The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Examining Mailer in a Time of Split-focus — or, What the Internet Cannot Do for Us

Written by
Tracy Dahlby

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Abstract: Norman Mailer’s method of journalism illustrates how to extend the quality and scope of journalistic inquiry into the future of a troubled tradition. In examining Lee Harvey Oswald, Mailer produces a book that is long, intricately built and absorbing, if in places marred by familiar bits of Mailer’s hyper-rational exuberance. What is particularly noteworthy at this time of media upheaval are the tips Mailer’s method offers students and other aspiring investigators about how to extend the quality and scope of journalistic inquiry into the future of a troubled tradition.

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URL: https://prmlr.us/mr03dah

Introduction: Entering a World of Epistemology-Lite

We are at a crossroads in America today in determining the extent to which we nourish our public discourse on the bounty of information available on the Internet or the Internet feeds on us. The accelerated decline of traditional print media is redefining forms of understanding that once obliged us to earn meaning about issues important to ourselves and our communities the old-fashioned way: by reading about them, substantively, from the printed page. Today, studies suggest, life online is propelling us (and particularly our young) into a world wags refer to as epistemology-lite where we may still make the effort to stay in the know but do so by skimming, not reading for depth, and routinely end our Web-based truth-seeking on any given topic, somewhat less than intrepidly, by clicking on the first few Google hits we come to.

Norman Mailer saw the handwriting on the digital wall. In 2005, he told a Manhattan audience that he felt “the woeful emotions of an old carriage-maker as he watched the disappearance of his trade before the onrush of the automobile.” The electronic media, namely commercial television, he suggested, had sapped even the thoughtful reader’s enthusiasm for taking the serious novel, or anything else for that matter, really seriously. “Indeed how many of you, even in this audience,” Mailer asked the crowd at the Marriott in Times Square, “do not obtain more pleasure from a review of a good novel in the New York Times than from the ardors involved in reading that good, but serious book?” (Those of us at home are now free to lower our hands.) While the Internet has emerged as destroyer-in-chief (or co-opter-in-chief, in the view of the optimists) of earlier media epistemologies, today’s digital shift puts the future of serious works of both fiction and nonfiction in question across a broad front, and with it, Mailer observed, the “insights with which good readers can enrich themselves” and expand their “comprehension of society.”

It is too early to tell precisely where this Darwinian process of media selection is headed, but the case for epistemological autophagy is building and nowhere more acutely than in journalism today. Fine old newspapers (and some admittedly not so fine) are either dying outright or degrading costly vital functions such as investigative reporting and long-form storytelling to stay in business while advertisers and readers head for the digital hills. Meanwhile, writes Maggie Jackson in a recent number of Neiman Reports, “A new hypermobile, cybercentric and split-focused world has radically changed the context of news consumption.” In her view, the Internet’s “rising data floods” put the national attention span at such risk of chronic distraction that Jackson asks,

If this continues to be the way we work, learn and report, could we be collectively nurturing new forms of ignorance, born not from a dearth of information as in the past, but from an inability or an unwillingness to do the difficult work of forging knowledge from the data flooding our world?

You can imagine Mailer’s ghost chortling at the proposition that new forms of human ignorance might be available for the inventing, but the serious point is this: The hard business of mapping the contours of our society and ourselves is only possible when we try to go in deep. And in a time of information anarchy, that calls for storytellers with the chops to deliver narrative messages in ways that show us the mountain that molehills of information can add up to when crafted with sustained energy and focus.

That of course is where Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery comes in. In teasing out one of the hardiest bits of ectoplasm in the machinery of American political psychology, Lee Harvey Oswald, Mailer produces a book that is long, intricately built and absorbing, if in places marred by familiar bits of Mailer’s hyper-rational exuberance. But what strikes me, an ink-stained-wretch-turned-educator, as particularly noteworthy at this time of media upheaval are the tips Mailer’s method offers my students and other aspiring investigators about how to extend the quality and scope of journalistic inquiry into the future of a troubled tradition. While there are a few lessons that workers in nonfiction will do well to avoid (including quixotic lapses in the author’s self-proclaimed mission to seek truth through facts), there is also much to commend, namely Mailer’s appetite for the brute labor required to invest a subject with deep context; his capacity to think critically about the writer’s role in the process; and, last but not least, his characteristic display of writerly daring.

Building a “base Camp on the Slopes of . . . a Mystery”

Lord knows that tackling the Kennedy assassination required guts. By the time Mailer reexamined the riddle two decades ago, there were two major schools of thought that, as he explains, ranged “from Mark Lane’s—ready to open the case—to Gerald Posner’s—eager to close it” and their many subsects; not a few Geraldo-esque “reporting” careers had been fattened on the public’s seemingly endless craving for pseudo-confirmation that the vulpine figure of Lee Harvey Oswald was at the center of a deep but fungible form of American evil. Did Oswald act alone? Was he a communist in disguise or more likely a right-wing co-conspirator in communist guise in the employ of the FBI or CIA? Was he a Mafia dupe? Wherever the red-meat enthusiasts came down on such questions, new evidence was in short supply, minds were long since made up, and the rest of us were left to bump around in a fishy stew of pop-culture morsels like Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-gone-wild movie, JFK. What was lost in the shuffle was Oswald himself who, as Mailer points out, had become “a barely visible protagonist in a set of opposed scenarios.”

For all of Mailer’s routine protestations about being a novelist first, last and always, even when working in nonfiction (and this despite having been hailed as a founder of the New Journalism of the fifties and sixties), he proceeds here as would any reporter worth his or her salt: He effectively jams a wrench into the gearwheels of what my friend David Halberstam used to call the bullshit machine to suspend the churning of factoids so he can reframe the old questions. He asks not so much what Lee Harvey Oswald did or didn’t do as what kind of man was he? Was he capable of killing JFK or, put in Mailer’s more interesting way, was he constitutionally incapable of sharing the limelight as a member of a murderous conspiracy? “Before we can understand a murderer—if he is one—we must discover his motive,” Mailer tells us. “But to find the motive, we do well to encounter the man.” Mailer says his goal is psychological truth and we believe him—but what he is really after, it seems to me, is to help us penetrate that tangled thicket where personal psychology encounters the pivotal political event.

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Works Cited

• Jackson, Maggie (Winter 2008). "Distracted: The New News World and the Fate of Attention". Nieman Reports. Nieman Foundation. Retrieved 2009-04-11.
• Kee, Tameka (April 7, 2008). "Get Your Assets on First Three Pages of Search, Or Else". Online Media Daily. MediaPost Communications. Retrieved 2009-04-19.
• MacLeish, Archibald (1967). "Ars Poetica". In Smith, A. J. M. Seven Centuries of Verse, English and American. New York: Scribner’s.
• Mailer, Norman (2008). "Acceptance Speech for National Book Foundation Award". The Mailer Review. 2 (1): 219–220. Retrieved 2021-06-23.
• — (January 29, 2003). "An Interview with Norman Mailer". The Charlie Rose Show (Interview). Interviewed by Charlie Rose. PBS.
• — (1995). Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery. New York: Little, Brown.
• — (2003). Why Are We at War?. New York: Random House.
• Nichols, John; McChesney, Robert W. (March 18, 2009). "The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers". The Nation. Web. Retrieved 2009-04-18.
• Orwell, George (2005). "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius". Why I Write. New York: Penguin. pp. 11–94.
• Patterson, Thomas E. (July 10, 2007). "Young People and News" (PDF). Harvard Kennedy School. Harvard University. Retrieved 2009-04-12.
• Porter, Eduardo (February 13, 2009). "What Newspapers Do, Have Done and Will Do". New York Times. Web. Retrieved 2009-04-12.
• Powers, Thomas. "The Mind of the Assassin". New York Times. Web. Retrieved 2009-04-18.