The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night: Difference between revisions

In an article citing and synthesizing Mailer’s many pronouncements on the distinctions among narrative forms, J. Michael Lennon concludes that Mailer sees:

      

Lennon’s summary faithfully represents Mailer’s own distinctions. The question is whether Mailer’s critical principles are consistent with his practice as a writer. A related question: when Mailer references history and journalism, is he talking about what he considers standard historiographic and journalistic practice or his own? The dichotomy that Lennon brings to light suggests that Mailer conceives of history and journalism as those forms are traditionally understood, but when we look closely at ''Armies'', a work of New Journalism, we can see that the text embodies many of the qualities Mailer associates with fiction. First, Mailer’s heuristic, improvisational style gives to ''Armies'' the sense of spontaneity he associates with his preferred form, the novel. Further, Mailer’s focus on his own perceptions and impressions does at times intensify the reader’s consciousness in sympathetic union with the narrator’s, and some of the more deliberative passages, such as the “Why Are We in Vietnam?” chapter, present the reader with the difficult moral choices such as how to end the war in Vietnam without creating even greater instability in southeast Asia. Finally, the form of ''Armies'' is ultimately open-ended, ambiguous, and suggestive, qualities Mailer again associates with fiction; his metaphorical final chapter illumines questions about the future of the embattled Republic without drawing definitive conclusions.

One way to bridge the gap between or among the genres is to borrow Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of history as drama, to read Mailer’s text as a dramatic conflict in which Mailer, playing the role of protagonist, dramatizes the political struggle between the right-wing establishment and the left- wing anti-establishment over the war in Vietnam. Mailer’s distinction between the methods adopted by historians and journalists and his own novelistic method is similar to the distinction Burke makes between the “semantic” and “poetic” ideals in ''The Philosophy of Literary Form'', (138–164). Traditionally, historians and journalists, striving to achieve the “semantic” ideal, stress the role of the observer, attempting, according to Burke, “''to get a description'' [of an event] by the ''elimination'' of an attitude ... to ''cut away'', to ''abstract'', all emotional factors that complicate the objective clarity of meaning” (147–8). Mailer, adhering to the “poetic” ideal, stresses the role of the participant and, indeed, he refers to himself as “the Participant” in the text. Mailer’s primary concern is with preparing a dramatically persuasive image which will invite the audience’s symbolic participation in the historical struggle. Through a dramatic, “poetic” presentation of events, Mailer appeals to his readers to give their assent to his subjective observations, reactions, and analyses. His emotional involvement in the March and his commitment to radical causes—however qualified—set him apart from other journalists and historians. According to Burke, literary artists like Mailer, striving to achieve the “poetic” ideal:

Mailer attempts to foreground as many “conflicts of attitude” into his text as possible as he dramatizes a process in which competing discourses engage each other dialectically. In Bakhtinian terms, ''Armies'' is a “heteroglossic” text: “''another’s speech in another’s language'', serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (Bakhtin 324). By incorporating the language of others into his own text, Mailer plays the various voices off one another dialectically, multiplying perspectives so that no particular ideological viewpoint, other than Mailer’s idiosyncratic own, is privileged over the others, yet even Mailer, in the wake of the event, refuses to draw definitive conclusions about the significance and outcome of the march on the Pentagon (Mailer 236). Dramatically and dialectically, ''Armies'' resists closure; the historic conflicts it develops remain unresolved.

Mailer’s subjectivity and personal involvement in the demonstration allow him a closer perspective than an historical account, based on secondary research (newspaper reports, interviews, etc.), can achieve. Mailer’s extended “Novel Metaphor,” which introduces Book Two, makes the point:

    

The method is then exposed. The mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of an historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced. (243–4)

Mailer’s tower metaphor suggests that the primary distinction between history and fiction exists in the realm of experience: the historian writes his account after the fact, basing his narrative on research, assimilating other accounts, direct or indirect, into his own text; the novelist, by contrast, at least in Mailer’s case, writes from direct experience. One key difference, then, between history and journalism, on the one hand, fiction or new journalism on the other, is that conventional historical or journalistic accounts tend to regard significant events as exterior, residing in the realm of empirically verifiable facts, while fictional or new journalistic texts take interior factors, the writer’s private thoughts or emotions, for example, into consideration. Philip Bufithis draws the following distinction between fiction and history in ''Armies'': “The book is novelistic because it sensitively describes the ''effects'' of the march on a participant-protagonist, Norman Mailer, and historical because it scrupulously describes the ''fact'' of the march” (86). Mailer says that  

History, Mailer says, is “interior” (281), indicating that history is a lived experience, not a compilation of data which bear a purely external relation to the individuals involved. ''Armies'' contains a multitude of facts about the anti- war demonstration, but Mailer’s primary concern is with the feel of the event, the emotional factors that cannot necessarily be conveyed by the conventional five Ws approach—Who, What, When, Where and Why.

Mailer’s conception of history and his own role in the historical drama overlap. John Hellmann observes that Mailer “casts himself as a protagonist able to bridge self and event through action and metaphor” (37). Indeed, one of the text’s central metaphors compares history to a “crazy house” that the reader gains entrance to via Mailer’s persona as “bridge” (Mailer 66). Mailer says that

Mailer’s metaphor is appropriate to his method. The “crazy house,” typically found in an amusement park, is constructed in this case of events that seem to defy conventional historical or journalistic methods for making sense of experience. In a “crazy house,” one’s senses become disoriented, and nothing is necessarily what it seems. The sense of distortion and disorientation is augmented by mass media accounts and by dogmatic political discourse on the left and right. Mailer’s “crazy house” metaphor implies that, given the confusion and baffling complexity of events, it would be unethical, if not simply inaccurate, for the writer to omit that element of disorientation or craziness from his text. Despite the protagonist’s egotism, then, a perspective “off to the side” deemphasizes the centrality of the writer’s position in the midst of the event. To report truthfully on an ambiguous event requires a central consciousness that is not only ambiguous but somewhat detached: “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required” (65), Mailer says. At the same time, “egotism” implies subjectivity, the necessity to seek the truth of the event within one’s own experience; this “truth” can only be discovered within a “house of mirrors,” where the writer may examine his experience by seeing his reaction to diverse phenomena reflected back for examination.

experience:

Mailer uses ellipsis, the omission of a word easily understood, “Stripped of their own [clothing],” to suggest the protestors’ degradation and humiliation by the authorities. By stating that the protestors were “Stripped of their own,” he implies that they were deprived of more than clothing: their fundamental rights and dignity were also taken from them. The repetition of the phrase “for many days” emphasizes the terrible relentlessness of their punishment, and creates through its rhythmic pattern a Biblical tone, leading Mailer finally to ask about the protestors, “who was to say they were not saints?” (316). He closes this chapter by imaginatively recreating the protestors’ prayer that their suffering be accepted by God as penance for the sins of their country in Vietnam.

The final chapter of ''Armies'' consists of a pair of extended metaphors which capture the ominous uncertainty, the mixture of hope and dread Mailer feels in the wake of the march. These final, emotionally charged metaphors are crucial to an understanding of the text’s dramatic structure:

Brood on that country who expresses our will. She is America, once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin. She is heavy with child—no one knows if legitimate—and languishes in a dungeon whose walls are never seen. Now the first contractions of her fearsome labor begin—it will go on: no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is only known that false labor is not likely on her now, no, she will probably give birth, and to what?—the most fearsome totalitarianism the world has never known? or can she, poor giant, tormented lovely girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the locks. God writhes in his bonds. Rush to the locks. 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. (316–7)

Mailer’s text concludes, according to Hollowell, with the hope that good will ultimately triumph over evil (101), but Hollowell’s interpretation disregards the political implications of Mailer’s conclusion; instead, he sees Mailer involved in a moral struggle somewhat disengaged from historical reality. What Hollowell discusses in theological or moral terms, Stanley T. Gutman interprets dialectically:

Gutman’s speculation is grim, and not altogether warranted. Mailer’s metaphorical “babe of a new world brave and tender” suggests not the imminence of mutual destruction but the possibility of social and political regeneration. At the same time, when asked whether, subsequent to the March, his metaphorical child had been delivered, Mailer has replied in the negative and suggested that “[i]t gives every promise of being a monster,” adding, however, that “when you’re writing about a period that has not finished itself, you don’t know the end, and this keeps you open” (Schroeder 104–05). In any case, as the text concludes, the dialectical opposites, freedom and totalitarianism, are still firmly locked in struggle. Warner Berthoff suggests that the “metaphors of parturition and ambiguous new birth with which the book ends ... have the heart-sinking beauty of an entire fitness to this fearful, intimately American occasion ... it is hard not to feel that they form a climax” (327), but while Mailer’s metaphors may form a climax, there is no denouement, no final resolution of the dramatic conflict, no closure. The birth Mailer prophesizes has yet to occur. Nevertheless, ''Armies'' does conclude on a note of hope, as Mailer urges his readers in that historical moment to “Rush to the locks,” to reflect on the fact that the war in Vietnam still raged and so the battle for America’s future was not yet won. Mailer exhorted his readers to believe that the curtain was not closed, and that they all still had their roles to play in the historical drama; this final chapter was perhaps their cue.