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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
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/"Their Humor Annoyed Him": Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in The Castle in the Forest (view source)
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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 mod- ulated 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 per- haps 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. | 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 mod- ulated 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 per- haps 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. | ||
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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