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An American Dream Expanded/There’s Hope in Mailer: Difference between revisions
An American Dream Expanded/There’s Hope in Mailer (view source)
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In every categorical sense, Norman Mailer is an utter and hopeless mess. If their is an intellectual in the United States who talks more predictable nonsense on the subject of foreign policy, I will pay a week's wages not to have to hear him. | In every categorical sense, Norman Mailer is an utter and hopeless mess. If their is an intellectual in the United States who talks more predictable nonsense on the subject of foreign policy, I will pay a week's wages not to have to hear him. | ||
On the domestic scene, he is a so-so socialist. So-so because even though he finds he can float only in cool waters of the left, he is transparently unhappy, really, as a socialist: although he is more docile toward that barren religion than toward any other. | |||
As a citizen, he is wild, defying not only those starched conventions that are there primarily to stick out your tongue at, but the other conventions, the real McCoys; those that are there to increase the small chance we have whether as children or' as adults, for a little domestic tranquility. | |||
== Sort of Conservative == | |||
'''AS A PHILOSOPHER''', however, Mailer is dare I say it?__In his own fashion, a conservative. Wrestling in the 20th Century with the hegemonies of government and ideology, the conservative tends to side with the individualist. In his savage novels, Mailer's titanic struggles are sustained by the resources of his own spirit (plus booze). in his most recent novel, ''[[An American Dream,]]'' a hero as screwy as Mailer lurches fro Gomorrah to hell and back, but always depends on himself to get out of the jam. | |||
Mailer is properly denounced by philosophical taxonomists as a soilpsist__a man for whom reality is confined to himself and his own experience. Still it is a relief__sort of a half way house to the proper blend of the individual and tradition __ to read a novel in which the protagonist doesn't depend for his salvation on life rafts coast out into the sea of Hope by Marx. Freud, or U Thant. | |||
I confess that Mailer's tours through the nightspots of hell are not my idea of recreation, even with pad and pencil in hand to jot down what one has Learned about. Things, I do not enjoy spelunking in human depravity, nor do I wish my machine around to tape-record the emunctory noise of psychic or physical human excesses. Even so, there is hop in Norman Mailer's turbulent motions. | |||