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

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.