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

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« The Mailer Review • Volume 2 Number 1 • 2008 • In Memorium: Norman Mailer: 1923–2007 »
Written by
David Anshen
Abstract: A reading of Harlot’s Ghost in relation to Mailer’s efforts to use fiction writing to reveal contradictions at the heart of American society and challenge American ideology, particularly in relation to the Cold War. The novel resists making overt judgments on events. The novel’s form and its political and social content are unified in their challenge to the dominant societal narratives about America and how these narratives are traditionally told.
URL: https://prmlr.us/mr08ansh

“The sour truth is that I am imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.”[1]

“Please do not understand me too quickly.”

— Norman Mailer, quoting Andre Gide in the epigraph to The Deer Park.

Norman Mailer was one of the most ambitious writers of our time. He had enormous faith in the power of writing to influence and change society and to alter the quality of human life. Despite the controversies that swirled around his public figure, he should be more recognized for the scope of his efforts to use his writing to transform America. With bravado, courage, and a bit of recklessness, he has repeatedly proclaimed his personal ambition to place himself, as a writer, in the company of literary giants and thereby remedy what he believes are America’s literary deficiencies, while also promising that he is about to write a novel that will create the “revolution in consciousness”[1] which he believes is necessary to rejuvenate a stagnant America,[a] through writing the “great American novel” which will “tell the truth of our times.” Undoubtedly, however, this effort has been fraught with difficulties; as Carl Rollyson explains in his biography of Mailer: “In the forty years since The Naked and the Dead Mailer has been searching for a way to write the great panoramic American novel. . . . America had seemed too complex for any single novelist—no matter how mature—to take on.”[2] His last, sustained effort to reveal America through a work of fiction is the long historical novel about the CIA, Harlot’s Ghost. However, this novel has been overlooked as the culmination of Mailer’s project of a fictional representation of America and therefore largely ignored as the important work of politically engaged fiction that I believe it is.[b] This is undoubtedly because the novel presents a strange puzzle; both its content and form need careful consideration before its significance can be understand.

My essay offers a reading of the novel in relation to Mailer’s efforts to use fiction writing to reveal contradictions at the heart of American society and challenge American ideology, particularly in relation to the Cold War, while offering an explanation for the unorthodox formal features. In contrast to most critics who have written on the novel, I believe that Harlot’s Ghost presents a fierce indictment of America during the Cold War and after, which is intensified by the unconventional form.[c] Indeed, I hope to show that the novel’s importance and significance, the truth it tells about American society, lies in what might appear its utter failure, both as a novel and a judgment on the history and politics, namely the way the novel fails to cohere as a novel. The novel refuses overt judgments on the events narrated. Paradoxical as it may seem, I will argue that the failure of traditional novelistic form and resolution creates a dialectic between reader and text allowing important revelations about American society to emerge which make the novel a success in telling the “truth of our times.” The truths revealed are precisely that the issues of the novel, which concern the meaning of the Cold War and the struggle between capitalism and its challenges, are not over and that instead of “the end of history” (to use Francis Fukiyama’s famous phrase) we are still plunged into unresolved history. Therefore, the novel’s form and its political and social content are unified in their challenge to the dominant societal narratives about America and how these narratives are traditionally told.

Notes

  1. ↑ See again Mailer (1959) as well as essays in Mailer (1966) and Mailer (1982). This point recurs throughout his writing.
  2. ↑ One of the many critics who argue this way is Nielson (1997), who sums up her conclusion about Mailer’s politics based on Harlot’s Ghost and Oswald’s Tale by stating, “What an examination of the persistent presence of Kennedy in their writings tends to suggest is that, for all Mailer’s non-conformism, his oeuvre serves to ultimately uphold the defining myths of the society which he describes, while that of Vidal works to undermine them.”[3] While her analysis of the episodes featuring Kennedy in Mailer’s work and Vidal’s is persuasive in showing that Mailer’s writings on Kennedy are more positive than Vidal’s, this doesn’t justify, in my opinion, the broad conclusions she draws. On the other hand, the major critic who has treated Harlot’s Ghost as a whole, John Whalen-Bridge (1995) argues persuasively that Mailer’s novel debunks the “myth of the American Adam.” This “myth” described by R.W.B. Lewis (and others) concerns alleged American “innocence” which Whalen-Bridge convincingly demonstrates is undermined by the novel. Whalen-Bridge is the major scholar that has written in detail on Harlot’s Ghost and draws the conclusion that “His [Mailer’s DA] fictional interpretation of American intelligence work does more than any other work of literature to help readers gain access to ‘the imagination of the state.’” Unfortunately, few others have recognized the critical features of the novel. See also Whalen-Bridge (1998). Others who don’t believe the novel is critical of the CIA include Glenday (1995) who, in his biography states categorically that the novel “doesn’t set out be, then, a critique of the CIA”[4] and Dearborn (1999).
  3. ↑ I would place this novel alongside masterpieces of Cold War literature such as Coover, Doctorow and Delillo below. All of these novels challenge the conventions of traditional literary realism and present radical formal structures.

Citations

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Mailer 1959, p. 17.
  2. ↑ Rollyson 1991, p. 359.
  3. ↑ Nielson 1997, p. 23.
  4. ↑ Glenday 1995, p. 131.

Works Cited

  • Adorno, Teodor (1978). Aesthetics and Politics. New York: Verso.
  • Benjamin, Walter (1998). "The Author as Producer". Understanding Brecht. Translated by Bostock, Anna. New York: Verso.
  • Bloom, Harold, ed. (1986). Norman Mailer: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House Publishers.
  • —, ed. (2003). "Norman in Egypt". Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Norman Mailer. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers.
  • Brecht, Bertolt (2001). Brecht on Theater: the Development of an Aesthetic. Translated by Willet, John. New York: Hill and Wang.
  • Coover, Robert (1977). The Public Burning. New York: Grove Press.
  • Dearborn, Mary (1999). Mailer a Biography. New York: Simon and Shuster.
  • DeLillo, Don (1997). Underworld. New York: Simon and Shuster.
  • Doctorow, E. (1996). The Book of Daniel. New York: Plume Penguin Press.
  • Fukikyama, Francis (1998). The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon Books.
  • Glenday, Michael (1995). Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin's Press.
  • Jameson, Fredric (1991). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP.
  • Lenin, V. (1977). Selected Works in 3 Volumes. Moscow: International Press.
  • Mailer, Norman (1959). Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam.
  • — (1965). An American Dream. Dial.
  • — (1966). Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial.
  • — (1955). The Deer Park. New York: Putnam.
  • — (1976). Genius and Lust: A Journey through the Major Writings of Henry Miller. New York: Grove.
  • — (1991). Harlot's Ghost. New York: Random House.
  • — (1982). Pieces and Pontifications. Boston: Little Brown.
  • McHale, Brian (1992). Constructing Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge.
  • Nielson, Heather (1997). "Jack's Ghost: Reappearances of John Kennedy in the work of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer". American Studies International. 35 (3): 23–41.
  • Rollyson, Carl (1991). The Lives of Norman Mailer. New York: Paragon House.
  • Whalen-Bridge, John (1995). "The Myth of American Adam in Late Mailer". Connotations. 5 (2–3): 304–321.
  • — (1998). Fiction and the American Self. Urbana: University of Illinois P.
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