User:Chelsey.brantley/sandbox

Written by
Katharine Westaway

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Abstract: Mailer has been . . . uniform edition.

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Note: This paper served . . . me to participate.

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URL: https://prmlr.us/mr07dick

On a in weekend in October of 1967, tens of thousands of demonstrators amassed in Washington DC to protest the war in Vietnam. Intending The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History (1968) to record and commemorate this eventful weekend, Norman Mailer enlarged the march on the Pentagon’s meaning, working as a novelist to make it more than a four-day set of tremors in the nation’s capital. Some consider the march a watershed moment, “the first in a chain of events that led to Lyndon Johnson’s decision . . . to deescalate in Vietnam." Mailer’s nonfiction novel carefully examines this defining event of American history. Through Mailer’s dual role as a demonstrator and narrator, readers are provided a rich witness to the many obstacles that were set before marchers in the form of a biased media and government officials opposed to the peace movement, including the military and police whose physical abuse is featured in the novel.

Armies is also concerned with a sweeping view of American culture vis-à-vis the march, for this is a “literary project . . . radically committed to a rendering of the American reality”, and Armies becomes Mailer’s attempt to expand upon the march’s implications for the national character. When Armies was published, the country was divided over the war in Vietnam; according to a 1967 Gallup poll, when asked whether “the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to Vietnam” forty-six percent said yes while almost an equal amount, forty-four percent, answered no. Mailer addresses the division over the war and also the disparaging of anti-war

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protestors in the mainstream press which created a gulf between mainstream America and the anti-war movement: “from late 1967 into 1968 when Mailer wrote this book, open season on the ‘hippie’ had been tacitly declared." Mailer works to familiarize the populace with these voices of dissent and to humanize them. The cultural clashes Mailer depicts epitomize the volatility of the U.S. at that moment, the rips in the social fabric that were becoming obvious during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

I will also consider how this novel might have acted as a catalyst for activism for some contemporary readers and how it worked to coalesce support for the anti-war movement, addressing those Americans who were either unsympathetic towards or even appalled by the anti-war protesters and challenging readers to see the efficacy and patriotism of the marchers’ cause. It is difficult to gauge the novel’s effectiveness on this front, but I will consider media coverage and popular reaction to the marchers and to the book itself. It is in the novelistic form that Mailer shares this moment in history, and he has said that the reading of novels “is a noble pursuit, that ideally it profoundly changes the ways in which people perceive their experience." Mailer understood the great possibility of his novel to effect change and the opportunity he had to shape readers’ understanding of what it meant to protest the war in Vietnam.

The political divide was so great in America in the late 1960s that Mailer may have felt obliged to explain one faction to another, to use as a didactic tool; he was teaching about a counterculture, from which many Americans were insulated. Scott MacFarlane measures the social turmoil of the times “at a level unseen since the Civil War. The book reading public was clamoring for insight into what was happening on the streets of America." Armies was a new window into the anti-war movement. The mainstream media kept Americans in the dark about the anti-war movement. Readers were witness to Mailer’s own perspective of the counterculture which was not always exhortative: “It was the children in whom Mailer had some hope, a gloomy hope. These mad middle-class children with their lobotomies from sin, their nihilistic embezzlement of all middle-class moral funds, their innocence, their lust for apocalypse, their unbelievable indifference to waste." Mailer does not form saints out of the anti-war camp, and one could not accuse Mailer of being an outright defender of the counterculture. But through his intimate sketches of the activists and his own experience as a fellow marcher,we do see images of greatness, of self-sacrifice and

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