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A Fear of Dying: Norman Mailer's An American Dream: Difference between revisions

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The attitude toward society revealed in ''An American Dream'' cannot be viewed in simplistic fashion as irreconcilable alienation. Such an evaluation of Mailer was made in Marcus Klein's ''After Alienation'', which appeared before ''An American Dream''. Even without the testimony of this last novel, however, it should have been apparent from pieces in ''The Presidential Papers'', as well as from sections of ''Advertisements for Myself'', that Mailer was protesting aspects of American culture but not repudiating its future. For Mailer the promise of America reposes wholly in the individual, not at all in the society in which he is enmeshed. That society has tended to de-invidualize the individual, to reduce his sanctity and importance, while ensconcing him in ever-increasing material splendor. All of Mailer's fiction beginning with ''The Naked and the Dead'' has emphasized the dangers to man from this de-individuation. But whereas in ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''Barbary Shore Mailer'' was still hopeful about social reform, in ''The Deer Park'' and ''An American Dream'' the only meaningful reform envisioned is the transformation of the individual.  
The attitude toward society revealed in ''An American Dream'' cannot be viewed in simplistic fashion as irreconcilable alienation. Such an evaluation of Mailer was made in Marcus Klein's ''After Alienation'', which appeared before ''An American Dream''. Even without the testimony of this last novel, however, it should have been apparent from pieces in ''The Presidential Papers'', as well as from sections of ''Advertisements for Myself'', that Mailer was protesting aspects of American culture but not repudiating its future. For Mailer the promise of America reposes wholly in the individual, not at all in the society in which he is enmeshed. That society has tended to de-invidualize the individual, to reduce his sanctity and importance, while ensconcing him in ever-increasing material splendor. All of Mailer's fiction beginning with ''The Naked and the Dead'' has emphasized the dangers to man from this de-individuation. But whereas in ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''Barbary Shore Mailer'' was still hopeful about social reform, in ''The Deer Park'' and ''An American Dream'' the only meaningful reform envisioned is the transformation of the individual.  


No less than a radical metamorphosis is initiated in An American Dream. Mailer has confessed that he is "humorles; he rarely displays an ironic bent. Yet  
No less than a radical metamorphosis is initiated in ''An American Dream''. Mailer has confessed that he is "humorless"; he rarely displays an ironic bent. Yet the title of his new novel is an ironic comment on the tenuousness of the official American dream, that hyper-conglomerate of success, salesmanship, health, and wealth which produces row on row of mannequins. Scratch the glossy surface of a contented mannequin and it bleeds a different kind of American dream, "a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation." An outpouring of this passion provides the plot and texture of the novel and suggests the positive and negative dimensions of a new individualism.
the title of his new novel is an ironic comment on the tenuousness of the official American dream, that hyper-conglomerate of success, salesmanship, health, and wealth which produces row on row of mannequins. Scratch the glossy surface of a contented mannequin and it bleeds a different kind of American dream, "a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation." An outpouring of this passion provides the plot and texture of the novel and suggests the positive and negative dimensions of a new individualism.


Stephen Richards Rojack has reached the heights of the official dream at the book's opening. A man of action and intellect, physically brave, sexually attractive, photogenic, he is a professor of psychology at a New York City university, host of a television interview show, amateur boxer, husband of the wealthy, beautiful daughter of a financial tycoon, author of a popular book on the psychology and forms of execu tion. Nor is that all, for earlier he has been awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for valor in World War II and elected a congressman at the age of twenty-six. Who could ask for anything more? Rojack! Now aged forty-four, he confesses on page 8: "I had come to the end of a very long street. Call it an avenue. For I had come to decide I was finally a failure."  
Stephen Richards Rojack has reached the heights of the official dream at the book's opening. A man of action and intellect, physically brave, sexually attractive, photogenic, he is a professor of psychology at a New York City university, host of a television interview show, amateur boxer, husband of the wealthy, beautiful daughter of a financial tycoon, author of a popular book on the psychology and forms of execution. Nor is that all, for earlier he has been awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for valor in World War II and elected a congressman at the age of twenty-six. Who could ask for anything more? Rojack! Now aged forty-four, he confesses on page 8: "I had come to the end of a very long street. Call it an avenue. For I had come to decide I was finally a failure."  


Rojack is not the anti-heroic failure who populates the novels of such contempo raries as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud. Instead, Mailer's protagonist isa conventional nineteenth-century hero, another sign of the essential traditionalism of Mailer's novelistic powers whether in An American Dream or his earlier works of fiction. Like the typical romantic hero, Rojack seeks to free himself from society and its stultifications; he has been tainted by society, however, and his spirit is also corrupt by virtue of his humanity. Heroic aspirations and human limitations foreshadow agony and tragedy, and such is Rojack's fate. Mailer's major character, then, is a tough rather than a sentimental creation, the toughness consisting of his fortitude and his persistent effort to revivify his cauterized sensibilities, and with their aid to respond to the stimuli and mysteries omnipresent for the man escaping from urban, technological culture. Mailer has written a disturbing existential novel; it is by no means accidental that the "existential psychology" of his hero revolves around "the thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death [are] the roots of motivation."
Rojack is not the anti-heroic failure who populates the novels of such contemporaries as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud. Instead, Mailer's protagonist isa conventional nineteenth-century hero, another sign of the essential traditionalism of Mailer's novelistic powers whether in ''An American Dream'' or his earlier works of fiction. Like the typical romantic hero, Rojack seeks to free himself from society and its stultifications; he has been tainted by society, however, and his spirit is also corrupt by virtue of his humanity. Heroic aspirations and human limitations foreshadow agony and tragedy, and such is Rojack's fate. Mailer's major character, then, is a tough rather than a sentimental creation, the toughness consisting of his fortitude and his persistent effort to revivify his cauterized sensibilities, and with their aid to respond to the stimuli and mysteries omnipresent for the man escaping from urban, technological culture. Mailer has written a disturbing existential novel; it is by no means accidental that the "existential psychology" of his hero revolves around "the thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death [are] the roots of motivation."


Many readers may be more sickened by Rojack in process of existential metamorphosis than by the condition from which Mailer extricates him. This ironic fate has haunted Gregor Samsa of Kafka's "Metamorphosis," whose conversion to a giant insect tends to make him more repulsive to some than the petty bourgeois job and family he has sloughed off. However, the engaged contemporary novelist finds it I difficult to construct a major character whose fight from society purifies him of all its negative qualities. Furthermore, such a writer cannot easily conceive of the disap pearance of those negative qualities which have not been induced by social conditioning, for which the character himself may be held responsible. Should the novelist undertake to disregard his understanding of the interrelationship of man and society, he will also be discounting the similar insights provided by social and individual depth psychology and assuring that his fiction will be trivial and irrelevant. Finally, the more impregnable, sacrosanct, and virtuous the condition of the entity against which the existential hero struggles, the more of a repugnant outcast does the latter seem to be. Measured by the Judeo-Christian code as refined by modern Western civilization, he is Antichrist,a heretical criminal; in his own judgment, however, he is a saint inaugurating the far ranging transvaluation of values urged by Nietzsche. The closest parallel to the world of Mailer's existential hero is medieval Europe, where priests were permitted to bray in church, plague was a seasonal visitor, strong odors were ubiquitous, witches rode broomsticks, the Dance of Death was an endless festival, God and the Devil fought obdurately and incessantly for man's soul, and the onlooking prize could not readily differentiate between the two competing champions.  
Many readers may be more sickened by Rojack in process of existential metamorphosis than by the condition from which Mailer extricates him. This ironic fate has haunted Gregor Samsa of Kafka's "Metamorphosis," whose conversion to a giant insect tends to make him more repulsive to some than the petty bourgeois job and family he has sloughed off. However, the engaged contemporary novelist finds it I difficult to construct a major character whose fight from society purifies him of all its negative qualities. Furthermore, such a writer cannot easily conceive of the disap pearance of those negative qualities which have not been induced by social conditioning, for which the character himself may be held responsible. Should the novelist undertake to disregard his understanding of the interrelationship of man and society, he will also be discounting the similar insights provided by social and individual depth psychology and assuring that his fiction will be trivial and irrelevant. Finally, the more impregnable, sacrosanct, and virtuous the condition of the entity against which the existential hero struggles, the more of a repugnant outcast does the latter seem to be. Measured by the Judeo-Christian code as refined by modern Western civilization, he is Antichrist,a heretical criminal; in his own judgment, however, he is a saint inaugurating the far ranging transvaluation of values urged by Nietzsche. The closest parallel to the world of Mailer's existential hero is medieval Europe, where priests were permitted to bray in church, plague was a seasonal visitor, strong odors were ubiquitous, witches rode broomsticks, the Dance of Death was an endless festival, God and the Devil fought obdurately and incessantly for man's soul, and the onlooking prize could not readily differentiate between the two competing champions.  
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