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:::</blockquote>Though eventually Dad came to regret it, at the time he was totally unaware of how this decision would directly shape our lives. Our relationship would always carry a burden of separation and longing. (''In Another Place'')</blockquote> | :::</blockquote>Though eventually Dad came to regret it, at the time he was totally unaware of how this decision would directly shape our lives. Our relationship would always carry a burden of separation and longing. (''In Another Place'')</blockquote> | ||
In this passage, Norman Mailer’s response to his daughter’s question conveys a prodigiously blunt bohemian hedonism and, yes, a full-fledged narcissism to boot. The phrase “to be honest,” however, dominates the semantics of their conversation. For the most part, it guides the father-daughter future interactions until his death. It is no mean achievement by any standard. As it was his wont to do, Norman Mailer’s answer to his first daughter’s question is remarkably unsparing. All the same, it also proves that being honest (from Latin ''honestus'') connotes honor with it as an onto-ethical intention, which redeems the authoritarian harshness of Norman Mailer’s true statement. | |||
One such implication of giving honor where honor is due is the suggestion that a certain psychological healing process begins when little Susan accepts the tough and unvarnished truth as she hears it. She graduates with honors from the proverbial elite “University of Hard Knocks” with a silent dissertation on John Dewey’s ethical pragmatism applied to her own circumstances. | |||
This statement will also prove to be true in her father’s five other marriages and their consequences. However, there is no messy sentimentality or worse morbid emotional reaction to her father’s forthright confession to her. Her dignity is not lost on her father, who later also admires her courage when she loses her baby as a teenager. All indications support the notion that Norman Mailer readily valued and appreciated that kind of toughminded dignity in his oldest daughter. | |||
In another instance, eight-year-old Susan is baptized as a Roman Catholic at the behest of Salvador’s sister Tia [Aunt] Lupita, without her mother’s knowledge. She is eager to receive her First Communion like other Mexican girls her age would be. She attends Sunday school for months to go to confession and she receives the sacrament of reconciliation. When she tells her father of her short-lived conversion, he is clearly not pleased. Indeed, he is “annoyed.” Yet he is seriously interested in the sacrament of confession, which one might think of as an intimate lingual sacrament. | |||
Norman Mailer’s fervent reliance on the mysterious powers of language is no secret. His fascination then with confession as an obligation is not surprising. As an act of recounting one’s life as a succession of trials, tribulations, and often failures, confession is of interest to him. He tells his daughter, “Susie, you know what upsets me? That you confess to another person, a human being just like you. Why not just confess directly to God?”(). She lets the reader know, nevertheless, that her Grandma, however, was not nearly as philosophical about learning of her conversion. “I can’t believe your mother let you to go through with this nonsense!” She adds, “Susie this is ridiculous. You’re Jewish, and you are not to go to confession again, you | |||
hear me?” (). | |||
Her Grandma understandably offers a strong traditional defense of her granddaughter’s familial religious heritage. However, in spite of being none too happy about it, her father’s reaction to her brief conversion to Roman Catholicism and its requirement of sacrament of confession is historically and philosophically more intricate and nuanced. He asks Susan why another human being has to listen to her confession and mediate between her and God. The question arises from the depth of western Gnosticism as a philosophical, theological, and transcendent mode of direct knowledge of the divine acquired by embracing and directly addressing the divine without any | |||
intercession or intermediation. | |||
As we know, Gnosticism reaches us from a collection of ancient religious texts provided by various sects in Abrahamic religions of the Middle East (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). The Gnostics believed and continue to believe in gaining unmediated spiritual salvation by directly engaging in devout personal encounters with the divine. They do so through a series of meditational techniques and spiritual practices. | |||
I would suspect that the author’s reference to “philosophy” in her father’s reaction to the sacrament of confession shows his awareness of his own more or less Gnostic tendencies. Norman Mailer’s reaction to his daughter practicing the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation strikes the reader as a no nonsense approach to truth as he understands it. Mere truthfulness in discussion of such serious matters is not what he pursues. Their conversation in style and substance will become emblematic of the father-daughter approach concerning their future relationship as the author remembers it in her memoir. Subsequently, she hits upon a series of similar archetypal, generative learning configurations. Educative and informative dialogues with others inform the narrative of her memoir as a Bildungsroman. | |||
I should think a restatement of our preceding analyses would be appropriate here. As harsh as the author’s dialogues with her father appear to be, they permit her to be receptive to accepting reality wherever she finds it, no matter how harsh and unyielding it might be at any given time. Judiciously, she pursues a dialogic discourse in her relationships with others, accepting it as the irreplaceable essence of our humanity, which it is. She finds it to be a solution to the thorny problematics of alienation and the ensuing sinister tendency to repress relational hostilities. | |||
I would say that the author accepts the ubiquitous reality of various complications in the human condition in their different modes and degrees of severity. She comes across as attentively accepting existing situational realities and creatively remaking them. She refuses the false alternative peace of mind by futile attempts at repressing them. Her courage to do so saves her from the horror of the return of the repressed, which might produce a tragic form of arrested development. She accepts her father as paterfamilias. The reader gets a more illuminating glimpse of | |||
Norman Mailer’s gentler family life as opposed to his stormy public life. His inner life remains a secret to us a perhaps it was to himself, as it is so with the rest of us. There is an unknowable part to our psyche, which English psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion calls “O.” As ultimate Truth, it surpasses even the unconscious language of our dreams and remains ineffable. Therefore, one might say the short, hard-hitting father-daughter dialogue remarkably affects and informs the subjective-objective or phenomenological quality of the different formulations and conceptual patterns of Susan’s memoir. Along with her revelations of infantile memories, their dialogue casts a long, if crepuscular, light on the familial encounters with her father and, by extension, her mother. Her desire to allow reciprocal truthfulness to surface in intimate dialogues about family matters makes them more intelligible to the reader than they might have been otherwise. They come close to a mode of psychoanalytic sessions of various length, where language reigns supreme. In such sessions, the author focuses solely on getting a grip on her past, not as over and done with, but rather for the opposite reason. She shrewdly uses them as a springboard toward future undertakings. For example, still trying to decipher the circumstances of her mother’s sudden appearance at Long Branch to take her to Mexico, the author engages in another truth-seeking conversation. Curious about the circumstances arrested in spacetime by that invariantly upsetting second snapshot, she writes, “Years later, I found out from Mom this picture had been taken the day I left Grandma to go to Mexico. And when I heard this, I felt the same uncomfortable sensation in my belly. Only I wanted to cry for that little girl, twice | |||
ripped away from her surroundings (''In Another Place''). | |||
The above quotation bears out the effectiveness of intimate power of psychological discoveries and their effectiveness by the author. She sees through her tears the possibility of receiving enlightenment and relief intermediated by the miracle of lingual communication and communion. She assumes the right of grieving for the helpless little girl abandoned by her mother, who is the center of her infantile universe. On the other hand, those tears show her the way to comprehension of her situation. They psychosomatically empower her to look at her past through a rearview mirror of her psyche to be able to see better the road ahead and appreciate her unique journey as a | |||
teenager and in her adult life. | |||
The author clearly learns the cause of her anxiety and the resultant feeling of nausea when she would look at her picture with her mother as an infant. Thus, that exiled little girl eventually is in a position to claim the authority to repatriate herself—psychologically and otherwise. Through tenacious learning processes, she becomes a citizen of the world, by freely choosing to do so. All these dialogical activities bode well for her. They enable her to get along excellently with her extensive family members and her future endeavors with others as a psychoanalyst. Yet, I would stress again, the author cannot and, fortunately, does not repress the effects of her infantile lived experiences. She often cries while listening to her mother plays | |||
an oneiric twilit Chopin nocturne, Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” or a | |||