The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today: Difference between revisions
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The three go bear hunting in Alaska, but the most important action takes place in D.J.’s mind. At one point he has an urge to turn his gun on his father and “blast a shot, thump in his skull.” Although he resists, he soon commits the act symbolically by contradicting his father’s warning and courageously approaching a wounded bear, putting his life on the line, while his father lies hidden, waiting for the bear to become helpless before firing the fatal shot. Thus liberated from paternal authority, D.J. finds his instincts for love and battle shifted to Tex, D.J. encounters nakedly for the first time his other self. And through a mutual awareness of their mutual desire for both intercourse and fratricide, D.J. and Tex finally achieve a sense of purification and personal integration. | The three go bear hunting in Alaska, but the most important action takes place in D.J.’s mind. At one point he has an urge to turn his gun on his father and “blast a shot, thump in his skull.” Although he resists, he soon commits the act symbolically by contradicting his father’s warning and courageously approaching a wounded bear, putting his life on the line, while his father lies hidden, waiting for the bear to become helpless before firing the fatal shot. Thus liberated from paternal authority, D.J. finds his instincts for love and battle shifted to Tex, D.J. encounters nakedly for the first time his other self. And through a mutual awareness of their mutual desire for both intercourse and fratricide, D.J. and Tex finally achieve a sense of purification and personal integration. | ||
{{quote|. . . Tex Hyde . . . was finally afraid to prong D.J., because D.J. once become a bitch would kill him, and D.J. breathing that in by the wide-awake of the dark with Aurora Borealis jumping to the beat of his heart knew he could make a try to prong Tex, there was a chance to get in and steal the iron from Texas’ ass and put it on his own . . . now it was there, murder between them under all friendship, for god was a beast, not a man, and god said, “Go out and kill—fulfill my will, go and kill,” and they hung there each of them on the knife of the divide in all conflict of lust to own the other . . . Killer brothers, owned by something, prince of darkness, lord of light, they did not know; they just knew that telepathy was on them, they had been touched forever by the North and each bit a drop of blood from his own finger and touched them across and met blood to blood . . . .}} | |||
In one eternal moment the Manichean polarities that have obsessed Mailer are at last synthesized—God and the Devil, heaven and hell, nature and man, Negro and white, Dallas and Harlem, phallus and anus. | |||
But why ''are'' we in Vietnam? What relation does the title have to D.J., Tex, Rusty, bear-hunting, Harlem, Dallas, liberated syntax, or Maileresque eschatology? In the strictest sense, nothing at all. But in a broader, metaphysical sense, the title can be explained as another urgent warning to America. We are in Vietnam because we, as a nation, are going, or have already gone, insane. Mailer’s development from politics to meta-politics is complete. The world—and especially America—is now viewed as an expression of Mailer’s own most extreme longings and fantasies. Subject and object, chaos and order, internal imagination and external reality are united in a fusion of creator and creation. | |||
In an ultimate sense Mailer is claiming not only ''relation to'' America but ''identity with'' her. It is likely that he has himself in mind when he writes of Rusty: | |||
{{quote|His secret is that he sees himself as one of the pillars of the firmament, yeah, man—he reads the world’s doom in his own fuckup. If he is less great than God intended him to be, then America is in Trouble.}} | |||
=== Notes === | === Notes === | ||
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