<blockquote> [I]f we take The Sun Also Rises as the purest example of a book whose protagonist created the precise air of a time and a place,
+even there we come to the realization that Hemingway at the
+time he wrote it could not have been equal to Jake Barnes—he
+had created a consciousness wiser, drier, purer, more classic,
+more sophisticated and more graceful than his own. He was still
+gauche in relation to his creation. (''Pieces'' 91)
+Partly that is because Hemingway, through his narrative personae, was
+determined not to describe “or depict life—or criticize it—but to actually
+make it alive. So that . . . you actually experience the thing” (Hemingway, ''Ernest'' 153). Laura Adams was the first to see a similar technique at work in ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'', although she stopped short of drawing the connection to Hemingway in identifying the “radical promise” of Mailer’s novel, which is that the reader will not only receive an adequate account of the way things are in America (“know what it’s all about”), but also experience at the level of sensibility remission from the cultural plague that is “an ultimate disease against which all other diseases are in design to protect us” (Adams 124). Adams concludes, in language that makes us think of Hemingway’s goals, “The radicalized or ‘shamanized’ reader, whose silence has been rewarded, participates in Mailer’s attempt to reintegrate the old, now suppressed, human circuitry with the baneful new” (124). And this happens, as it does in Hemingway, through detailed description and a compelling new narrative voice. As one critic astutely observes, D.J. makes us experience the
+{{pg 200 #|pg 201 #}}