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'''Boiling the Archetypal Pot'''</br> | |||
Norman Mailer’s American Dream | Norman Mailer’s American Dream</br> | ||
TIMOTHY EVANS | TIMOTHY EVANS</br> | ||
IN ONE | IN ONE Of HIS RECENT ESSAYS, Leslie Fiedler proposes that a new technology in a New World made both necessary and possible "the manufacture, the mass production, and the mass distribution of dreams.” Some of these were "dreams disguised as goods,” but of course they also reached their public dressed as art, poor and vulgar art, by and large; ”but what,” as Fiedler asks, ”can one expect of a population descended horn the culturally dispossessed of all nations of the world?"1 | ||
An image to reflect in accelerating expectations, to judge by the' Ragged Dicks and Tattered Toms it favored during the first great age of mass literature in America. Alger’s stereotype of struggle-and-success, and others like it, resonated with the dreams his readers dreamed; and behind those dreams was a latch in worldly success as a measure of individual humanity that reached back past the puritans’ doctrine of the calling to the Faustian core of Protestant ethics itself. But by the time the crash of 1f29 imposed its reality on the nation, a tradition had emerged among serious novelists that set them in imaginative opposition to the stereotype of struggle-and-success. Those who published the decisive works of the twenties and thirties—Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Scott FitzGerald, John Stein- beck, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner—a1l of them took on in some significant measure the task of demythification. | An image to reflect in accelerating expectations, to judge by the' Ragged Dicks and Tattered Toms it favored during the first great age of mass literature in America. Alger’s stereotype of struggle-and-success, and others like it, resonated with the dreams his readers dreamed; and behind those dreams was a latch in worldly success as a measure of individual humanity that reached back past the puritans’ doctrine of the calling to the Faustian core of Protestant ethics itself. But by the time the crash of 1f29 imposed its reality on the nation, a tradition had emerged among serious novelists that set them in imaginative opposition to the stereotype of struggle-and-success. Those who published the decisive works of the twenties and thirties—Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Scott FitzGerald, John Stein- beck, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner—a1l of them took on in some significant measure the task of demythification. | ||
They struggled and, in true American fashion, they succeeded. They succeeded so thoroughly that only the grossest hacks find rite old stereotype a challenging target anymore. But if the example of Jacqueline Susann or Harold Robbins arrests to rite success of the stereotype’s enemies, it also raises a question about its obvious persistence in the popular imagination. Has the dream of success become a reflex of the mass psyche, a subliminal myth that no longer needs to be established or | They struggled and, in true American fashion, they succeeded. They succeeded so thoroughly that only the grossest hacks find rite old stereotype a challenging target anymore. But if the example of Jacqueline Susann or Harold Robbins arrests to rite success of the stereotype’s enemies, it also raises a question about its obvious persistence in the popular imagination. Has the dream of success become a reflex of the mass psyche, a subliminal myth that no longer needs to be established or | ||