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

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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]

The Basic Elements

The basic elements of Mailer’s novels match up pretty closely with Talcott Parson’s sociological articulation of the analytical aspects of human phenomena and the human sciences, which are physiological, personality centered, social relational and symbolic.[e] To these I add the transcendental. These elements—physiological, psychic, social, cultural and transcendental—underlie Mailer’s structural statics and all his work.

The basic elements are present in all Mailer’s fictions right from The Naked and the Dead. Take the vivid physicality of the transport of the 77mm antitank guns; and the vivid personalities of Cumming strategizing, Croft and Martinez conniving, Roth and Brown reminiscing about “back home.” Take the social relations involved in the dialogues of Goldstein and Ridges, in the conversations of Cummings and Hearn and the troops at the “Chow Lines,” as well as up and down the Anapopei chain of command. For cultural elements, take the shared language on the Chow Lines and the battling ideologies of Cummings and Hearn, Velsen and Roth. Transcendental elements tend to strongly intersect other elements. For example, we can perceive a degree of emotional exhilaration in Croft’s transient, intensely physical yet also transcendental sense of challenge and triumph in his ascent of Mt. Anaka.

Moving beyond The Naked and the Dead, examples of the basic elements are numerous. For physicality, we may recall the felt electrical charge of anxiety as Rojack heads toward the assembly about Deborah’s corpse amidst the stopped traffic on “the Drive” and—a favorite of mine—when Provincetown Police Captain Alvin Luther Regency is so “on” at one point in Tough Guys Don’t Dance that, to quote Mailer, “if he had had a tail, it would have been whipping the rungs.”[2] For the personality, we have Mailer’s agitated state approaching the stage to speak at Ambassador Theater in The Armies of the Night; Meni’s nuanced mental reflections on his relations to Mother, Father and Pharaoh; Gilmore and Nicole (Harry and Kittredge) in revealing epistolary communion with each other in The Executioner’s Song (and Harlot’s Ghost). We also have an array of unforgettably vivid characters—Tim Madden’s father, Dougie, and Harry Hubbard’s father, Cal; Pharaoh Ptah-nem-hotep, Queen Nefitiri and “little queen” Honey Ball; and Alois Shicklgruber (aka Alois Hitler). For social relations—the core stuff of the novel according to Northrop Frye—the list is endless: a favorite of mine is the rich social interplay among the vivid Ptah-nem-hotep, little Meni, Meni’s mother Hathfertiti, and his Father Nef-khep-aukhem and the other guests at Evenings’ banquet, “The Night of the Pig.” For culture, we have the densely rendered U.S. Army, Hollywood and CIA worlds. We have stuff of Mickey Lovett’s conversation with revolutionary MacLeod, Hugh “Harlot” Montague’s conversations with Harry, Mailer’s own conversation with Robert Lowell on the Pentagon march or with a Hell’s Angel just afterwards while in Federal custody, the rituals of the Pharaoh’s court and temples, the tavern banter of Alois Shicklgruber and his drinking companions. For transcendence, we have Rojack’s communing with Cherry across a club room in the Village, Menenhetet at the side of Ramses II as he communes with Amon during a blood sacrifice, and Gary Gilmore’s self-designed striving after public moral rehabilitation through self-promoted execution. What I would stress about these basic elements is the broad range of modes of humanity at the foundations of Mailer’s work, a breadth that affirms Lee Siegel’s claim that “Mailer is one of the last Western writers to create a self-contained intellectual universe out of strong, idiosyncratic convictions about the relationship between spiritual, psychic and social existence.”[3]

Statics

The emergent, molecular Mailerian statics help specify the characters and dramatic tensions that generate narrative. They consist of pairs of contrasting categories. One pair is individual-society (Hearn versus platoon; O’Shaugnessy versus Hollywood; Rojack versus police and business establishments; Mailer versus the Pentagon; Harry Hubbard vis-à-vis the CIA). A second couplet is dominant-subordinate (for example, Cummings over Hearn; studio head Herman over director Charles Eitel; Barney Kelly and Lieut. Roberts over Rojack; Pharaoh over Menenhetet; Captain Regency over Tim Madden; Bill Harvey over Harry Hubbard). A third and fourth are the cowardly-courageous and the everyman-magus. Here, Hearn retrieving his cigarette butt off the General’s floor illustrates the cowardly, while Hearn previously stamping out that that cigarette butt illustrates courage. Rojack on his first, failed walk on the parapet at Barney Kelly’s penthouse illustrates both the cowardly and a bit of everyman; Rojack on his last triumphant walk illustrates both the courageous and the magus. Menenhetet casting spells with Honey Ball against the bugger Pharaoh Ramses II does so as well.

A fifth is the mundane versus the transcendent. O’Shaugnessy’s fractured consciousness may pass as mundane in the alienated Hollywood of The Deer Park, but his sexual gymnastic in “The Time of Her Time” again attain an at least ephemeral transcendence. The funk of most of Rojack’s marriage is mundane; but Rojack’s regenerative sodomy with Ruta and exhilarating combat with Shaggo Martin again touch the transcendent. Menenhetet idling with his childhood friends in the Nile delta or training as charioteer taps little more than the mundane. However, the temporally restorative power of Menenhetet’s intercourse with the Secret Whore of the King of Kadesh touches the transcendent, and Menenhetet’s selfreincarnating embrace with Nefitiri transcends the finality of at least one death. Little Meni regularly transcends normal social and psychological limitation through his mind reading, especially in “The Book of the Child,” a veritable symphony of empathetic leaps of a sort prefigured by the leaps that Rojack makes into the mind of Cherry in An American Dream. It merits stressing that transcendence in Mailer’s work tends toward not only to be frequent and salient but to be ephemeral as well. Menenhetet’s trysts with the Secret Whore of Tyre and with Honey Ball are interludes. Rojack’s ecstatic first witness of Cherry singing in a Village joint is a “rare moment of balm.”[4] Sergius O’Shaugnessy’s long fuck with Denise Gondelman at the end of “The Time of Her Time,” although perhaps fullest and fittest conclusion to The Deer Park O’Shaugnessy’s saga, seems an end to O’Shaugnessy’s relationship to Gondelman.

Terms are now in place for a discussion of the Mailerian dynamic.

Notes

  1. ↑ 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.
  2. ↑ 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.”
  3. ↑ 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).
  4. ↑ 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.
  5. ↑ See Parsons & Smelser (1956).

Citations

  1. ↑ Leeds 1978, pp. 3–4.
  2. ↑ Mailer 1984, p. 211.
  3. ↑ Siegel 2007, p. 2.
  4. ↑ Mailer 1965, p. 99.

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.
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