The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Identity Crisis: A State of the Union Address: Difference between revisions

{{dc|dc=N|o two contemporary writers have looked harder}} or with greater analytical intelligence at the forces undermining the American Dream than [[Norman Mailer]] and [[w:Kurt Vonnegut|Kurt Vonnegut]]. Whatever individual differences of vision or temperament may separate these brooding seers, Mailer, the mystic Existentialist, and Kurt Vonnegut, the comic Absurdist, serve as shamans, spiritual medicine men whose function is to expose various forms of societal madness—dispelling the evil spirits of greed, irresponsible mechanization, and aggression while encouraging reflection and the will to positive change. It is this almost mystical vision of the writer as spiritual medium and healer that Vonnegut intends by calling himself a “canary bird in the coal mine”—one who provides spiritual illumination, offering us warnings about the dehumanized future not as it must necessarily be, but as it surely would become if based on the materialism, government corruption, and promiscuous technology of the present.{{sfn|Vonnegut|1965|p=238}} In books Mailer might call existential errands, like ''[[Why Are We in Vietnam?]]'', ''[[The Armies of the Night]]'', ''[[Of a Fire on the Moon]]'', and ''[[Miami and the Siege of Chicago]]'', Mailer’s particular genius has been to penetrate the facade of contemporary events to show us who we are, where we are, and where we are likely to go, pointing up the significant in the most trivial of events, and conversely placing in perspective the truly momentous acts of our time.

Canary birds notwithstanding, of course, Mailer and Vonnegut have been as painfully conscious of the fundamental absurdities of their age as any of their contemporaries: the stockpiling of doomsday weapons to keep the world safe, the brutalities of World Wars, the quest for God through material acquisitions and technological advance, uncritical patriotism—the list goes on. Both see the atrocities of the death camps and those that followed Auschwitz as symbolizing the spiritual devastation of our age. In his essay “[[The White Negro]],” Mailer describes the Holocaust as a mirror to the human condition that “blinded anyone who looked into it.” “Probably,” Mailer says, "We will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge ... that we might ... be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by ''[[w:Deus ex machina|deus ex machina]]'' in a gas chamber or a radioactive city.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=338}} In an address at Bennington College in 1970, Vonnegut said, “I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientists, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty and sold it to ''Popular Mechanics'' magazine. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima."{{sfn|Vonnegut|1965|p=161}} Vonnegut acknowledges that in the wake of Hiroshima and the death camps, faith in human improvement has not come easily, pointing out that he and his fellow canary-bird artists chirped and chirped and keeled over in protest of the war in Vietnam, but it made no difference whatsoever. “Nobody cared.” But, he says, “I continue to think that artists—all artists—should be treasured as alarm systems”{{sfn|Vonnegut|1965|p=239}} That’s what our minds were designed to do.  

In their latest analyses of America’s ills, Mailer’s ''[[Why Are We at War?]]'' (2003) and Vonnegut’s ''[[w:A Man Without a Country|A Man Without a Country]]'' (2005), Mailer and Vonnegut reaffirm their love of democracy and the U.S. Constitution as civilization’s best hopes for a more orderly and saner world. As always, both labor hard on behalf of a society, as Vonnegut writes, “dedicated to the proposition that all men, women and children are created equal and should not starve.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=11}} “It so happens,” Vonnegut says, “that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed clouds. It is the law. It is the U.S. Constitution.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=98}} He praises his two favorite spokesmen for democratic freedoms, [[w:Carl Sandburg|Carl Sandburg]] and [[w:Eugene Victor Debs|Eugene Victor Debs]]: “I would have been tongue-tied,” he says, “in the presence of such national treasures.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=13}} He encourages us all to read Tocqueville’s ''[[w:Democracy in America|Democracy in America]]'' as the best book ever written on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in American democracy. Vonnegut asks, “Want a taste of that great book?” Tocqueville says, “and he said it 169 years ago, that in no country other than ours has love of money taken a stronger hold on the affections of men. Okay?”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=8}} Mailer hails democracy as God’s most noble and beautiful experiment, but always “in peril.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=16}}, an existential venture whose delicacy makes it dangerously vulnerable, a “state of grace” attained only by those ready to suffer and even to perish for its freedoms.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=71}} We’ll see later how at the end of ''Why Are We at War?'' this forewarning takes a complex and troubling turn.

On the one hand, it is clear to me that ''Why Are We at War?'' and ''A Man without a Country'' read more funereally than as prescriptions for a better world. Equally clear is that neither writer believes they had the power now either personally or artistically to repair or elevate the American soul, so vast, complex, and divided. “Let’s not have a false notion of our possibilities,” Mailer says. “We’re not noble enough to fulfill that scheme. Let’s live at the level we’re at.” Those are words said in an earlier interview about the country,{{sfn|American Masters|2000}} but they apply dolefully for the role of shaman. So why with such scant reason to cheer was it not depression or remorse I heard in the canary bird’s diminished voice but something curiously buoyant and relieved, as if the shaman had been freed from some great burden? Why, for instance, would Vonnegut speak not of personal hopelessness, but of a process of becoming—an existential condition to which Mailer would readily relate? Vonnegut declares, “I really don’t know what I’m going to become from now on. I don’t think I can control my life or my writing ... I’m simply becoming.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|2005|p=130}} Why would Mailer declare almost unequivocally that he was not unhappy, a discouraged shaman, yes, but not an unhappy man? I found the answer in Mailer’s self-interview called “Mailer on Mailer.” He explains, “I’ve always felt that my relationship to America is analogous to a marriage. I love this country. I hate it. I get angry at it. I feel close to it. I’m charmed by it. I’m repelled by it. It’s a marriage that has gone on for at least the fifty years of my writing life. And in the course of that marriage what’s happened is the marriage has gotten worse. It is not what it used to be."{{sfn|American Masters|2000}} Mailer was a man without a country, too, at least the country he had loved, and ''Why Are We at War?'' and ''A Man without a Country'' are divorce proclamations. One thinks of Fitzgerald and his protagonist Dick Diver, men who must separate from hopelessly schizophrenic women to save their own sanity. If I am not taking the affirmation of ''Why Are We at War?'' and ''A Man without a Country'' too far, this severing from what D. H. Lawrence called the “bitch goddess success,” whose seductive wiles are power and material lusts, constitutes not only self-preservation, lest the healer become the patient, but an act of personal and artistic renewal. This is the classic resolution of identity in turmoil that rescues Stephen Dedalus at the end of ''[[w:A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man|A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man]]''. Repudiating a country whose ideals had been grotesquely betrayed by cultural [[w:Philistinism|philistinism]], degraded religion, and wholly corrupt politics, Stephen achieves the necessary independence and self-possession to fulfill his destiny as artist. “So be it,” Stephen says, “Welcome, O Life!” As for Mailer and Vonnegut, who knows what new thinking or new art might come from such self-possession and rededication to the muse within? Wasn’t this what Vonnegut meant at the end of ''[[w:Fates Worse Than Death|Fates Worse Than Death]]'' when he says, “Hopelessness is the mother of Originality.”{{sfn|Vonnegut|1991|p=237}} “As you grow older,” Mailer says, “you have other things in your life besides your country. I have my family and I have my work.”{{sfn|American Masters|2000}} If his country is not as great or noble as he had hoped it is, it allowed him the freedom to think and write as he wished. If, as for Vonnnegut, that greatest of all human dreams were already behind him, it would be enough to serve as witness, if not to change the world—to meditate upon the perversities and wonders of his times.