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| « | The Mailer Review • Volume 5 Number 1 • 2011 • Norris Mailer: A Life in Words | » |
History is a nightmare from which Mailer is still trying to awaken; but he will not take the easy way out in his struggle.
And yet if he is singleminded in his determination to view life in terms of ultimate battle, his desire for victory is not without ambivalence. His involvement in the pop world has become more than peripheral with his play, his new underground movie (where he is cast as a Mafia gangster), his new novel, and his own life style (where he tries to enact simultaneously the roles of writer, fighter, celebrity, lover, and messiah); and like most of the major figures in this eclectic pop world, he is flirting with psychosis. To live on the edge of so many different scenes is to belong truly to none; and to act like so many different people is to endanger the self. The sign of surrender, the indication that the battle has been lost, is the sense of succumbing to Dread. It is not impossible that Mailer’s Dread is essentially the fulfillment of his own unacknowledged desire for that Dread, the intuition that all those "psychotic" ideas and actions he lives by are simply the expression of a profound longing for madness and extinction.
Mailer holds himself together, however, by virtue of his work. Through creation he is able to come closer to the unattainable goal of total victory in the struggle which is the metaphor for his vision of life. Even if we do not believe in it ourselves, even if we are impatient with the intellectual naivete of a man who only a decade ago speculated that perhaps he was the first person to state that God was in danger of dying, and even if we are annoyed by the heavily flawed style of his prose, we can still learn from, and be moved by, this belligerent prophet. At the end of the stage version of The Deer Park, he speaks of debates about God and Time and Sex as constituting “part of the poor odd dialogues which give hope to us noble humans for more than one night.” If Mailer has done this in his own work even a small part of the time, he is one Puritan our age can ill afford to lose.