The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Norman Mailer: The Magician as Tragic Hero: Difference between revisions

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We are reminded of Gardner’s dialectic of art and chaos, of artists/heroes and the abyss, of opposing philosophies (or constructive oppositions) that test values and seek synthesis or personal transformation. He and Mailer are both seeking consciousness rather than codes. Mailer’s underlying conflict between vitality and entropy is in Egypt mythologically reflected in Ra’s nightly descent into darkness to battle the great serpent of entropy and in Osiris’ role not only as Lord of Resurrection and Mind (consciousness). Similarly, that dialectic is symbolized by the conflicts between the gods and their opposing qualities. And ultimately it is symbolized by “the balance of Maat,” which holds in creative equipoise the dialectical polarities of existence — barbarism and civilization, bestiality and nobility, death and life, waste and generation, Set and Osiris. Entropy to Mailer is that which destroys the balance, the devouring of life principle by death principle.

To express this vision of bold effort and failure, Mailer chooses two narrators. In a spirit of outrageous experimentation Mailer grants his six-year-old first narrator a first-person omniscient point of view. Having the lineage and gifts of pharaohs, as Mailer depicts them, Meni II sees others’ minds. Through this first narrator, the grandfather in tum tells the stories of his four lives for most of the novel. The grandfather guides the young Meni through the World of the Dead as well as the world of the living, as Conchis and Tag Hodge guide their initiates by the use of a series of parabolic tales about human nature and history. Like the archetypal guides of ancient and modem literature, and again like Fowles’ and Gardner’s, Mailer’s guide figure is at once magus, odoriferous old man, shapeshifter, and obscene fool. Like the artist himself, the guide may even lie to get at the truth: “The traveler from distant places is an everlasting liar.”{{sfn|Mailer|1983|p=65}} Previously a student of magic, medicine, and religion and the High Priest of Thebes, Menenhetet I has the lore to negotiate the Land of the Dead and mediate between the worlds of gods and humans. “I will offer a story far better than any father ever gave a son, and I would like my granddaughter to listen as well,” Menenhetet tells the pharaoh. “They are now nearest my flesh of all four lives.”{{sfn|Mailer|1983|p=232}}

This magician, tale-teller, and guide, like Gardner’s heroic models from Clumly to Lars-Goren, is not known so much for his quickness of wit as for his peasant-like persistence, truth-seeking, and courage despite all his foibles and failures. These qualities of endurance and risk-taking are what first endeared him to the youthful Ramses II. Above all, Meni I’s tale is one of personal courage, ambition, and folly, and each of these qualities of his tale are in turn reflected by the desires, maneuverings, and comments of his three interlocu­tors — Ramses IX, Hathfertiti (little Meni’s mother), Meni’s father Nef-khep­aukhem. All of the characters at both levels of the narrative are caught in a web of conflicting ambitions and historical contexts — a context extended by com­parison even as far back to such earlier pharaohs as Kufhu, for example. If by the end of the novel, the historical context extends forward to Greece and Rome, then by appropriate comparisons each reader may extrapolate to modem history as well. Such themes as the value of courage and strength, the necessity of balance or proportion, the brutal and disconnected nature of social and political establishments, and the psychic underworld of ambition, greed, and lust are emphatic themes in the novel with ethical ramifications in many historical con­texts.

==Works Cited==

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* {{cite journal |last1=Begiebing |first1=Robert J. |authormask=1 |date=1983 |title=[[Twelfth Round: An Interview with Norman Mailer|Twelfth Round]] |url= |journal=Harvard Magazine |volume=85 |issue=March-April |pages=40–50 |doi= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Bloom |first=Harold |date=April 28, 1983 |title=Norman in Egypt |url= |magazine=New York Review of Books |location= |publisher= |access-date= |pages=3–5 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Epstein |first=Joseph |date=July 1983 |title=Mailer Hits Bottom |url= |magazine=Commentary |pages=62–68 |publisher= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Fiedler |first=Leslie |date=June 1983 |title=Going for the Long Ball |url= |magazine=Psychology Today |location= |publisher= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Gardiner |first=Sir Alan |date=1980 |orig-year=1961 |title=Egypt of the Pharaohs |url= |location=New York |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Girard |first=Rene |date=1977 |title=Violence and the Sacred |url= |location=Baltimore |publisher=Johns Hopkins University Press |page= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lentricchia |first=Frank |date=1983 |title=Criticism and Social Change |url= |location=Chicago |publisher=University of Chicago Press |page= |isbn= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lichtheim |first=Mariam |date=1976 |title=Ancient Egyptian Literature: The New Kingdom |volume=2 |url= |location=Berkley and Los Angles |publisher=University of California Press |page= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1963 |title=The Presidential Papers |url= |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons |page= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last=Manning |first=Margaret |date=April 3, 1983 |title=Look upon this Work, Oh ye Mailer, and Despair |url= |work=Boston Globe |location=A10–A11 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=June 10, 1983 |title=Review of ''Ancient Evenings'' |url= |magazine=Times Literary Supplement |location= |pages591–592= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Shaw |first=Peter |date=September 1983 |title=Norman Mailer Turns Victim |url= |magazine=The American Spectator |location= |pages=45–46 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last=Stade |first=George |date=May 2, 1983 |title=A Chthonic Novel |url= |magazine=The New Republic |location= |publisher= |access-date= |pages=32–36 |ref=harv }}