The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/"Their Humor Annoyed Him": Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in The Castle in the Forest: Difference between revisions

Mailer’s final novel (2007) is a concatenation of aesthetic shocks that tells of the formation of Adolf Hitler’s character, beginning with the incestuous influences of his grandfather (about the identity of whom there has been much historical speculation), and continuing through his schooling. Ron Rosenbaum’s ''Explaining Hitler'' can fruitfully be read as a companion-text to Mailer’s novel; its central question is “When and how did Hitler become ''Hitler''?” Mailer’s novel affirms the idea that Hitler developed sociopathic tendencies by his early teens and that these were the foundation for the subsequent obsession with eliminationist anti-Semitism that would come later—but this evolution in Hitler’s darkness is not central to Mailer’s novel. Mailer builds a Hitler to explain a person attracted to murder and deceit, but anti-Semitism is not the driving force of the life Mailer imagines. Mailer does not at all exclude the idea that everything in the novel is tuned toward the Holocaust. The title ''The Castle in the Forest,'' Dieter tells readers in the final pages, is the translation of a death camp called “''Schlossimwald''” by those inmates who would not, even in the face of ultimate pain and evil, surrender their sense of irony.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=465}} That ''irony'' would remain a prized possession under such circumstances will shock some readers, since the phenomena of Hitler and the Holocaust are for many the very limit of irony. In the Rortyean, postmodern, and thoroughly ironic world in which we live, the Holocaust cannot be reduced to a contingent phenomena whose meaning is entirely dependent upon the subject position of the perceiver. Such a way of thinking will earn a comparison with Holocaust deniers. Mailer not only concludes with an homage to ironic camp inmates but also has Dieter-the-demon tell us that the Devil (whom he calls “the Maestro”) is a connoisseur of irony: “All this was uttered by the Maestro with characteristic irony. We never know how serious he might be when he speaks to our mind’s ear. (His voice is a cornucopia of humors.)"{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=78}} Mailer might even be describing himself in this passage.

A ''New York Times'' article paused to note that a number of recent novels had the odd feature of including bibliographies. The bibliography of ''The Castle in the Forest'' is rich with entries on bee-keeping. Readers of the novel know it is a richly over-determined metaphor, combining elements of modulated brutality and great technical skill. Bee-keeping is perhaps the central metaphor of the novel, and Mailer’s bibliography lists half-a-dozen or so specialist books on the subject. Bee-keeping signifies social order, but order as understood from an awful height, that of humans looking down on potentially profitable insects, or that of God looking down on mischievous creation. The bees themselves are ruthless at maintaining order, and they eliminate all threats to the hive without hesitation. Mailer’s Alois Hitler is presented as a dedicated bee-keeper, and the narrator Dieter—while perhaps disingenuously or even seductively warning readers not to make too much of such events—presents several scenes in which hives are gassed or burned. Readers might wonder how exactly they could ever make “too much” of such a parallel.

Mailer’s laughter in ''The Castle in the Forest'' is not the raucous, adolescent laughter of America’s 1960s black humor fiction, a laughter that is always implicitly the laughter of an overly stable know-it-all ''we''.{{efn|One could say that Yossarian is a character who must act from isolation even when he crucially chooses to act for the sake of others, but I would still characterize the laughter aroused by the novel as more social. This we carried over quite smoothly from the novel to the film ''M*A*S*H'' and to the buddy-scenarios of the television version as well. Consider the narrative situation of ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'', Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo narrative: however iconoclastic and anarchic the voice of Raoul Duke, this road novel depends for it’s effects on internalizing the “we,” so Duke is accompanied by Dr. Gonzo, his Samoan attorney (who is based on Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Mexican-American political activist). If we look through ''Castle'' carefully, we will see that Mailer has, again and again, done without the protections of an imaginary men’s club.}} We laugh at the bureaucrats in ''Catch-22''. There’s an unsettling oddity to Mailer’s style, though, an awareness that, like Dieter’s, Mailer’s humor is both on the mark and a bit to one side of the main stream of events. Mailer does not pretend to be in the ethical center, and the rude, cruel, and invasive qualities of his “diabolical” narrative technique are, he will not let us forget, essential elements in our own conventional mind-set. The castle in Mailer’s forest, the redemptive beauty that makes the pain and failures of such unappreciated masterpieces as ''Ancient Evenings'' and ''The Castle in the Forest'' bearable, is always a repetition and ever-free variation of a cavalier wit. As it is in the moment in which Adolf tortures his brother with literature, Mailer’s humor is genuinely funny and, at exactly the same time, resoundingly grim. Putting his own idea that our best is often closest to our worst into the mouth of Himmler, Mailer turns into the pain of his own humor and allows—encourages, actually—the nasty identifications his harshest critics made of himself and his work, that he was violent and cruel and “patriarchal” in the sense in which patriarchy is a synonym for Fascism. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to this cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably ''alone''.{{efn|None of this article could have been written if I had not been told the joke about lawyers and sharks by Professor Winfried “the Hun” Schleiner of UC Davis twenty years ago.}}