The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/"Their Humor Annoyed Him": Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in The Castle in the Forest
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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
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. (Summer 2006). "Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer". University of Toronto Quarterly. 75 (3): 883–904.
- Bosman, Julie (December 6, 2006). "Literature: Do Novels Really Need Bibliographies?". International Herald Tribune. Archived from the original on December 8, 2006. Retrieved 2020-09-10.
- Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2007). Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. New edition with a new preface by the author.
- Gubar, Susan (Spring 2001). "Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries". The Yale Journal of Criticism. 14 (1): 191–215.
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