The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Wise Blood of Norman Mailer: An Interpretation and Defense of Why Are We in Vietnam?

Written by
Richard Lee Fulgham

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Abstract: Why Are We in Vietnam? is a novel that calls for reassessment four decades after its appearance, particularly as a work of satiric allegory.

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URL: https://prmlr.us/mr08fulg

Among the imperceptive and raucous commentaries on Mailer’s novels, this remark by Anatole Broyard stands out as refreshingly clear: “the rock he throws usually has a message tied to it.” In the case of Why Are We in Vietnam?, the rock has been given much more attention than the message because it hit us at the wrong time and in an extraordinarily sensitive spot.

When the novel appeared in 1967 we were freshly engaged in a frightening confrontation between what we perceived as the primitive savagery of an undeveloped nation and the sophisticated savagery of our so-called developed one. We were simply too busy analyzing our moral integrity to pay heed to a warning that we had collectively embarked on a bizarre “bear hunt.”

Most of us who read the novel at the time of its publication were properly stunned by the impact; but few of us, if any, fully comprehended the tragic implications hidden within. Perhaps at the time it was most convenient not to understand this darkest of Mailer’s satiric allegories.

In retrospect, however, it becomes increasingly clear that Mailer is worth the extra thought it takes to interpret his writing. This is particularly true in the case of Why Are We in Vietnam? because its fundamental point is hidden beneath an obvious and simplistic plot. Even the most casual reader can immediately spot the parallel between our military adventure in Vietnam and the hunting trip of Mailer’s characters. And it is even easier to presume Mailer is blaming our presence in Southeast Asia on our collective heart of the hunter. But this is seeing only the reflection on the surface of the well. The actual waters run much much deeper.

Before our descent into these depths, however, it will pay us to take a quick look at the basic story. Two Texas teenagers, D.J. and Tex, fly to Alaska’s frigid Brook’s Range with D.J.’s father, Rusty, and two “yes men.”

Rusty is a corporate executive, ruling a vast conglomerate based on the manufacture of plastic cigarette filters. He is ultra-aggressive, bullying, pompous, territorial, and boastful. His code of conduct is comparable to that of an alpha male in a baboon troop.

He brings along the two “yes men”—called “medium asses” in the book—to act as witnesses when he slaughters a bear. His only motive for the hunt is to ensure that he is respected and feared as a sexually superior and merciless leader. In order to impress his prowess upon his peers, he must bring back a “grizzer.” Concepts like “sporting chance” and “grace under pressure” have no meaning to him. He operates on a grossly animalistic level, considering ruthlessness and sexual domination as supreme virtues.

In D.J.’s words, “He sings the song of the swine.” And in Mailer’s estimation, Rusty is analogous to the American corporate mind which would seek out a Vietnam to attack in order to release an explosive, repressed sexuality and reaffirm its status as pack leader of the world. In Rusty—and the American corporate mind—Mailer sees the worst kind of genetic tyranny and conditioning by tribal mores.

His son, D.J. (self proclaimed “disk jockey to the world”) stands in great contrast to the uncompromising animal values embraced by Rusty. Sixteen at the beginning of the hunt, his mind has been so riddled and scrambled by the constant electronic chatter of modem media that he can only think in a non-stop breathless stream of obscene monologue.

As he is telling the story, we are bombarded by a curious, often annoying, adolescent style and a series of naive boasts. (This may be the one most disturbing aspect of an otherwise well-conceived satire.) In certain ways he does resemble his father: sneering boastfulness, shallow sexuality, arrogance, domineering stance. But he differs in a drastic way that forever separates the two from each other. D.J. knows the anxiety of self-awareness. As he puts it, he is a victim of “Herr Dread.” His intimacy with his own rationality produces a free-floating fear which plagues him constantly, nibbling at his confidence like a rat trapped within his chest. In his own words, D.J. “sees through to the stinking root of things” and “can watch his own ass being created. . . . ”

He neither admires nor loves his father, feeling instead a horror when he looks into Rusty’s eyes. There he sees “voids, man, and gleams of yellow fire....” . Students of Mailer will quickly recognize D.J. as the personification of “The White Negro.” He is a hipster, a sensitive psychopath who operates only in the present, with no precedents, no preconceptions.

Mailer had used this theme before. Virtually all of his fiction up till and including Why Are We in Vietnam? is centered on this one fixed idea:

If the fate of twentieth-century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.

D.J. is so different from his father primarily because he grew up in a super-accelerated society where no sooner is one standard established than it is destroyed and superseded by another. No value system lasts for more than a few months before it must be dismantled and replaced. To infinitely compound matters, he must exist in a society that is literally held hostage by its own government, with the subsequent threat of impending annihilation.

To exist as a free individual in such a society means waging eternal war against the rigid conformity imposed by the state and corporate bosses. D.J., if he is to retain his personal integrity, has to face American life as a “white Negro,” forever on the edge of life, tottering as it were on the brink of Nietzsche’s abyss. Though this interpretation of D.J. might be debatable, Mailer himself hints at such a relationship between D.J. and the existential hipster. Many times D.J. interrupts his monologue to suggest that he is not really a “Texas Wasp,” but rather a “black-ass cripple Spade and sending from Harlem” .

This singular literary device not only accentuates the existential state of D.J., it implies that American youth as personified by D.J. is hopelessly divided in half, with two separate and distinct personalities. In this sense especially, D.J. becomes a valid microcosm of the macrocosmic youth rebellion of the 1960s, where even the most bitter protester was torn between love of country and love of individual freedom. We who have survived long enough to peer into the twenty-first century can still relate. We love the country but hate the scene.

We have spent so much space on D.J. with good reason. He represents more than the divided youth of high-technology America in the 1960s. Indeed, he represents more than Mailer’s embattled existential hero. He represents as well the inescapable Catch-22 of modem times: divorcing one’s self from society means loss of security. But being part of society means loss of freedom, because society is still ruled by the dictates of other people or of Nature. You’re either in lock-step with humanity or you’re all alone. One means a loss of self; the other means to live in perpetual anxious isolation.

It is only with Mailer’s maturing mind that we find a third possibility— that the individual can be free without alienating himself from human society. This freedom comes with the understanding that humanity is not necessarily in the dictates of Nature. Mankind can choose between good and evil. (Hence the importance of democracy.) Mailer’s variance from the existentialism of the post war French intellectuals is profound. Man is not alone in the Universe. Morals are not moot. Good and Evil not only exist in the eternal moment, they suggest the existence of a not allegorical God and Devil!

This astonishing conclusion can be seen in Mailer’s 2007 novel The Castle in the Forest (New York: Random House, 2007) and his nonfiction interview about God with his authorized biographer Dr. Michael Lennon, appropriately entitled On God: An Uncommon Conversation (New York: Random House, 2007). We have to pay attention because Norman Mailer’s genius cannot be denied.

But there is no such realization seen in Mailer’s 1968 novel Why Are We in Vietnam? In it, protagonist D.J. gives up his freedom of choice by acquiescing to the “wisdom of the blood.” By submitting to the dictates of Nature (that is,“instinct”), D.J. loses all control of the hunt, to say nothing of his life. He learns nothing from his encounter with “that Cannibal Emperor of Nature’s Psyche” . And having learned nothing, he is subsequently doomed perforce to confronting life with the animalistic shallowness of his father. In the end, he lacks the courage to be free and voluntarily gives his will over to instinct.

Works Cited

• Broyard, Anatole (September 17, 1967). "A Disturbnce of the Peace". New York Times. 3, 4–5.
• Mailer, Norman (1966). Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial.
• — (1971). Of a Fire on the Moon. Boston: Little, Brown.
• — (1959). "The White Negro". Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam. pp. 357–358.
• — (1967). Why Are We in Vietnam?. New York: Putnam.