The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/An American Dream: American Existentialism

Written by
Randy Laist

---

Abstract: Norman Mailer himself was self-conscious of his personal evolution in his writerly identity. In the stylistic transition from the early novels to An American Dream, we observe Mailer in the act of creating himself. Mailer’s under- standing of existentialism recognizes no debt to its European roots; it is wholly intuitional. Mailer is attracted to existentialism as an oppositional philosophy, one that challenges the Socratic roots of the entire tradition of Western philosophy with its abstract observers and transcendent truths.

---

URL: https://prmlr.us/mr03lai

The 1950's was a decade of anguish for Normal Mailer, who has often discussed the identity crisis he suffered following the runaway success of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead.(1) Mailer’s meteoric emergence as the author of an astonishing bestseller thrust Mailer into a public position from which there was no obvious next move. If he kept writing WWII novels, he might have developed into a self-parodist. If he experimented with new forms, he might be derided as an upstart. If he stopped writing books altogether, he would be a one-hit-wonder. The two novels Mailer produced during this decade, Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955), both testify to the strain of this crisis. They are haunted parables of inertia and surveillance. Their protagonists have only the most provisional sense of who they are and drift through their stories with their moral compasses spinning arbitrarily from north to south and back again. If The Naked and the Dead bears the common first-novel sign of wearing its influences too openly, the same can easily be said of the two following novels. While The Naked and the Dead refers to Dos Passos, Barbary Shore unselfconsciously pays homage to European novelists, particularly Camus and Koestler, while The Deer Park is drenched in the style of Californian writers, particularly Hammett and West. Throughout these novels, one senses that Mailer is still casting about for a style. By his next work of fiction, An American Dream (1965), we have the Norman Mailer we recognize, as if he had risen up from some literary ooze into his most recognizable form, up to his most characteristic literary devices; recklessly pitting God against the Devil, interlarding his social, sexual, and literary lives into one another, and writing every sentence as if it were his last. In the stylistic transition from the sophomore novels to An American Dream, we observe Mailer in the act of creating himself.

Mailer himself was self-conscious of this evolution in his writerly identity. The turning point in Advertisements for Myself (1958) is chapter three (of five), “Births,” in which Mailer describes the fundamental rearrangement of the self-understanding that he experienced between the proofs of The Deer Park and his extensive revisions: “I turned within my psyche I can almost believe, for I felt something shift to murder in me.” This distinctly Mailerian conversion is informed by his identification with the new street culture of hipsterism. Among those contemporary commentators who read Advertisements as the lamentations of a failed novelist, a representative voice is Charles I. Glicksburg, who writes:

What Mailer never comes to grips with is the fundamental question of how Hip provides a viable aesthetic for the writer of fiction... Mailer’s negative and confused ‘theology’ will not serve to promote his career as a novelist, for Hip has no direct bearing on the problem the writer faces when he settles down to the task of composing fiction. There is no such mythical creature as a Hip novelist.

Hip, Glicksburg explains, is a way of life, not a way of art. Glicksburg’s prim practitioner “settling down to the task of composing fiction” is distancing himself from the press of existence in order to reflect abstractedly upon it. But in his formulation of hip as “an American existentialism,” Mailer proposes a code according to which the acts of living and of writing are mutually constitutive. Advertisements is both an argument and a demonstration of the thesis that expression and experience “have an umbilical relationship.” The hip novel will be a natural extension of the hip existence.

Mailer underwrites his romantic conception of the writer with a style of existentialism that foregrounds the antirationalist stance of Heidegger and Sartre. Robert Denoon Cumming has criticized Mailer for loosening the term “existentialism”from its philosophical constraints, using it carelessly as a term for “romantic activism,” and thereby obscuring the true complexities of this branch of philosophy. But, of course, Mailer never boasted any pretensions to being a careful student of continental philosophy. In a 1965 interview in The Paris Review, Mailer explained,

I’d hardly read anything by Sartre at this time, and nothing by Heidegger. I’ve read a bit since, and have to admire their formidable powers, but I suspect that they are no closer to the buried continent of existentialism than were medieval cartographers near to a useful map of the world. The new continent which shows on our psychic maps as intimations of eternity is still to be discovered.

Mailer’s understanding of existentialism recognizes no debt to its European roots; it is wholly intuitional. Mailer is attracted to existentialism as an oppositional philosophy; one that challenges the Socratic roots of the entire tradition of Western philosophy with its abstract observers and transcendent truths. Mailer’s variation on existentialism goes even further than Heidegger and Sartre, however, in repudiating the very principle of philosophical discourse itself. In the American tradition of Emerson and Whitman, Mailer is dismissive of any philosophy he cannot feel coursing through his soul. Mailer’s existentialism cannot be discovered in any closely reasoned tome, but only in the rhythm of the blood and the streets, in sex and drugs: “One’s condition on marijuana,” for example,“is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one’s being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness.”

In the twin interests of achieving some insight into the nature of the American existentialism that Mailer discovered in the late 1950s and examining the manner in which Mailer translated this discovery into a novelistic style, it may be useful to parse out the four pieces of Mailer’s marijuana revelation. Mailer’s catalogue of insights clearly indicates that his existential theory is more comprehensive than the mere “romantic activism” derided by Cumming. Mailer’s recognition of “the importance of each moment” reflects Sartre’s formulation of anguish and responsibility. Attention to the manner in which each moment “is changing one” recapitulates the Sartrean motto that “existence precedes essence.” Mailer’s reference to “being” signifies more than just “a good existential word,” as one of Mailer’s interviewers quips. It is a term that broadens the field of subjectivity to include not only sensual perception, but also the deep structures of mood and context that organize experience. In Sartrean terms, “the enormous apparatus of nothingness” is nothing less than consciousness itself, which is the upsurge, as Sartre would say, of nothingness into the world. Mailer is no Sartre scholar, but the consistency of his unique variety of existentialism has more in common with Sartrean existentialism than perhaps even Mailer himself supposed.

At the same time, moreover, each of these existential tenets reflects an attitude toward what has been commonly identified as the four pillars of the narrativist’s art: plot, character, atmosphere, and tone. When Mailer returned to fiction in 1963 to begin writing An American Dream, it is evident that his plot moves with an urgency that is completely absent from Barbary Shore or The Deer Park. There is an inbuilt sense of “the importance of every moment.” Although the narrative of An American Dream spans only thirty-two hours, its protagonist Stephen Rojack is continually destroyed and reborn in response to his extreme experiences in a way that contrasts sharply with the numb souls wandering through the two subsequent novels. The atmosphere of An American Dream, rather than reflecting the social realism and literary naturalism of the 1950s novels, is permeated with occult tremors that signify that the reality Rojack inhabits is the kind of field consciousness associated with philosophies of Being. Finally, in the hell-bent prose of An American Dream, Mailer invents a consciousness that aspires to give full vent to the enormous apparatus of language and expression, to the reckless shapes of nothingness that somehow become art and communication. In all of these aspects of An American Dream, Mailer explores the possibilities of his American existentialism as they apply to the art of the novel.

When Mailer said of Barbary Shore that it was “the first of the existential novels written in America,” he surely must have been referring to the European kind of existentialism with its grim mood and haunted corridors as opposed to his own homegrown variety. Although the characters in Barbary Shore are always aware of the imminent end of the world, their apocalypticism doesn’t inspire their lives with any urgency. The plot is a series of random encounters, confined almost entirely to a dreary boarding house. The narrator’s mood is typical of the murk of ennui in which the entire storyline is immersed: “I lived, and was it I alone in relation to nothing? The world would revolve, and I who might exercise a will for so long as money lasted, exercised nothing and dreamed away hours upon my bed.” Most strikingly, despite the blur of adultery, murder, and espionage; the last chapter of Barbary Shore ends with the very same expression of pointlessness with which the first chapter concluded: “So the blind lead the blind and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.” Among the many similarities between Barbary Shore and The Deer Park is this purgatorial sense of a sordid cast of characters exiled alone with one another. Like Lovett of Barbary Shore, O’Shaugnessy is living off of some money he saved up, drifting aimlessly through time. If Lovett is ostensibly occupied by a novel that he never writes, O’Shaugnessy is involved in an even more negative project of forgetfulness and self-narcosis: He’s “trying to forget how to fly a plane.” The plot of The Deer Park is certainly more kinetic than Mailer’s previous novel, but the stakes—being “in” or “out” of the Hollywood power circles, winning or losing the affections of vain and mercurial women—are generally phony, interchangeable pursuits in self-deception. Toward the end of the novel, however, Sergius’s resolution to strive for a new kind of life and Marion Faye’s Manichean psychosis charge the climax of the book with a new dimension. Although the plot of The Deer Park remains essentially unchanged through Mailer’s revisions, these developments are clearly inflected by the born-again Mailer, touched by a vision of American existentialism and its new possibilities for purpose and resolution. As such, they point toward the more fully realized treatment this vision would receive in An American Dream.

One of the common critiques of Sartrean existentialism is that it has no moral dimension and implies an ultimate relativism and quietism. All action is equivalent and therefore useless. Sartre tried to contest this verdict by articulating a theory of what he called “anguish.” The very absence of any definitive code of right or wrong, Sartre argued, transforms every human action into a moral act of universal import; we invent right and wrong through our actions: “When a man commits himself to anything, fully realizing that he is not only choosing what will be, but is thereby at the same time a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind—in such a moment man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility.” This aspect of Sartrean philosophy is generally overlooked, and existentialism continues to have associations with the kind of moral nihilism and Beckettian futility that characterizes novels like Barbary Shore. One of the most salient aspects of Mailer’s existentialism, however, is its unabashedly metaphysical character. Although the appeal to God and the Devil seems to fly in the face of any conventional existentialist attitude, Mailer insists that, “To be a real existentialist (Sartre admittedly to the contrary) one must be religious, one must have one’s sense of the ‘purpose’— whatever the purpose may be—but a life which is directed by one’s faith in the necessity of action is a life committed to the notion that substratum of existence is the search, the end meaningful but mysterious.” Mailer’s theology invests the existential world with the pressing sense of moral urgency that Sartre had attempted to communicate through his thesis of anguish, because the events which befall his characters are no longer random and meaningless; every moment is transformed into a pitched battle for the soul of the universe. The plot of An American Dream is propelled by the imperatives of this existential metaphysics.

Mailer has told us that “there is one single burning pinpoint in the vision in hip: it’s that God is in danger of dying.” In An American Dream, it is a tenet of Rojack’s existential philosophy that “God’s in a war with the Devil, and God may lose.” Everything Rojack sees and does in the thirty-two hours of his story is inseparable from this vulnerability of God to the predations of the Devil. The random sequence of events that constitutes the narrative plot of the novel is transformed through Rojack’s existential theology into a mythological odyssey. By some mystical coincidence, Cherry shares Rojack’s conviction about the metaphysical dimension of human choices. She is haunted by “the idea that God is weaker because I didn’t turn out well.” Kelly, moreover, gleefully plays the role of the Devil which Rojack’s intuitions have assigned to him. Rojack is really in the world he has philosophized, and so every action he performs is fraught with a significance that bears no relation to its worldly consequences, but represents a victory or a defeat on a universal and hence invisible plane. Rojack’s murder of his wife is obviously a sickening crime in the worldly sense, but to look for the substance of Rojack’s actions in the factual pragmatic modality would be to make a hash of Mailer’s story. One of the most radical achievements of this book is its complete dislocation of heroism from conventional morality. If Rojack is a hero or a villain, a warrior for God or the Devil, it has nothing to do with how we feel about uxoricide or, in the case of Ruta, anal rape. Rojack perceives the moral character of his actions by their alignment with an entirely intuitional sense of symbolic valences. The result is that every moment of Rojack’s story is saturated with a significance that is immediate but at the same time mysterious and ambiguous. Even Rojack can never be sure that he is reading the valences accurately: “Am I now good?” he wonders after killing Deborah, or “Am I evil forever?” It is surely one definitive fate or the other—that is the metaphysical dimension of Rojack’s belief-system—but there is no way to tell which one—and that is the existential twist. The result of the uncertainty is that Rojack has to try again and again, yet he can never finally succeed. Like Sartre’s anguished consciousness, Rojack is burdened at every turn with the urgent responsibility of deciding the fate of mankind and the universe. Should he come in Ruta’s ass or in her vagina? Should he follow Shago to Harlem or obey Kelly’s summons? Should he walk the parapet or scoff at the absurdity of such an insane gesture? Rojack’s actions in response to these seemingly trivial dilemmas have consequences that go to the root of Rojack’s sense of the universe, and they fill him with the dread of a sacred onus: “Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of anxieties, for I believed God was not love but courage.” This all-pervasive emphasis on heroic courage reconfigures the ennui characteristic of conventional existential fiction (Barth’s The End of the Road, Bellow’s Dangling Man, Percy’s The Moviegoer, Mailer’s Barbary Shore) into the plot-driven suspense more characteristic of an action movie in which the hero is called upon in every scene to save the world.

Closely connected to the mood of cosmic significance permeating every development in the plot of An American Dream is the manner in which Rojack is conceived as a character in contrast to Mailer’s previous protagonists. In Barbary Shore, Lovett is planning to write “a large ambitious work about an immense institution... and about the people who wandered through it. The book had a hero and a heroine, but they never met while they were in the institution. It was only when they escaped... that they were able to love and so discover each other.” Lovett, of course, is the hero of this story, clamped down under a set of circumstances that defer any possibility of personal transformation into the future. Indeed, we learn that this deferral is to be indefinitely and probably perpetually postponed for Lovett himself. In the final chapter, Lovett perceives, “If I fled down the alley which led from that rooming house, it was only to enter another, then another.” There is no escape from the institution, and therefore Lovett’s character is condemned to a state of suspended animation, incapable of the kind of potentiality that gives meaning to agency. Likewise, O’Shaugnessy spends most of The Deer Park wandering without direction in a fog of self alienation: “I didn’t know what was right, and I didn’t know if I cared, and I didn’t even care if I knew what I wanted or what was going on in me.” O’Shaugnessy’s final scenes are charged with an urgency and a will toward self-transformative encounters that echoes Mailer’s own experience of existential rebirth. In O’Shaugnessy’s closing thoughts on the kind of writer he will aspire to be, we hear Mailer’s distinctive new voice: “I know that finally one must do, simply do, for we act in total ignorance and yet in honest ignorance we must act, or we can never learn, for we can hardly believe what we are told, we can only measure what has happened inside ourselves.”

. . .

Works Cited

• Cumming, Robert Denoon (1979). Starting Point: An Introduction to the Dialectic of Existence. Chicago: U of Chicago P.
• Esslin, Martin (1961). The Theater of the Absurd. New York: Anchor.
• Glicksburg, Charles L. (1960). "Norman Mailer: The Angry Young Novelist in America". Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature. 1 (1): 25–34.
• Mailer, Norman (1959). Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam.
• — (1965). An American Dream. New York: Dial.
• — (1951). Barbary Shore. New York: Rinehart.
• — (1966). Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial.
• — (1955). The Deer Park. New York: Putnam.
• — (September 8, 2000). "The Mailer Verdict". The Sunday Times Magazine (Interview). Interviewed by Dotson Radar. pp. 40–51.
• — (1963). The Presidential Papers. New York: Putnam.
• . . .
• Sartre, Jean Paul (1956). "Existentialism is a Humanism". In Kaufmann, Walter. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. Cleveland: Meridian. pp. 287–311.