The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Heart of the Nation: Jewish Values in the Fiction of Norman Mailer: Difference between revisions

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Every action, then, that individuals perform has a significance that detracts or adds to the sum of all meaning, ordering chaos, inventing form, and flowing into the flux of Time, every action, individually realized and existentially self- defining is a dance over the hot coals of life. No scene in '' Gospel '' brings this out more than Jesus’s encounter with the Devil, the most admired section of the novel. In this section, the naïve Jesus tackles a being of infinite seductiveness, power, and wit. (Like Milton, Mailer finds himself giving some of the best lines to the Devil, which may be why he returned to this character for his last novel.) The Devil uses every trick in the book from the physical to the spiritual, from hallucinations to lying to undermine Jesus, but the Son is up to the task and if anything, by fighting the Devil he discovers his own powers and destiny.  
Every action, then, that individuals perform has a significance that detracts or adds to the sum of all meaning, ordering chaos, inventing form, and flowing into the flux of Time, every action, individually realized and existentially self- defining is a dance over the hot coals of life. No scene in '' Gospel '' brings this out more than Jesus’s encounter with the Devil, the most admired section of the novel. In this section, the naïve Jesus tackles a being of infinite seductiveness, power, and wit. (Like Milton, Mailer finds himself giving some of the best lines to the Devil, which may be why he returned to this character for his last novel.) The Devil uses every trick in the book from the physical to the spiritual, from hallucinations to lying to undermine Jesus, but the Son is up to the task and if anything, by fighting the Devil he discovers his own powers and destiny.  


<blockquote> If I could increase in my powers ... perhaps the world of men might multiply in virtue with me. So I had begun to believe in my Father .... I had been tested, had proved loyal, and now my tongue began to feel clean.{{sfn|Mailer|2005| |p=57}}</blockquote>  
<blockquote> If I could increase in my powers ... perhaps the world of men might multiply in virtue with me. So I had begun to believe in my Father .... I had been tested, had proved loyal, and now my tongue began to feel clean.{{sfn|Mailer|2005|p=57}}</blockquote>  


While Jesus knows who his father is, he still has to learn who he is and make the connection between the two so that God’s plans can be fulfilled.  
While Jesus knows who his father is, he still has to learn who he is and make the connection between the two so that God’s plans can be fulfilled.  


<blockquote> I was obliged to wonder. Why had the Lord left me alone with Satan? Was it to scourge me of an excess of piety? Before long I would learn that there might be truth in this. There was work to do, and it could not be accomplished on one’s knees.{{sfn|Mailer|2005| |p=57}}</blockquote>  
<blockquote> I was obliged to wonder. Why had the Lord left me alone with Satan? Was it to scourge me of an excess of piety? Before long I would learn that there might be truth in this. There was work to do, and it could not be accomplished on one’s knees.{{sfn|Mailer|2005|p=57}}</blockquote>  


In a way we are all children of God, as Mailer noted in the aforementioned interview:  
In a way we are all children of God, as Mailer noted in the aforementioned interview:  


<blockquote> God wants to do more and gave us free will precisely because we’re God’s children .... I see God as a creative artist ... but not all powerful. And not all-good. And so, as an artist, God wants us to go further than God went. {{sfn|Shaikh|2007|}} </blockquote>  
<blockquote> God wants to do more and gave us free will precisely because we’re God’s children .... I see God as a creative artist ... but not all powerful. And not all-good. And so, as an artist, God wants us to go further than God went. {{sfn|Shaikh|2007|}}</blockquote>  


Human beings therefore have lives that are not theirs to waste, as Cherry explains in '' An American Dream '':  
Human beings therefore have lives that are not theirs to waste, as Cherry explains in '' An American Dream '':  


<blockquote> I always end up with something like the idea that God is weaker because I didn’t turn out well .... I believe God is just doing His best to learn from what happens to some of us.{{sfn|Mailer |1965|p=197}}</blockquote>  
<blockquote> I always end up with something like the idea that God is weaker because I didn’t turn out well .... I believe God is just doing His best to learn from what happens to some of us.{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=197}}</blockquote>  


Mailer, though, gives an interesting spin on this essentially Jewish idea. In his telling, God moves from being all- powerful and an artist par excellence to ironically a sort of conservative economist, harvesting his energies in a way that would make the most ardent environmentalist happy. Again, in the '' Nextbook '' interview, he expounds on this long -held credo:
Mailer, though, gives an interesting spin on this essentially Jewish idea. In his telling, God moves from being all- powerful and an artist par excellence to ironically a sort of conservative economist, harvesting his energies in a way that would make the most ardent environmentalist happy. Again, in the '' Nextbook '' interview, he expounds on this long -held credo:
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<blockquote> The world is much too fraught with peril and much too important a creation, to have it as a stage play where we do what we do, work at how we work, and if we please God, we go to heaven, if we displease we go to hell. Very wasteful, totally uneconomic. {{sfn|Shaikh|2007|}}</blockquote>  
<blockquote> The world is much too fraught with peril and much too important a creation, to have it as a stage play where we do what we do, work at how we work, and if we please God, we go to heaven, if we displease we go to hell. Very wasteful, totally uneconomic. {{sfn|Shaikh|2007|}}</blockquote>  


I am reminded of that wonderful discussion in '' Tough Guys Don’t Dance '' about the way that God plays the odds in a football game:  
I am reminded of that wonderful discussion in '' Tough Guys Don’t Dance '' about the way that God plays the odds in a football game:


<blockquote> “Because footballs ... take funny bounces. It is not practical to get better than four out of five. That’s good enough. If [God] wanted to take account of the physics of every bounce, He’d have to do a million times more work in His calculations in order to get up from eighty to ninety-nine percent. That’s not economical. He’s got too many other things to work at.” {{sfn|Abraham|1984|p=160}}</blockquote>  
<blockquote> “Because footballs ... take funny bounces. It is not practical to get better than four out of five. That’s good enough. If [God] wanted to take account of the physics of every bounce, He’d have to do a million times more work in His calculations in order to get up from eighty to ninety-nine percent. That’s not economical. He’s got too many other things to work at.”{{sfn|Abraham|1984|p=160}}</blockquote>  


Mailer liked this idea so much, he repeated it virtually verbatim in '' Harlot’s Ghost ''!  
Mailer liked this idea so much, he repeated it virtually verbatim in '' Harlot’s Ghost ''!  
The third aspect of Mailer’s work that owes a debt to his Jewish heritage might be the most obvious one: The idea of the Jew as “prophet” or “social commentator.” In '' The Naked and the Dead '', Joey Goldstein’s grandfather, speaking of the people of Israel, refers to an idea posited by Judah Halevi, the Kuzari, an eleventh-century Spanish Jewish mystic: Israel “is the heart of all nations ... the heart is also the conscience” {{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=247}}. If you will forgive the Jewish chauvinism, one that I am sure Mailer does not subscribe to either, the Kuzari lays down a template for how the Jew must behave and the implications of that role:
<blockquote> The Jew is the heart because he [sic] is endowed ... with the most perfect soul and the loftiest intellect which it is possible for a human to possess and ... [w]ith ... an immanence enabling him to enter into a communication with God.{{sfn| Heinemann|1969|p=144}}</blockquote>
The Jew is therefore endowed with the “spirit of continual prophecy.” In such a state the Jew is of the people, yet in a state of awareness that raises the Jew above the rest. Mailer secularizes this concept when he writes in “Minorities”: “Minority groups are the artistic nerves of a republic and, like any phenomenon which has to do with art, they are profoundly divided. They are both themselves and the mirror of their culture as it reacts upon them” {{sfn| Mailer|1974|p=626}} This notion helps to explain Mailer’s concern not only with God’s power and destiny as manifested by humankind on Earth, but also connects with his concerns about the nature of modern society. He is a witness to individuals’ being deprived of their potential for beauty and art and, like the watchman of the night, feels impelled to call out his warning. Nearly fifty years ago, he had seen “authority and nihilism stalking one another in the orgiastic hollow of this century” (AFM 94) and he has trumpeted his horror at every opportunity to make a “revolution in the consciousness of our time” (AFM 17) But as the Good Book says, “the prophet is never heard in his own city,” and it must be cold comfort to the prophet to see us back at this point again after brief bursts of light shining on us.
Mailer’s prophetic tendencies have been considered unruly and intemperate but what prophet has not been considered that way, from Isaiah, who stormed into the royal palace, to Jeremiah, who was thrown into jail, to Jesus, who ended up crucified? As Heschel puts it,
<blockquote> The prophet’s words are outbursts of violent emotions. His rebuke is harsh and relentless. But if such deep sensitivity to evil is to be called hysterical, what name should be given to the abysmal indifference to evil which the prophet bewails.{{sfn|Abraham|1956|p=6}}</blockquote>
Not without validity, Judaism, or at least the left wing branch of it, remains synonymous with prophecy, as Will Herberg in '' Judaism and Modern Man '' points out: Jewish tradition “is one continuous story of the witness of faith against those who hold power ... in every case it is the man [sic] ... of faith challenging the inordinate pretensions of official society”{{sfn|Herberg|1951|p=185}}
Bernard Sherman in '' The Invention of the Jew '' applies the term '' prophecy '' to writers who share this response to the problems of modern humankind —Mailer among them:
<blockquote> Each found that the distinctively Jewish element was the demand—  very often in fervid, prophetic, even mystical terms—  that man [sic] fulfill his highest possibilities, that he achieves a Messianic release in a world in which mind and justice were triumphant. The locus of this spirit of social compassion is the prophetic vision of Isaiah ''{{sfn|Sherman|1969|p=16}}</blockquote>
It is a connection well known, and as Nathan Glazer in '' American Judaism '' points out: “the Jewish religious tradition probably does dispose Jews ... towards liberalism and radicalism” {{sfn|Glazer |1957|p=139}} Mailer emerges from this Jewish tradition, the strong left- wing liberal side, which while eschewing ritual, rabbis took to heart its strong social concerns. Sherman also notes this attraction of Jews to the most “prophetic” of all -isms, Marxism. One recalls Mailer’s own involvement with Wallace’s Progressive Party and his detailed study of Marxism in his second novel, '' Barbary Shore ''. Similarly, these prophetic concerns predominate in his novels, '' The Deer Park '', which has as its backdrop, Hollywood, the HUAC, and the Korean War; '' An American Dream '', a panoramic study of a garden gone to seed; and '' Why Are We in Vietnam? '', a study of a schizophrenic nation, to mention but a few instances.
The role of prophet is one that Mailer has often portrayed himself as playing: “He has been a poor prophet of the Sixties but it was not a century for prophets”{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=141}}(The prophets were not “nice Jewish boys” either.) Every novel, every piece of fiction, essay, or work of reportage of Mailer’s has a touchstone quality about it, showing us where we are at a particular moment in time. Even more so, it has led to some of his most beautiful writing:
<blockquote> Let the bugle blow. The death of America rides in on the smog. America—the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power .... Deliver us from our curse. For we must end on the road to that mystery where courage, death, and the dream of love give promise of sleep. {{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=316-317}}</blockquote>
Reading this quotation, I am reminded of Mailer’s comment on Henry Miller: “a writer of the largest dimension can alter the nerves and marrow of a nation” {{sfn|1976|p=191}} I think it is an apt appraisal of Mailer’s '' own '' contribution to our nation’s literature and consciousness.


===Citations===  
===Citations===  
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