10,114
edits
The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare (view source)
Revision as of 17:08, 11 February 2019
, 11 February 2019Added byline.
(Added note.) |
m (Added byline.) |
||
| (One intermediate revision by the same user not shown) | |||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
{{DISPLAYTITLE:''An American Dream'': The Singular Nightmare}} | {{DISPLAYTITLE:''An American Dream'': The Singular Nightmare}} | ||
{{MR01}} | {{MR01}} | ||
{{abstract|Mailer’s fourth novel can be read as sardonic social criticism and a dramatic critique on those nuances underlining the ambiguous values in contemporary America, on those individual roots of American aspirations and ideals. For Mailer, the collective ideal is a civilized composite of everyone’s primitive desires.{{efn|Reprinted by permission of the author, Donald F. Kaufmann. From {{cite book |last=Kaufmann |first=Donald L. |date=1969 |title=Norman Mailer: The Countdown |url= |location=Carbondale, IL |publisher=Southern Illinois UP |pages=35–50 |isbn= |author-link= }} }} }} | |||
{{Byline|last=Kaufmann|first=Donald L.}} | |||
New directions, even in Mailer’s fiction — “''An American Dream'' is a departure from practically anything I have done before.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|}} — contain vestiges of the old, and Mailer’s fourth novel can be read (as most critics and reviewers have done) as sardonic social criticism. National ideals seem under attack, as New York, Jack Kennedy, Las Vegas, Marilyn Monroe impart a satiric tone to Rojack’s dream. Just before his encounter with Barney Oswald Kelly, the current tycoon, Rojack enters the Waldorf and sees “a nineteenth-century clock, eight feet high with a bas relief of faces: Franklin, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Washington, Grant, Harrison, and Victoria; 1888 the year.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=207}} At such times, the theme of national dream turned nightmare seems as obvious as the title suggests. It instead is an outgrowth of Mailer’s great admiration of Dreiser’s ''An American Tragedy'' which represents (in Mailer’s words) an “end of a period” or “a way of looking at things.” If rewritten for the contemporary milieu, Dreiser’s book would “no longer be a tragedy; it would be a dream,” because in the last forty years, there has been a “transition in consciousness in the character of our times” which has “moved us from the state of the tragedy to the state of the dream.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|}} Here Mailer is paraphrasing an earlier idea: “there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1963|p=38}} | New directions, even in Mailer’s fiction — “''An American Dream'' is a departure from practically anything I have done before.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|}} — contain vestiges of the old, and Mailer’s fourth novel can be read (as most critics and reviewers have done) as sardonic social criticism. National ideals seem under attack, as New York, Jack Kennedy, Las Vegas, Marilyn Monroe impart a satiric tone to Rojack’s dream. Just before his encounter with Barney Oswald Kelly, the current tycoon, Rojack enters the Waldorf and sees “a nineteenth-century clock, eight feet high with a bas relief of faces: Franklin, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Washington, Grant, Harrison, and Victoria; 1888 the year.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=207}} At such times, the theme of national dream turned nightmare seems as obvious as the title suggests. It instead is an outgrowth of Mailer’s great admiration of Dreiser’s ''An American Tragedy'' which represents (in Mailer’s words) an “end of a period” or “a way of looking at things.” If rewritten for the contemporary milieu, Dreiser’s book would “no longer be a tragedy; it would be a dream,” because in the last forty years, there has been a “transition in consciousness in the character of our times” which has “moved us from the state of the tragedy to the state of the dream.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|}} Here Mailer is paraphrasing an earlier idea: “there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1963|p=38}} | ||
| Line 59: | Line 62: | ||
[[Category:Mailer Review]] | [[Category:Mailer Review]] | ||
[[Category:V.1 2007]] | [[Category:V.1 2007]] | ||
[[Category:Classic Interpretations (MR)]] | [[Category:Classic Interpretations (MR)]] | ||