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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What shall we make of this? One possible response will be to link Mailer’s use of the Holocaust with that of Sylvia Plath.<ref>
What shall we make of this? One possible response will be to link Mailer’s use of the Holocaust with that of Sylvia Plath.<ref>
Gubar, Susan. “Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contem- poraries.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 ~Spring 2001!: 191–215.</ref> One could say each author uses the pain of others to provide historical ballast to pain that is really individual. It would be the height of egotism to use the deaths of six million in order to hide the idiosyncrasy of one’s pain or the eccentricity of one’s ideas.
Gubar, Susan. “Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contem- poraries.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 ~Spring 2001!: 191–215.</ref> One could say each author uses the pain of others to provide historical ballast to pain that is really individual. It would be the height of egotism to use the deaths of six million in order to hide the idiosyncrasy of one’s pain or the eccentricity of one’s ideas.
Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. He consistently presented himself as an author with an important vision, one worthy of “the mind of Joyce” or Melville, since the mid-1950s, and critics debated whether he ever wrote his ''Ulysses'' or ''Moby- Dick''. Mailer’s personal ambition, however, was never in question.


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