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The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Genre-Bending in The Armies of the Night: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision.{{sfn|Burke|1974|p=148}} }} | {{quote|[W]ould attempt to ''attain a full moral act'' by attaining a perspective ''atop all the conflicts of attitude'' ... to derive its vision from the maximum ''heaping up'' of all these emotional factors, playing them off against one another, inviting them to reinforce and contradict one another, and seeking to make this active participation itself a major ingredient of the vision.{{sfn|Burke|1974|p=148}} }} | ||
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” | 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” {{sfn|Bakhtin|1974|p=148}}. 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: | 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: | ||