The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/"Their Humor Annoyed Him": Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in The Castle in the Forest

Written by
John Whalen-Bridge

---

Abstract: Mailer’s innovative device of having a mind-entering demon narrate backgrounds denied to us by the enclosures of history allows Mailer to conflate the epistemological realism of first person narration with the omniscience of third person. Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to the Castle’s cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably alone.

---

URL: https://prmlr.us/mr08whal

Works Cited

• Adamowski, T. H. (2006). "Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman

Mailer". U of Toronto Quarterly. 75 (3): 883–904.

• Bosman, Julie (December 6, 2006). [http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/06/

features/novels.php "Literature: Do Novels Really Need Bibliographies?"]. International Herald Tribune. Retrieved 3 August 2008.

• Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2007). Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP.
• Gubar, Susan (2001). "Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries". The Yale Journal of Criticism. 14 (1): 191–215.
• Lennon, J. Michael (1982). "Mailer's Cosmology". Modern Language Studies. 12 (3): 18–29.
• Mailer, Norman (1983). Ancient Evenings. Boston: Little Brown.

An American Dream. New York: Dial. 1965.

The Castle in the Forest. New York: Random House. 2007.

The Naked and the Dead. New York: Rinehart. 1948.

Why Are We at War?. New York: Random House. 2003.

• Mailer, Norman; Whalen-Bridge, John (2006). "The Karma of Words: Mailer since Executioner's

Song". Journal of Modern Literature. 30 (1): 1–16.

• McCann, Sean (2000). "The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism". English Literary History. 67 (1): 293–336.
• McDonald, Brian (2006). "Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the 'Very Jewish

Jesus'of Norman Mailer's The Gospel according to the Son". Journal of Modern Literature. 30 (1): 78–90.

• Rorty, Richard (1989). Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge UP.
• Rosenbaum, Ron (March 6, 2007). The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer: What Will He Make of ‘Hitler’s Chappaquiddick’?. Slate.
• Taylor, A. J. P (1996). The Origins of the Second World War. New York: Touchstone.
• Uygur, Cenk (December 8, 2006). "The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush". Retrieved 1 August 2008.