The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Mailerian Dynasty: Narrative in a Structural Poetics of Mailer’s Fiction

«	The Mailer Review • Volume 3 Number 1 • 2009 • Beyond Fiction	»

Written by
Alexander Hicks

Abstract: In Norman Mailer’s fiction, the underlying poetics, although simplifying, is complex in its basic elements, which are five: the physiological, psychic, social, cultural and transcendental. The poetics is also plural in its underlying statics and in the narrative dynamics that these statics help constitute.

URL: https://prmlr.us/mr03hic

Structural Introduction

Structuralist analysis frequently traces a work’s meanings and powers to an underlying structure like the static semiotic infrastructure of binary oppositions in Levi-Strauss’ analysis of Amazonian myths, the dynamic narrative structure of Vladimir Propp’s slavic folk tale or of Will Wright’s classical western.^[a] Structural analysis may also lead into a single, deep structure specific to a single author’s vision as in Bordwell’s poetics of the communitarian films of Yasujiro Ozu.^[b] Here my emphasis is on the last, a creator-specific type of simplifying but empowering deep structure.

In Mailer’s fiction, the underlying poetics, though simplifying, is complex in its basic elements. These basic elements as I see them are five: the physiological, psychic, social, cultural and transcendental. The poetics is also plural in its underlying statics and in the narrative dynamics that these statics help constitute. To quickly illustrate statics and dynamics with Western film examples, in the classical Western, static dichotomies like “outsider/insider,” “wilderness/civilization.” “Good/bad” and “weak/strong” help organize materials. These statics in turn underlie the constitution of a dynamic narrative structures in which, typically, strong outsiders, just having ridden in from the wilderness, champion a weak and beleaguered community from strong villains (as when Shane champions sodbusters against their cattlemen adversaries).^[c]

Here I look at basic elements, statics, and dynamics, in turn, for most of Mailer’s novels. I also do so for the first of his fictions, which is The Armies of the Night, and longest of them, The Executioner’s Song. In so doing I range over nearly a dozen works—both early and late, relatively realistic and relatively fanciful—in some detail. However, I especially stress The Naked and the Dead, The Executioner’s Song and Ancient Evenings.^[d]

Notes

↑ See Levi-Strauss (1966). At the level of the specific genre, Propp (1958), Wright (1976) and Moretti (1987) offer an historically shifting structural analysis of the Bildungsroman in his The Way of the World. Walt Reed (1981) criticized the interpretive adequacy of a structural poetics of the picaresque in light of the genre’s (and the novel’s) sheer historical and documentary social contents. Here, however, I focus on poetics to the virtual exclusion of Reed’s “history,” or social content. (That is, I focus on the core events of tales like Shane’s, not the tales’ uses of the likes of homesteading range wars.) Thus, my structuralism shares little or no focus with that of Leeds on the social and social psychological, which is to say on Leeds’ foci on “social problems,” “the individual and society” and “voice.”^[1] This is so despite some overlaps between the current work’s Mailerian poetics, on the one hand, and “the individual and society” in Mailer’s work, on the other hand. Although structural analysis may lead out into an expansive multiplicity of structures that illuminate a work’s unique plurality of meanings as in Barthes (1974)’ S/Z, I refer here to reductive underlying structures rather than to outwardly branching ones like those of Barthes.
↑ Bordwell (1988)’s Ozu is a director with his own mode of film, not simply a distinctive style, like many an “art film” director, but a mode of film distinct from the Bordwellian “art film.”
↑ More specifically, the dynamics of the genre are constituted by the following sequence of events: hero enters social group; hero is unknown to group; hero has exceptional ability, is set apart by group and given special status; hero is not accepted by group; hero enter into conflict with villains who threaten group and are stronger than it; hero befriends or respects key villain; hero avoids opposing villains when they first threaten society but when the villains endanger a friend of the hero; hero fights and defeats villains, saving society, which accepts him and assimilates him (if he does not move off). See Wright (1976, pp. 48–49).
↑ I stress The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner’s Song as, alongside The Armies of the Night, the most broadly acclaimed of Mailer’s fictions. Because of its frequent distance from fiction that is, in part, due to its excursions into the essay and analytical historical forms, I do not stress Armies. I stress Evenings, however, both as the most developed and as the least realistically inhibited expression of Mailer’s poetics (a point that I hope my discussion of it here will substantiate) and as because the bimodal reception to this work makes it at once a zenith and nadir of Mailer’s critical reception; see Bloom (2005), Burgess (1985, pp. 132–133) and Poirier (1999, pp. 226–337). I somewhat limit my attention, largely ignoring Why Are We in Vietnam? and The Gospel According to the Son, which are the shortest of Mailer’s fictions, and Harlot’s Ghost and The Castle in the Forest, which are the least complete with regard to closure of the stories of their respective central protagonists, namely Harry Hubbard and Adolf Hitler.

Citations

↑ Leeds 1978, pp. 3–4.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland (1974). S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bloom, Harold (2005). Novelists and Novels. New York: Checkmate Press.
Bordwell, David (1988). Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. London: BFI Pub.
Burgess, Anthony (1985). 99 Novels: the Best in English since 1939. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Didion, Joan (October 7, 1979). "'I want to go ahead and do it.' Rev. of The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer" (PDF). New York Times Book Review. p. BR1. Retrieved 2021-07-07.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E.; Gillies, Eva (1937). Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
Eysenck, Hans J. (December 1988). "Health's Character—Research on Personality and Health". Psychology Today. pp. 27–35.
Gallagher, Winifred (September 1994). "How We Become What We Are". The Atlantic Monthly. pp. 38–55.
Gilmore, Mikal (1994). Shot in the Heart. New York: Doubleday.
Guest, David (1997). Sentenced to Death. Jackson, Mississippi: UP of Mississippi.
Hartley, Linda (2004). Somatic Psychology. London: Whurr Publishers.
Kemper, Theodore D. (1969). A Social Interactional Theory of Emotions. New York: Wiley.
Leeds, Barry (1978). The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer. New York: New York UP.
Lennon, J. Michael (2006). "Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian?". Journal of Modern Literature. 30 (1): 91–103.
Levi-Strauss, Claude (1966). The Savage Mind. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Mailer, Norman (1965). An American Dream. New York: Dial.
— (1983). Ancient Evenings. Boston: Little, Brown.
— (2007). The Castle in the Forest. New York: Random House.
— (1955). The Deer Park. New York: Putnam.
— (1979). The Executioner's Song. Boston: Little, Brown.
— (1997). The Gospel According to the Son. New York: Random House.
— (1991). Harlot’s Ghost. New York: Random House.
— (1948). The Naked and the Dead. New York: Rinehart.
— (1959). "The Time of Her Time". Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam. pp. 478–503.
— (1998). The Time of Our Time. New York: Random House.
— (1984). Tough Guys Don’t Dance. New York: Random House.
— (1967). Why Are We in Vietnam?. New York: Putnam.
—; Lennon, J. Michael (2007). On God: An Uncommon Conversation. New York: Random House.
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1948). Magic, Science and Religion. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Moretti, Franco (1987). The Way of the World: the Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso.
Parsons, Talcott; Smelser, Neil J. (1956). Economy and Society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Poirier, Richard (1972). Norman Mailer. New York: Viking Press.
— (1999). "Mailer's Strangest Book". Trying it Out in America: Literary and Other Performances. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Propp, A. Vladimir (1958). Pirkova-Jakobson, Svatava, ed. Morphology of the Folktale. Translated by Scott, Laurence. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Reed, Walter L. (1981). Exemplary History of the Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
Ricks, Christopher (2002). "Norman Mailer: The Executioner's Song". The Reviewery. New York: Handsel Books. pp. 79–90.
Siegel, Lee (January 21, 2007). "Maestro of the Human Ego". New York Times Book Review. pp. BR1. Retrieved 2021-07-07.
Thoits, Peggy A. (1989). "The Sociology of Emotions". Annual Review of Sociology. 15. Palo Alto: Annual Review Inc.
Wright, Will (1976). Sixguns and Society. Berkeley: U of California P.

[2] See Levi-Strauss (1966). At the level of the specific genre, Propp (1958), Wright (1976) and Moretti (1987) offer an historically shifting structural analysis of the Bildungsroman in his The Way of the World. Walt Reed (1981) criticized the interpretive adequacy of a structural poetics of the picaresque in light of the genre’s (and the novel’s) sheer historical and documentary social contents. Here, however, I focus on poetics to the virtual exclusion of Reed’s “history,” or social content. (That is, I focus on the core events of tales like Shane’s, not the tales’ uses of the likes of homesteading range wars.) Thus, my structuralism shares little or no focus with that of Leeds on the social and social psychological, which is to say on Leeds’ foci on “social problems,” “the individual and society” and “voice.”^[1] This is so despite some overlaps between the current work’s Mailerian poetics, on the one hand, and “the individual and society” in Mailer’s work, on the other hand. Although structural analysis may lead out into an expansive multiplicity of structures that illuminate a work’s unique plurality of meanings as in Barthes (1974)’ S/Z, I refer here to reductive underlying structures rather than to outwardly branching ones like those of Barthes.

[3] Bordwell (1988)’s Ozu is a director with his own mode of film, not simply a distinctive style, like many an “art film” director, but a mode of film distinct from the Bordwellian “art film.”

[4] More specifically, the dynamics of the genre are constituted by the following sequence of events: hero enters social group; hero is unknown to group; hero has exceptional ability, is set apart by group and given special status; hero is not accepted by group; hero enter into conflict with villains who threaten group and are stronger than it; hero befriends or respects key villain; hero avoids opposing villains when they first threaten society but when the villains endanger a friend of the hero; hero fights and defeats villains, saving society, which accepts him and assimilates him (if he does not move off). See Wright (1976, pp. 48–49).

[5] I stress The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner’s Song as, alongside The Armies of the Night, the most broadly acclaimed of Mailer’s fictions. Because of its frequent distance from fiction that is, in part, due to its excursions into the essay and analytical historical forms, I do not stress Armies. I stress Evenings, however, both as the most developed and as the least realistically inhibited expression of Mailer’s poetics (a point that I hope my discussion of it here will substantiate) and as because the bimodal reception to this work makes it at once a zenith and nadir of Mailer’s critical reception; see Bloom (2005), Burgess (1985, pp. 132–133) and Poirier (1999, pp. 226–337). I somewhat limit my attention, largely ignoring Why Are We in Vietnam? and The Gospel According to the Son, which are the shortest of Mailer’s fictions, and Harlot’s Ghost and The Castle in the Forest, which are the least complete with regard to closure of the stories of their respective central protagonists, namely Harry Hubbard and Adolf Hitler.

[FOOTNOTELeeds19783–4-1] Leeds 1978, pp. 3–4.

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[b]

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