The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/A New Politics of Form in Harlot's Ghost: Difference between revisions

===The Novelist as the God that Fails and the Novel as Disinformation===

The divine and mystical power of God allows new reservoirs of creative energy for aesthetic expression. If, however, we compare Harlot’s statement with Mailer’s earlier claims above, we detect an important shift. In both conceptions God is divided and warring, like a writer struggling to create works that are true to personal vision but facing critical rejection. However, Harlot’s theology is based on a God that is a losing force and that does not trust his audience. God needs to produce disinformation or his rule will be threatened by his creations. I suggest that Mailer’s theology, and Harlot’s, helps us understand how to read ''Harlot’s Ghost'' and probe beneath appearances. Harlot, who plots Hubbard’s fate and orchestrated history, manipulates because, like God, he needs to face the conditions of things becoming “smaller” and “less important.” Therefore, what is at stake in this novel is precisely the possibility of the novel, in general, as a creative form which can reveal understanding about history and society (which has always been Mailer’s stated objectives), or novels reduced to a minor expressive form. Mailer’s youthful optimism and confident rebellion against shrinkage of human and expressive potential seem lost: as God, Harlot and the novel are in danger of being revealed as weak frauds. If Harlot, who plays God with his Godson Harry, not to mention the CIA as a whole with its missions and history, is really part of an elaborate hoax, then the novel itself, by extension, threatens to be revealed as inadequate to represent history. However, perhaps Mailer’s strategy is similar to what he projected onto a threatened God; the grand novel that resolves history is disinformation. The lapse in this novel’s ending becomes full of implications for novel writing at large. Perhaps just this deception is necessary since the novel is not expanding and growing larger in our world of the television and the Internet but needs to be fought for in new ways.

To make sense of this ending, it is useful to return to Walter Benjamin. In his essay on authors in capitalism, he claims that the true revolution that writers can affect is one in terms of “technique”:

This framework of Benjamin’s sheds new light on what can be made of the apparent failure of the novel to resolve. Mailer himself has given two explanations. At the time of the novel’s publication, Mailer promised to complete the work after some time went by, but recently has stated that he won’t revisit the novel because technology has dehumanized espionage. This doesn’t seem persuasive to me because the novel’s scope is not contemporary espionage but historical episodes revealed through the voice of a fictional spy positioned to discover truth. Interestingly, in an earlier interview for BBC, Mailer defends the form of the novel in a way that directly echoes Benjamin’s concept of a transformation in technique, which transforms authors into producers. He says:

From the vantage point of “telling” the “truth of our times,” and on the level of crafting an explicit plot resolution, the novel fails. The position of the author is in decline—at least in terms of the author as the “hero” who reveals history. Could the novel be taken as an elaborate hoax? Mailer, himself, at some level, recognizes that there is no novelistic resolution to the level of questions he poses. Even though Mailer planned to write a sequel, the results remain: the incomplete novel becomes a radical formal experiment and gesture of making the readers into the “authors” of the sequel. Mailer stresses the value of readers who “conceive” the ending. Given that the ending revolves around the nature of the Cold War and the value of the relative sides, making the readers interpret the future “ending” means placing the readers as judges of history. Perhaps Mailer’s attachment to radical individualism and existential courage is shown inadequate in the face of “ghosts”; that is, the collective, overpowering force of history that cannot be revealed by an “author” because they are beyond the purview of an individual. On the other hand, out of this failure, meaningful truth is produced and revealed, precisely out of abandoning the position of the author who tells all. Any answers given by Mailer to the questions at the end of the novel would ring hollow since they would force him to stand for or against the U.S. role in the Cold War by making Harlot a hero or villain. True, the reader cannot end this novel with the sense of completion or satisfaction traditional novels provide. Instead, we are left to become the writers and producers—speculating and arguing about how the novel that wasn’t written should end. We may consider whether the public media-driven faith in the God-like claims about capitalism and so-called democracy, which are supposedly outside of time and history and beyond challenge are an elaborate hoax. Harlot may be alive or dead, and like a possible “God” and “Devil” we cannot know, but we are put in the writer’s place free from the authority of any divine will. It would be ironic if Mailer, who, like his fictional CIA agents, has spent a career attempting to write the great novel, decided not to, precisely so that by turning away from this project and refusing a sequel, he forces us to rethink our relationship to novels and history. This is where his great contribution can reside.

===Notes===

* {{cite book |last=DeLillo |first=Don |date=1997 |title=Underworld |url= |location=New York |publisher=Simon and Shuster |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Doctorow |first=E. |date=1996 |title=The Book of Daniel |url= |location=New York |publisher=Plume Penguin Press |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Glenday |first=Michael |date=1995 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location=New York |publisher=St. Martin's Press |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Jameson |first=Fredric |date=1991 |title=Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism |url= |location=Durham |publisher=Duke UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}