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

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{{cquote|Himmler subscribed to the theory that the best human possibilities lie close to the worst.}}

Mailer’s narrator in ''The Castle in the Forest'' speaks with courtesy and intelligence.{{efn|Both Steven Poole in his ''New Statesman'' review, “[https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2007/02/norman-mailer-hitler-novel  Sympathy for the Devil]” (19 February 2007) and John Freeman in his ''Independent'' review “[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/sympathy-for-the-devil-norman-mailer-on-his-satanic-new-novel-434647.html Sympathy for the Devil: Norman Mailer on His Satanic New Novel]” (2 February 2007) connect Mailer’s novel and the Rolling Stones’ song in their titles. The Jagger/Richards song, which first appeared on the 1968 album ''Beggers Banquet'', is a dramatic monologue in which Lucifer brags about his achievements, insists on commonalities between himself and his listeners, and demands courtesy if met: he is a “man of wealth and taste,” after all. All criminals are cops, all sinners are saints, and we all killed the Kennedys.}} He calls himself “Dieter” (though it is not clear what he means to “deter”), and he has been a witness to the formation of Adolf Hitler. Dieter explains to the reader that he has been a functionary in the Third Reich, but he has been—long before he came to work for Himmler—part of the Devil’s bureaucracy, with young “Adi” as his most important case. In this way, Mailer manages to bring together the bureaucratic “banality” of evil with the attractions and powers of evil that the word banality cannot subsume.

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.

As important as bee-keeping is to Mailer’s larger narrative loops, it competes in the reader’s imagination with a theme that is given equal air-time but which etches the memory more ruthlessly moment for moment and image for image: transgressive sex. Mailer stays true to his fascination with the idea that God and the Devil partake in human lives through dreams and sex acts. The reader must consider a Freudian primal scene in which young Adolf witnesses Alois and Klara in the sixty-nine position, and witnessing the fictional event makes the reader equal, in some imaginative sense, to demons like Dieter who enter minds and bodies in the most intimate situations imaginable.

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