The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Norman Mailer: The Magician as Tragic Hero

Written by
Robert J. Begiebing

To whom do I speak today?
Brothers are evil,
Friends of today are not of love.

To whom do I speak today?
Hearts are thievish,
Every man seizes his neighbor’s goods.

To whom do I speak today?
The gentle man perishes,
The bold-faced goes everywhere.

To whom do I speak today?
He of the peaceful face is wretched,
The good is disregarded in every place.

To whom do I speak today?
When a man should arouse wrath by his evil conduct,
He stirs all men to mirth, although his
iniquity is wicked.

…………

To whom do I speak today?
The pest is faithful,
But the brother who comes with it becomes an enemy.

To whom do I speak today?
There are no righteous,
The land is left to those who do iniquity.

“The Corruption of Men” (ca. 2000 B.C.)
as rendered by J. H. Breasted

With the publication of Ancient Evenings it became clear that a serious reassess­ment of Norman Mailer’s career was due. Any such reassessment, it seems to me, must take into consideration the degree to which Mailer’s self-proclaimed magnum opus is a culmination of his themes, especially the fantastic and magi­cal themes. The novel also represents a culmination of his heroes’ struggles to gain independent moral stature even amidst failure. Perhaps because it was published so late in this author’s career, Ancient Evenings even more than Fowles’ or Gardner’s magical narratives is prototypical of the author’s body of work. We have now a novel that gives significant order and emphasis to the narrative qualities and the ethical issues developed throughout Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction career. Chief among these qualities and issues is the dialectic between vitality and entropy. Those opposing forces create the conflict behind all the other conflicts in the narrative, just as, in turn, each specific conflict helps to characterize the nature of the hero’s task and the connections between his life and death.

We are reminded of Gardner’s dialectic of art and chaos, of artists/heroes and the abyss, of opposing philosophies (or constructive oppositions) that test values and seek synthesis or personal transformation. He and Mailer are both seeking consciousness rather than codes. Mailer’s underlying conflict between vitality and entropy is in Egypt mythologically reflected in Ra’s nightly descent into darkness to battle the great serpent of entropy and in Osiris’ role not only as Lord of Resurrection and Mind (consciousness). Similarly, that dialectic is symbolized by the conflicts between the gods and their opposing qualities. And ultimately it is symbolized by “the balance of Maat,” which holds in creative equipoise the dialectical polarities of existence — barbarism and civilization, bestiality and nobility, death and life, waste and generation, Set and Osiris. Entropy to Mailer is that which destroys the balance, the devouring of life principle by death principle.

Yet in Mailer’s case the initial critical reaction to Ancient Evenings has been as curious and exorbitant as the novel itself. A few have thought it brilliant, some have thought it execrable, others have thought it both. More than a few have been unable to make up their minds. On the best and worst lists of 1983, Ancient Evenings, as Mailer predicted, bewildered everybody. Nearly all the reviewers were willing to grant Mailer power and significance as a major force on the American literary scene. But what to do with this new artifact? Indeed, the book, as Mailer had promised, is “out of category.” Vance Bourjaily was stunned by it: “The longest damn tour de force I ever read,” Bourjaily wrote in Esquire, “a monument like no other . . . a strange eminence.” It may be a masterpiece, he went on, but it is “also totally beyond judgment.” Any writer in his sixties, Bourjaily suggested, has nothing to lose; he or she can cut loose from all of us and, if nothing else, show us how “wide the final swings may be.” In a similar, though less sympathetic and more reductive vein, Leslie Fiedler wrote of the novel as a “deep-sleep nightmare” and “outlaw of the underground,” as perhaps even that mythical “longest ball ever to go up into the air . . . of our American letters,” which Mailer had promised back in the 1950s.

Almost every reviewer has had his or her difficulties (and fatigues) with the novel. It is difficult, perhaps irresponsible, to consider this novel without first assessing this cacophony of critical reaction. Those who are generally favorable seem to have been able to suspend disbelief and prejudgment enough to confront this strange work on its own terms. They frequently offer worthy insights into the possibilities and meanings of the work. Those who are unfavorable either have been unable to sufficiently suspend disbelief or have been overwhelmed by the flaws apparent from the perspective of either traditional or current fictional conventions.

At their worst, some negative critics seem to have been saving up their anti-Mailer bile for just such an opportunity. Reading the more spiteful reviews, one conjures an image of Mailer toppling into the waiting arms (or jaws) of, for example, Margaret Manning of the Boston Globe or Sey Chassler of Ms. Maga­zine. Manning calls the book “oceanic, unstoppable, and mad”; she attributes Mailer’s interest in reincarnation to egoism and wonders why he chose to write about “this period of degeneration,” necrophilia, and artistic decline. According to Manning, Mailer is also “one of the world’s great literary snobs” because many of his characters are high-born Egyptians. Moreover, she would have him treat the Greek pantheon because she likes Greek gods better than the “boring and structured” Egyptian gods. Since Manning doesn’t get her facts straight (the hero does not learn reincarnation from a woman, to take just one example), and since she lets her prejudices get in the way of her critical reading, it is no wonder she dismisses the book as claustrophobic “rubbish.” Mailer fares even worse in Ms. Chassler stops suddenly in the middle of her brief review to complain about the tone in which a Boston newspaper reported a gang rape, refers to the tone finally as “typically Mailerian, ordinarily masculine,” and ends with a howling non sequitur. Ancient Evenings, Chassler announces, “turns out to be about gang rape after all.”

This is not to suggest that all the negative reviews are simply spite. A few are. Others are thoughtful, raise serious questions, and emphatically stipulate what events and ideas in the novel were not to the reviewer’s tastes, nor, by extension, to the tastes of civilized adults in America today. Robert Gorham Davis, Mailer’s writing teacher and friend from Harvard days, focuses on two issues — the execrable subject matter and certain stylistic-formal qualities of the novel. Though Davis grants Mailer the creation of “states of awareness that go beyond anything ever attempted in literature before,” he finds dominance through homosexual rape, ancient violence, “polymorphous and inexhaustible sex,” and regressively unscientific ideas about the body” all things that “simply do not bear thinking about.” They are “the stock in trade of fakirs and mass cultists,” and, furthermore, embarrassing to read. On this point he echoes Joseph Epstein’s and James Wolcott’s witty repugnance with Mailer’s “obses­sions.” Though Davis’ criticism of style — “there is hardly a distinctive phrase or metaphor, an unexpected choice of words” — has been debated even among the negative critics, his second criticism of the novel’s form indeed raises a central question about the impact and effectiveness of the novel, and Davis seems to be alone in raising it clearly. Does the “transcendence” expressed in the final pages of the novel excuse, give purpose to, or clarify the preceding seven hundred pages of “betrayal, gloating cruelty, and the immediate gratifica­tion of every impulse at whatever cost to others?” Davis asks. “Is it more than an easy out, a rhetorical flourish . . . when there has been heretofore not a hint of what a noble purpose might be or how it is achieved . . . ?”

Although Davis misses a few “hints,” his question is an important one. The question is complicated because Mailer writes from the unprivileged position of one who is — like all of us and his characters — at times consumed by his passions, confusions, obsessions, and eccentricities. He imaginatively participates with such narrative energy in all the carnality and egoism he describes that he is always in danger of undercutting the ethical issues he raises. One could argue that in his tireless heaping of betrayal, cruelty, and self-gratification Mailer fails his sympathetic readers — those who might see the ethical undercur­rents, purposes, and (in the end) subversions of his gruesome tale.

Yet if transcendence and purpose are expressed only from the perspective of five failed lives and a future time when Greek and Roman classical civilization reign, as is the case at the novel’s end, and if one of Mailer’s greatest efforts in writing the novel was to expunge from his mind later (i.e. Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian) definitions of the spiritual and ethical nature of humanity, as he suggested in his Harvard Magazine interview, then Mailer may have left himself no formal choice but a final, brief retrospective section from which vantage alone we, like Menenhetet his hero, see the value, or lack of it, in the lives these characters have led. Be that as it may, placing such a burden on his ending is among the greatest risks Mailer takes in this audacious novel. Whether the final revelation of the novel works or not, however, may ultimately be more a matter of taste than of aesthetic law or necessity. And it will be taste in turn which leads a reader to decide whether the quotation Davis cites from Mailer’s old Paris Review interview (repeated in Cannibals and Christians and elsewhere) helps us to read the book as registering a positive or negative potential for the evolution of humanity and spirit: “violence, cannibalism, loneliness, insanity, libidinousness, hell, perversion and mess . . . [are] states which must in some way be passed through, digested, transcended, if one is to make one’s way back to life.”

Benjamin DeMott’s intelligent review emphasizes the familiar distaste with the subject matter; it is all, finally, a little too kinky and embarrassing. But DeMott adds a further dimension to the criticisms already noted. Though he was surprised and prepared for a masterpiece from reading the opening chapters, though pulled “inside a consciousness different from any hitherto met in fic­tion,” the novel finally is a “disaster” for DeMott. It is the social drama of books 3 through 6 that sinks Mailer’s ship. The failure amounts to replacing that opening, magical consciousness of the dynastic world with the obsessions of a twentieth-century mind — Mailer’s. In dramatizing these obsessions, Mailer too successfully represses his own sense of the ridiculous, but few readers will be able to do so.

These are telling criticisms that raise questions once again of taste as well as questions of a reader’s own preconceptions of life in 1200-1000 B.C. Egypt. It is a very good line, but is it accurate to say that all the characters are a ludicrous blend of Mel Brooks and the Marquis de Sade? Especially if to support that quip DeMott can only summarize out of context the King-as-Fool’s pranks and obscenities on the Night of the Pig — a night, like no other, when foolery, role reversal, and obscenity are supposed to reign. Such festivals are, further, not anomalous; rather, they are cyclical historical events that ring down the centuries from Egypt through Rome to Medieval Europe, right into the carnivals and Mardis Gras of our own time. They are intentional and sanctioned days and nights of excess with cathartic social and religious purposes. DeMott may be right about flawed moments of “unintended hilarity,” but surely much of Mailer’s material is not presented as if “it were without comic dimension,” and just as surely Mailer does not always fail in presenting Eastern sensuality.

Writing in The American Spectator, Peter Shaw offers a sobering assess­ment of the critics. Shaw reminds us, first, that Mailer is using Egyptian mythology in such a way that the incestuous and anal passions of the gods “are enacted by their human counterparts for whom these profane matters become the objects of religious and metaphysical speculation.” If with an “unprecedented, easy condescension . . . the reviewers were vastly amused . . . to report that Ancient Evenings came down to a treatise on ca ca,” they may have forgotten, first of all, that the scarab or dung beetle was a hieroglyph for creation and the com­memorative symbol of pharaohs. And if the reviewers have expressed their distaste for such subjects as excrement and sex and the violent Eastern mytholo­gies presented throughout the novel, they have been, secondly, expressing a distaste for D. H. Lawrence, Norman O. Brown, and James Frazer (not to mention, I might add, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Freud, Graves, and Jung, among others). They have, in short, denied Mailer a similar context and materials; they have admitted a “self-confessed philistinism” which is one “measure of the present revolt against high modernism.”

Among the positive critics like Shaw we find those who are, as Henry James admonished, willing to grant Mailer his subject, idea, and starting point. Having done so, they offer the most insight into the novel. And, like James, they are also willing to “estimate quality” by applying the only possible test, finally — “the test of execution.” Execution, James argues in “The Art of Fiction,” belongs “to the author alone; it is what is most personal to him, and we measure him by that. The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, discoveries, successes.”

As Shaw intimates, it is Mailer’s starting point that seems to offend so many. Just as Mailer had to “keep making certain that there wasn’t a single Judeo-Christian idea” in his head as he wrote Ancient Evenings, so too did he never avoid the violence of the pagan world and myth, nor the ambitions of gods and humans. He is searching for the pagan, he would say “karmic,” roots of human life. And there is nothing like war and sex for stripping off the surface and revealing the roots. “I think people are going to be immensely confused by the book” Mailer said. “They are going to say What is he saying that means something to him. . . . What is in this.” Mailer may have been strategically naive by being repetitious and heavy-handed. But his expose of the connections between war and eroticism — the erections of warriors in battle, the brutalities of “carnal ownership” of victor over vanquished — and between sexuality and politics, power, wealth, and state violence, if offensive, are at least honest by his own lights. “Maybe it is in war that you come to the place where the rainbow touches the earth, and much that has been hidden is simple,” Mailer’s hero Menenhetet says. Wouldn’t it be nice if it weren’t so? we want to say with the reviewers.

It is this audacious honesty as much as anything that gets Mailer into trouble with the reviewers. We see just one example of audacity in the long and brutal description of the night after the Battle of Kadesh. Here is not only Ramses’ nobility and bestiality, but the worst horrors of the Nazis, the Pol Pot regime, and all the government-sanctioned massacres and famines of the modem world. It is a description of the eternal human descent into Hell.

Over it all was the smell of sweat. I could smell the buttocks of half an army. A fit husband was that odor to blood and smoke. I would speak of these acts as abominations but it was less than what was yet to come. Besides, I will offer no judgment. . . . I can only say I was part of it, and much stimulated. I swear, if it were not the Night of the Pig, you would not know so much of this. . . . Sometimes you could not tell the oaths of pleasure from the wails of the doomed. Through such cries did Hera-Ra and I walk, among the flames. . . . I have never seen women [camp whores] so insatiable, so brutal, so superior in pure joy — it is their art, not a man’s. . . . It must have been all the blood and burning flesh. Maybe Maat approaches with love when all are choking with smoke. You have to wonder how many generals are conceived on campgrounds such as this. . . . Before the night was over, I, too, indulged the meat of a limb, burned it in the fire, took a taste, and knew the pleasures of a cannibal. . . . Suffice it that the first step in what is considered the filth of my habits was taken. It has led me through many a wonder and many a wisdom.

“None of us,” Mailer remarked in an unpublished portion of an interview, “has been able to explain the concentration camps, and in fact we step away from it in horror because the most logical answer is that those horrors are in all of us, and there to be tapped. We draw back from that as a conclusion about human nature. So the question is unsettled. Because it is unsettled, no one is rewarded for approaching that question. We don’t really want to know the answer to it.” We are reminded here of George Steiner’s argument that the Holocaust cannot be separated from the psychology of religion, from the ven­geance of some deep polytheistic and animistic need, or from the “egotistical failure of common, instinctual behavior” set against the ideal. The bloodlust, barbaric warfare, and orgiastic pain of ancient Egypt erupts in Mailer’s novel, as Steiner points out it did in the 1850s in Salammbô, like some “metaphysical provocation” or sadistic dream of violence against the “interminable Sunday and suet of a bourgeois life-form.”

Those critics like Richard Poirier, who can stand the audacious honesty, grant Mailer his chaff but seek the kernel. Poirier finds it not remarkable that American reviewers have found things to make fun of. Any work of “sustained visionary ambition” (e.g., Paradise Lost, Moby Dick) is bound “to have stretches of tiresome exposition, phrasings that are ludicrous, whole scenes that, as Dr. Johnson remarked, should have been not only difficult but impossible.” What is remarkable to Poirier is that so many of Mailer’s risks pay off in “moments of subliminal ecstasy, visionary descriptions.” Seeing Ancient Eve­nings as a work of magnitude, Poirier also sees it as a work that retrospectively orders Mailer’s entire body of work: “Mailer has imagined a culture that gives formal, and not merely anthropological sanction to what in his other works often seems eccentric or plaintively metaphysical, like his obsessions with ‘psychic darts’ and mind-reading, with immortality, with battles of the gods with villainous homosexuality, with magic and sorcery, and with excrement as an encoding of psychic failure or success.”

Harold Bloom similarly focuses on the losses and payoffs of Mailer’s risks and he sounds the same note as Bourjaily: “Our most conspicuous literary energy has generated its weirdest text, a book that defies usual aesthetic stan­dards even as it is beyond conventional ideas of good and evil.” Despite working his own hobbyhorse of literary influences, Bloom does suggest (and in two cases develops) four useful approaches to Mailer’s novel. First, Evenings can be seen as a culmination of Mailer’s metaphorical vision. By an “outrageous literalism,” Mailer makes the metaphorical seem literal, thereby granting a “reality” Mailer has always attributed to metaphor. In this primitive, magical world literal perceptions are meaningless without their metaphorical, intuitive dimensions and energies. Second, Mailer’s connections to a literary heritage of “religious vitalism” require readers to take him seriously or not at all. Like D. H. Lawrence, Mailer is a writer who would both “save our souls” and “renew our original relationship both to the sun and to a visionary origin beyond the natural sun.” Bloom is, third, one of the few reviewers to suggest, at least, a real connection between Mailer’s ancient world and contemporary America. And, finally, Bloom develops Mailer’s connection to the nineteenth-century Ameri­can Literary Renaissance. Like his forebears, Mailer finds in ancient Egypt a vision of resurrection that not only gives flesh and history to his long-held obsessions about life, death, power, courage, and the relationship between the human and the divine, but is an analogue of resurrection or personal survival through works of art.

George Stade, to take one final example, carried further the many review­er references to the novel’s fantasy and nightmare qualities. Stade sees ancient Egypt as Mailer’s “metaphor for the unconscious.” Indeed, it is with dream logic and energy that Mailer has worked since The Naked and the Dead, I might add. Such logic and energy are simply carried to their furthest, most risky, use here. And, of course, the images arising are often as rationally inexplicable, alien, surprising, magical, and distasteful to rational consciousness as they can be in our nightly dreams. For Stade, we are witness to a form of consciousness both alien and familiar that makes other novels of ancient magic, like Robert Graves’ novels, psychologically shallow by comparison and without formal distinction. Stade describes the design of Mailer’s novel as a kind of spiral interweaving two narrative strands around each other and sustaining a series of narrative parallels between gods and humans.

It was Mailer himself who first suggested in Harvard Magazine, inciden­tally, the spiral image, but this spiral has really three, rather than two, narrative strands or parallels: the reign of Ramses II, the reign of Ramses IX, and the eternal realm of the gods. The gods and their carnal possessions, ambitions, intrigues, battles, and gifts are mirrored by human counterparts. As Stade notes, the gods are metaphors for the permanent energies of the human psyche and the character types they produce. What Stade means by Mailer’s “somber excava­tions of our aboriginal and buried human nature,” is what Bernard Dick means by Mailer’s continuing creation of “a holograph of the psyche.” Mailer himself prescribed such excavations and holographs in 1966 when he called for “robust art”: a “hearty” quest for that which is fundamental and primitive in our nature, a “savage” antidote to all the “dissolution” and “entropy” in our world. Such art would above all be characterized by the dream (or dream novel), for the dream and the novel are “country cousins.”

What Stade and Dick, and even Bloom, remind us of, then, is that Mailer is not merely showing us powerful, affecting elements in human racial history through national and heroic events (i.e., a traditional historical novel); he is trying more to create a history of the dynamic and collective human psyche, which, as Jung among others argues, we can never sever without catastrophic loss and self-destruction. It is probably on that basis — as part of the history of the human psyche and its dynamic energies (including what James Breasted calls “the dawn of conscience”) — that Ancient Evenings will have to rest its claim for meaningfulness.

To understand and to begin to assess Ancient Evenings, I think we need first to grant the novel its chunks of ponderous, turgid writing and static ceremony. Then, beyond that admission, we need to discover whether anything of value, and how much, remains to us as readers. Joyce Carol Oates, in her chapter “The Teleology of the Unconscious,” reminds us how easy it is to go wrong with Mailer: “Norman Mailer’s efforts to dramatize the terror of the disintegrating identity have largely been mistaken as self-display, and his highly stylized, poetic, image-making structures of language have often been mistaken as willful and perverse hallucinations, instead of countermagic.” It is largely because Mailer’s literary countermagic is melodramatic that he has met with so much resistance from critics. His lurid texts, founded on the void left by our loss of the sacred, do indeed, as Peter Brooks has argued of melodrama generally, “depend for their validity on a kind of visionary leap,” on a suspension of our disbelief.

The desire to express all, to utter the unspeakable and dramatize deepest feelings through heightened and polarized gestures; the underlying Manichaeism and its accompanying hyperbole and extravagance; the “super-signification” of a world of charged interconnections, correspondences, and meanings — all are essential qualities of the melodramatic mode of expression that, as Brooks argues, seeks “a victory over the repression and censorship of the social reality principle, a release of psychic energy by the articulation of the unsayable.” The goal of this victory and release is to suggest that what is being played out in the realm of manners or the quotidian is charged with meaning, value, and “signifi­cance from the realm of the moral occult,” a domain of “spiritual values” or deeper sources of being where the stakes are life and death. We are always, of course, perilously close as readers to feeling that “the represented world won’t bear the weight of the significances placed on it.” The metaphorical relationship between the represented world and the occult world — or in Mailer’s case the stark immediacy of the occult in the represented — is what makes the fictive world barely supportable to the reader. Yet it is just this metaphorical nature of the text that creates “an expanded moral context” and “ethical consciousness.” Indeed, Brooks speculates that it is just this search to bring into the drama of manners and quotidian existence “the higher drama of moral forces” that is “one of the large quests of the modem imagination” since Romanticism; our “most Promethean writers” insist that the realm of the moral occult exists; they “write their fiction to make it exist” and to show “its primacy in life.”

If, as Brooks says, melodrama is the only form of the tragic left to a world where there is “no longer a tenable idea of the sacred,” Mailer balances precari­ously on the edge of the tragic and the melodramatic because he balances so precariously on the edge of the sacred and the profane. Such balancing acts place enormous demands on us as readers.

The suspension of disbelief Mailer requires of us in this novel has proven too much for some readers, even in these post-modem times when the irreal becomes common. When we add to that demand Mailer’s long-standing idea that the first ethic required of us is courage — the courage and strength to take risks and to rebel against anything that would diminish us — we can see why Mailer would be bound for heavy weather indeed in, if Mailer is right, an epoch of adjustment, compromise, and homogeneity.

The connections between courage and power, magic and power, and sexuality and power suggested repeatedly in this novel are not unlike Mailer’s own connection between risk or courage and power in writing as well. Like so many of his characters, Mailer is valuable as a writer in part because of his ability and endurance in risk-taking. He pursues, now more than ever, his questions and instincts through whatever slimes and sublimities he discovers along the way. He may outrage most of his critics, but he could least of all be accused of writing, in Donald Hall’s apt phrase, mere “letters to Stockholm.” He seems willing, not unlike Melville, to put everything on the line in a book, literary establishments and taste-makers be damned! He may arguably (as many have argued) fail. But there may be as much nobility as ludicrousness in his failures, if that they are. In his interview for Harvard Magazine, Mailer phrased it this way:

If I had tried to write the book in a year, the fear would have been so great it couldn’t have been written. But over ten years, you can carry the fear. Writing a book is the fear. . . . Most people take pride in the fears they can endure. It’s obvious that you can’t be a professional writer for as many years as I have been without taking a certain pride that I can endure those fears. I would say that writing is like all occupations that have some real element of risk. . . . And I will say I’ve taken more risks with the Egyptian novel than any book I’ve ever written. It’s the most, dare I say it, audacious of the books I’ve done.

Two questions need to be addressed before we can make sense of Mailer’s strangest novel. First, what is the central relationship between Ancient Evenings and Mailer’s previous work? Second, what is it about ancient Egypt that drew Mailer to that subject in the first place?

Mailer’s previous work stands, like Fowles’, emphatically antagonistic to a common element of post-war literature — the absurd or anti-hero. Above all, Mailer’s rebel heroes glory in their search for the power to advance their own lives and visions, even when they fail. Whether as “Life,” “Vision,” “God,” or “It,” the power Mailer’s heroes seek is unconscious, divine, regenerative. With this power the hero gains the only effective force available to struggle against a deadening, homogenizing, and totalitarian world. This power, this Vital Life Source, is a principle in the order of creation that stands in opposition to entropy, whether the entropy of violent personal defeat, or totalitarianism, or of chaotic force. Chaos and order, Devil and God, now Osiris and Set battle in human as in supernal realms. Each hero pursues and repeats the archetypal act of regeneration. What to Mailer keeps our condition from being absurd merely is just this universal dialectic. The God of Life is not all-powerful but at war, suffering — even as ourselves — defeats as well as victories.

This search for the rebellious, divine energy within is exactly what con­nects Mailer’s heroes to the mythological heroes of the past, to the ancient heroic adventure, to the archetypal return to the life-source within. The hero then returns to the world with expanded consciousness or nourishment for himself and others. In a previous book, I argued in detail how each of Mailer’s heroes makes such a journey and how, taken as a composite, they express a regenerative synthesis of both conscious and unconscious psyche (or “heroic consciousness”) characterized by five main qualities. The first two qualities are metaphorical perception (or the capacity to see interrelationships and telepathies between things) and divine or instinctual energy, the basis for courageous self­ potency with which the hero opposes whatever would deaden or defeat him. These first two qualities especially are the sources of the hero’s deeper vision into life and his moral force. The third quality of heroic consciousness is a revolutionary attitude toward the status quo. Such an attitude is the basis of that violence which precedes personal and social transformation. The fourth quality of heroic consciousness is the impulse to restore “wholeness” or balance to self and society whenever there is disproportion and imbalance. The final quality is extraordinary individualism, which best expresses Mailer’s own faith in the intensity, power, and truth of the subjective perceptions of heroic or tested individuals. These last three qualities especially define the relationship of the hero to his society or culture. Through all of these qualities Mailer is reacting to what he sees as two shortcomings in contemporary novelists. First, they create heroes (or anti-heroes) who are “passive, timid, other-directed, pathetic, up to their nostrils in anguish.” Second, their work shows great felicity (Fowles’ rococo) but little other significance: “There seem to be more and more felicity all the time. Each year there seem to be more people who can really write stunning prose. And technique gets more and more elaborated. But I can’t think off hand of any young writers who are philosophically disturbing at this point.”

These attributes of the Mailer hero connect the author to a literary and mythological tradition (including Fowles and Gardner) that seeks a larger foun­dation, a greater potential, for human aspirations than that of most anti-heroic twentieth-century existentialists. In American literature alone, this tradition of human transcendence, with its roots in Puritanism, ranges through Emerson and Thoreau, Melville, Twain, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. This is a lineage of artists who have sought to awaken the moral consciousness of their culture by, often, depicting the journey of the individual soul as somehow connected to the jour­ney of America itself. In British literature a similar lineage continues at least from Blake through D. H. Lawrence. These writers have continually warned humanity of the dangers of the drift toward spiritual impoverishment, loss of unconscious life or soul, mechanization, and what Mailer more inclusively has called “totalitarianism.” By that term Mailer means the human impulse to defeat nature, to avoid risk and chance, to homogenize all diversity and opposition, and to destroy mystery. When he has defined evil in his fiction and nonfiction, he has defined it as stasis, stereotype, and bland homogeneity.

In light of these attributes of Mailer’s mythic heroes, what is it, to address my second question, that drew Mailer to ancient Egypt as the subject of his first massive work of a possible trilogy? This question is all the more likely to arise when we recall that since The Armies of the Night (1968) Mailer had turned exclu­sively to nonfiction, including the “nonfiction novel” The Executioner’s Song (1979). He found in contemporary history itself the same quests, the same archetypal order, the same allegories for social criticism, and the same material for his preoccupations that he had imagined in fiction. Suddenly in 1983 with the publication of the Egyptian novel, Mailer seemed to shift away from the contemporary and the increasingly realistic. In a sense Mailer has reversed direction from his published work; on the other hand, he was writing Ancient Evenings off and on throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. He anticipated the issue himself: “the trouble is everybody is going to be saying, ‘How the devil does Norman Mailer get himself up to start writing about Egyptian pharaohs? I mean that’s really going too far.’”

Mailer had pursued his themes as far as he could in the contemporary and naturalistic Executioner’s Song. In Egypt Mailer could cut loose and develop his “karmic” concerns in a bold and original way, finally freed as much from the restrictions of fictional realism as from twentieth-century rationalism and scien­tism. Put simply, Mailer found in Egypt an ancient heroic and primary civiliza­tion; he found, in other words, an extremely fertile ground in which to plant and let flourish his fascination with the way extraordinary people have acted out and often failed in the eternal drama of the soul’s struggle for “salvation” through the ancient patterns of rebirth. He found in Egypt a primal area in which to stage the conflict basic to all his novels and major nonfiction books-the struggle to balance and control the ageless, conflicting, and dynamic forces in oneself and in the world. It is the struggle for the creative power of life itself. Because Mailer intended to include future and present civilizations in his trilogy of regeneration, it is not surprising that he wished to begin that drama at its root, at one of the places in the Ancient Near East where civilization and recorded history began. In scope and ambition, this proposed trilogy is as audacious as anything ever written by an American. Whether Mailer succeeds or fails, literary history will determine.

There are, moreover, some generally acknowledged principles of Egyptian civilization that might further explain Mailer’s attraction to Egypt and help clarify my later discussion. The constancy of Egyptian civilization through Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms and through successive dynasties, despite internal and particular changes, is significant. If ancient Egypt could be said to initiate and repeat the patterns of degeneration and regeneration familiar to us as the briefer cycles of later civilizations, Egypt’s continuities are the basis of its survival for three millennia. Chief among these continuities, this cultural identity, is its mythopoeic approach to experience and existence, that is, there is no clear division between the sacred and the secular, no desacralization of the world. Much to the consternation of his realist critics, Mailer has always sought this sacralization of the cosmos and human life. Mircea Eliade, in The Sacred and the Profane, suggests the archaic consciousness Mailer would approach:

The man of the archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred. . . . The tendency is perfectly understandable, because, for primitive as for the man of all pre-modem societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and in the last analysis to reality. The sacred is saturated with being. . . . It should be said at once that the completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit. . . .

For nonreligious man of the modem societies, this simultaneously cosmic and sacred dimen­sion of conjugal union is difficult to grasp. But . . . it must not be forgotten that religious man of the archaic societies sees the world as fraught with messages. Sometimes the messages are in cipher, but the myths are there to help man decipher them. . . . What we find as soon as we place ourselves in the perspective of religious man of the archaic societies is that the world exists because it was created by the gods, and that the existence of the world itself “means” something, “wants to say” something, that the world is neither mute nor opaque, that it is not a mute thing without purpose or significance. For religious man the cosmos “lives” and “speaks.” The mere life of the cosmos is proof of its sanctity. . . . For nonreligious man, all vital experiences — whether sex or eating, work or play — have been desacralized. This means that all these physiological acts are deprived of spiritual significance, hence deprived of their truly human dimension.

As Gardner uses ancient Eastern wisdom in his magician’s dialogues as a counterforce to our (i.e, Clumly’s) habitual assumptions and perceptions, and as a tentative redirecting of lives out of balance with the cosmos, so does Mailer. But the difference of course is larger than the differences between Mesopotamia and Egypt. Mailer bases his novel completely on an archaic approach to life (as best he can gather it). His disruption (or “defamiliarization”) of our assumptions and perceptions is not incidental but total. We enter a magical universe and a psychic condition counter to our own. We find ourselves in an unsettling realm where the sacred and the profane, the metaphorical and the literal, the micro­ and macrocosmic are inseparable.

The Egyptian pharaoh is but another example of this archaic view; he is the unifying and life-giving god-king. The king is Lord of Two Lands not only because he unifies Upper and Lower Egypt, but because his role is both histori­cal and cosmological, both natural and supernatural, both human and divine. He represents a unified cosmos in which nature, humanity, and gods all partici­pate in the cosmological order and drama. If he functions as a charismatic hero-god with powers beyond other mortals, his rule is not arbitrary nor, histori­cally, free from the corruptions of disproportion. He, like everything existent, is subject to Maat — truth, justice, order, harmony, and the equilibrium of oppo­sites or “balance,” to use Mailer’s repeated word. As guardian of Maat, the king is responsible for Egypt’s order instead of chaos, truth instead of falsity, har­mony instead of conflict. As sun-king and fertility god, his health and potency must be preserved through magic, ceremony, and celebration as in the Sed Festival, to take one example, commemorating his accession to power.

The king is, furthermore, without equal, and by his wealth and power is divorced from mere mortals in his social relationships. His identity like any god’s is, therefore, at once aloof and multiple. Such identity and power entails responsibilities. The king’s affirmation of Maat is part of the eternal pattern of recurrence, of death and regeneration, of the cycles of the sun, the Nile, and Osiris.

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