663
edits
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/On The Armies of the Night: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/On The Armies of the Night (view source)
Revision as of 09:59, 8 July 2021
, 8 July 2021Updated URL.
Jules Carry (talk | contribs) m (Fixed displaytitle.) |
Jules Carry (talk | contribs) m (Updated URL.) |
||
| (3 intermediate revisions by 2 users not shown) | |||
| Line 1: | Line 1: | ||
{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>On ''The Armies of the Night''}} | {{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>On ''The Armies of the Night''}} | ||
{{MR02}} | {{MR02}} | ||
{{byline |last=Gordon |first=Neil |abstract=To treat ''The Armies of the Night'' as simply an explanation of an historical period is a simplification, and it is especially relevant that the heart of this book is a meditation on the competing claims of three forms of knowing the past—the journalistic, the historical, and the novelistic. That | {{byline |last=Gordon |first=Neil |abstract=To treat ''[[The Armies of the Night]]'' as simply an explanation of an historical period is a simplification, and it is especially relevant that the heart of this book is a meditation on the competing claims of three forms of knowing the past—the journalistic, the historical, and the novelistic. That {{NM}} comes down so clearly on the side of the novelistic is in no doubt. The finest writing of this book comes not in the first half of the book in which Mailer describes his actual experience, nor in the historical or journalistic analysis but, precisely, in Mailer’s descriptions of those parts of the March on the Pentagon which he did not experience. |note=This paper was presented on October 19, 2007 at Georgetown University. The conference was the “40th anniversary conference on The March on the Pentagon/''The Armies of the Night''.” |url=https://prmlr.us/mr08gord}} | ||
{{dc|dc=I| am six years older than Norman Mailer}} when he wrote ''The Armies of the Night''. In 1968, its year of publication, I was 10. I come to this book therefore from a position perhaps somewhat different from my colleagues here: I come to it looking for an insight into the origins of my own political consciousness. I think I am not alone in this—in fact, I’m one of a number of writers who, over the past five years or so have published novels attempting, precisely, to understand what it meant to live in the politics of the sixties and how that relates to who we are today. | {{dc|dc=I| am six years older than Norman Mailer}} when he wrote ''The Armies of the Night''. In {{date|1968}}, its year of publication, I was 10. I come to this book therefore from a position perhaps somewhat different from my colleagues here: I come to it looking for an insight into the origins of my own political consciousness. I think I am not alone in this—in fact, I’m one of a number of writers who, over the past five years or so have published novels attempting, precisely, to understand what it meant to live in the politics of the sixties and how that relates to who we are today. | ||
It is a good way to approach this novel. Its historical insight is razor sharp. Take Mailer’s description of the fabled [[w:New Left|New Left]], who they were, where they came from. His remarkable frame of reference extends from the thirties to the late sixties; from the fine distinction between Leninists and Trotskyists to a real experience of marijuana and Benzedrine. And therefore his ability to show us how the New Left grew from the foundering of American radicalism of the thirties in a set of disputatious, incompatible, but nearly identical modes of political thought. Mailer describes for us the tangle of “Communist, Trotskyist, Splinter Marxist, Union Organizer, or plain Social Democrat,” and how these groups finally “succeeded in smashing the bones of their own movement into the hundred final slivers of American Marxism, miniscule radical sects complete each with their own special martyred genius of a Marxicologist.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=85}} He gives us access to the great disappointed hope of the Labor Movement, in which “Communists and Trotskyites, Splinterites, and Reutherites [ultimately came to] sit closer to the Mafia than to Marx.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=86}} This, precisely, is the context, most usually forgotten among people of my age, from which emerged the New Left. | It is a good way to approach this novel. Its historical insight is razor sharp. Take Mailer’s description of the fabled [[w:New Left|New Left]], who they were, where they came from. His remarkable frame of reference extends from the thirties to the late sixties; from the fine distinction between Leninists and Trotskyists to a real experience of marijuana and Benzedrine. And therefore his ability to show us how the New Left grew from the foundering of American radicalism of the thirties in a set of disputatious, incompatible, but nearly identical modes of political thought. Mailer describes for us the tangle of “Communist, Trotskyist, Splinter Marxist, Union Organizer, or plain Social Democrat,” and how these groups finally “succeeded in smashing the bones of their own movement into the hundred final slivers of American Marxism, miniscule radical sects complete each with their own special martyred genius of a Marxicologist.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=85}} He gives us access to the great disappointed hope of the Labor Movement, in which “Communists and Trotskyites, Splinterites, and Reutherites [ultimately came to] sit closer to the Mafia than to Marx.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=86}} This, precisely, is the context, most usually forgotten among people of my age, from which emerged the New Left. | ||
And who were they? Mailer describes “A generation of college students . . . who were finally indifferent to the blockhouse polemics of the past, and the real nature of the Soviet. It was the real injustice in America which attracted their attention—poverty, civil rights, an end to censorship.”{{sfn|Mailer| | And who were they? Mailer describes “A generation of college students . . . who were finally indifferent to the blockhouse polemics of the past, and the real nature of the Soviet. It was the real injustice in America which attracted their attention—poverty, civil rights, an end to censorship.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=120}} | ||
It is a genealogy of the New Left that, if we wish to understand who we are as Liberals and Radicals in America today, we need to master in its details. And it’s a description all the more poignant when you reflect that these hopeful words about the New Left were written in 1967, just a couple years before the New Left was to begin the process of self destruction that, I would submit to you, still casts its pall over the American Left today, its shadow of hopelessness, of pessimism and the sense that political engagement is, at heart, impossible. I refer of course to that moment in 1969, just two years later, when [[w:Weather Underground|Weathermen]] took over [[w:Students for a Democratic Society|SDS]] and put an end to the possibility of real, radical social transformation in America—a possibility that, I’ll argue, still disappoints us today. | It is a genealogy of the New Left that, if we wish to understand who we are as Liberals and Radicals in America today, we need to master in its details. And it’s a description all the more poignant when you reflect that these hopeful words about the New Left were written in 1967, just a couple years before the New Left was to begin the process of self destruction that, I would submit to you, still casts its pall over the American Left today, its shadow of hopelessness, of pessimism and the sense that political engagement is, at heart, impossible. I refer of course to that moment in 1969, just two years later, when [[w:Weather Underground|Weathermen]] took over [[w:Students for a Democratic Society|SDS]] and put an end to the possibility of real, radical social transformation in America—a possibility that, I’ll argue, still disappoints us today. | ||
| Line 40: | Line 40: | ||
{{Review}} | {{Review}} | ||
{{DEFAULTSORT:On the Armies of the Night}} | {{DEFAULTSORT:On the Armies of the Night}} | ||
[[Category:Articles (MR)]] | [[Category:Articles (MR)]] | ||