The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Norman Mailer in the Light of Russian Literature: Difference between revisions

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It would be hard to think of a writer with a more powerful moral and didactic thrust than Tolstoy, author of “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” a story which openly instructs us how ''not'' to live. Yet even with Tolstoy, just as we are about to assign a linear message to one of his stories, he is likely to throw us off the track, as he does at the end of the story “Alyosha The Pot.” As Alyosha is dying he thinks, “if it’s good here when you do what they tell you and don’t hurt anybody, then it’ll be good up there too.”{{sfn|Tolstoy|1993|p=9}} Then Tolstoy, switching to his narrator’s voice concludes the story with the words, “[he] looked like he was amazed at something. Then something seemed to startle him and he stretched his legs and died.”{{sfn|Tolstoy|1993|p=9}} Having received an apparently simple, direct message, the reader is now forced to wonder what exactly it was that Alyosha was surprised at. Further, the reader has to wonder whether Alyosha’s voice is the same as that of the author.

Dostoevsky’s moral stance in his fiction is equally as difficult to define. According to the Russian literary and cultural critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, Dostoevsky is the primary exponent of the polyphonic novel in which the voices of the characters, each of which is intimately tied with a central concept or idea, are independent of a controlling authorial voice and engage in a great debate that yields no easily distillable resolution.{{efn| See {{harvtxt|Bakhtin|1973|}}, especially pp. 3–62, for his exposition of the polyphonic novel in Dostoevsky.}} Another approach, championed by Konstantin Mochulsky, proposes that Dostoevsky’s novels contain definite moral, philosophical, and religious lessons the author wants us to heed. Mochulsky further sees urgent warnings in Dostoevsky’s novels about the dangers inherent in man taking on the role of God in such a way that he becomes in effect a “Man-God.” In such a situation, there are no constraints on human behavior and “everything is permitted.”{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Mochulsky|1967|p=651}}, who cites Raskolnikov in ''Crime and Punishment'', Rogozhin in ''The Idiot'', Kirilov and Stavrogin in ''The Demons'', and Ivan Karamazov in ''The Brothers Karamazov'' as characters for whom “everything is permitted.”}}  

A story by Dostoevsky, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” provides a cautionary note to anyone who wishes to confine Dostoevsky too closely to any one category or another. Here, the narrator, who has dreamt that he visited a planet where the people lived in a state of complete innocence and he corrupted them all, says just before the end that, “in one day—in a single hour—everything could’ve been arranged. The key phrase is, ‘Love others as you love yourself.’ And that’s all there is to it. Nothing else is required.”{{sfn|Dostoevsky|1961|p=225}} It would be hard to find a more direct way to underline the story’s message than this familiar injunction from the ''Bible''.

These two stories, “Alyosha the Pot” and “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” demonstrate that Tolstoy, “the great moralizer,” will thwart our search for a clear-cut moral if he likes, and Dostoevsky, “the great polyphonist,” will lead us to an unambiguous, monophonic conclusion when he chooses.

Where, then, does Norman Mailer stand in relation to the twin titans of Russian literature with respect to his treatment of the great questions of life? It should be said that in one respect at least he is closer to the techniques of Dostoevsky, who uses preposterous or even blasphemous situations to test different ideas and questions, such as he does with the Grand Inquisitor’s interrogation of Christ in ''The Brothers Karamazov'' or the experience of the ridiculous man on another planet. Mailer, it seems to me, is also daring and innovative as he attacks the largest questions of life with bold narrative stratagems, such as a first-person narrative from the point of view of Yeshua in ''The Gospel According to the Son'', or a story about Hitler from the first person point of view of one of his henchman in ''The Castle in the Forest''. When it comes to resolving moral issues, quandries, and questions he raises in his fiction, I would claim that Mailer, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, does not fit anyone else’s preconceived pattern, and the first proof of that is to be found in Mailer’s novel, ''An American Dream''.

Dostoevsky is justly renowned for portraying his central characters, including especially but not only Raskolnikov “in extremis,” “on the edge,” and “on the threshold.” It would be hard to think of a character in any fiction who fits this description better than Rojack in ''Dream''. Indeed, Rojack, as we know, acts out the state of being on the edge in a literal fashion in his much noticed walk along the wall while contemplating suicide. Near the end of ''Crime'', Raskolnikov experiences an analogous if less melodramatic

moment, when he looks down from a bridge into the water of the Neva River in St. Petersburg and ponders whether he should take his life. Despite this obvious similarity in the portrayal of these two characters, their reactions to the murders they have committed are not nearly the same. After he has murdered Alena the pawnbroker and her sister Lizaveta, Raskolnikov returns to his apartment, where he long languishes in a semi-delirious state that has all the symptoms of a serious illness. On the other hand, after he has killed his wife Deborah and thrown her out the window in an attempt to create confusion about the real cause of her death, Rojack goes on a tear of manic activity that includes having sex with Ruta and then Cherry, extensive interviews with the police, and imbibing copious, if not prodigious amounts of alcohol. Eventually, Raskolnikov gains control of himself, but in the first days after the murder he commits at least one act that shows his judgment is still shaky when he hides the pittance under a rock, which involves several rubles and change that he has stolen from the pawnbroker. I am not sure the criticism of the novel has fully recognized the absurdity of this act, which not only well illustrates Raskolnikov’s psychological state, but also underscores the futility of his whole murderous project. The money Raskolnikov stole was, after all, meant both to finance his university education and to provide for his mother’s and sister’s welfare.

If Rojack’s behavior appears to be frantic and bizarre, as it surely is, he nevertheless is initially in better control of his rational faculties than his Russian counterpart, as he is able to conceive and carry out Deborah’s diversionary defenestration and subsequently tell his version of events to the police with conviction if not complete credibility. At a certain point, the American and Russian stories begin to intersect again as both heroes undergo long, arduous interviews with the police. Raskolnikov recovers control over his emotions so well that he is able even to play out a hypothetical confession with inspector Zametov, showing signs of his need to be punished, an emotion Rojack also experiences. The interrogations of Rojack by Roberts, and of Raskolnikov by Porfiry are certainly clear parallels between the two novels, as both Porfiry and Roberts show themselves to be masters of their art, while each of the suspects also shows off his intellectual mettle at its best. In the case of Dostoevsky’s novel, the real nature and motivation of the pawnbroker’s murder begins to emerge in Porfiry’s relentless and psychologically sophisticated questioning of Raskolnikov. It is here that the two discuss an article Raskolnikov has written in which he develops the idea that there are extraordinary people, such as Napoleon, for whom the usual constraints on the behavior ordinary people do not apply, and who then can commit great crimes without experiencing any guilt for their actions.

In ''Crime'', Raskolnikov is testing in practice the idea of his article in the murder of the pawnbroker; he is testing himself to see whether he can step across the line that divides ordinary from extraordinary people. In the case of Rojack, he has been contemplating killing Deborah for much of the eight years they have been married, so volatile, visceral, and vindictive are their relations. Rojack confesses that, “living with her I was murderous; attempting to separate, suicide came into me.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=9}} The actual murder, however, occurs much more spontaneously than with Raskolnikov. The immediate provocation takes place when Deborah tells Rojack that she will no longer perform with him a certain unspecified sex act he has taught her, but that she will perform it with each of her three lovers, of whom Rojack learns for the first time. Rojack, like Raskolnikov, has produced a philosophical tract in the form of his lecture “On the Primitive View of Mystery.” Except perhaps for the apocalyptic notion Rojack expresses about “our private sense of some enormous if not quite definable disaster which awaits us,”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=159}} it would be hard to find a direct connection with the murder of Deborah, much less a justification or rationale for it.

In both ''Crime'' and ''Dream'', virtually all the names of the central characters tell us something about them as personalities. Dostoevsky employs this device, which had of course established itself in the fiction of Europe well before him in the eighteenth century, extensively and with great purpose. If we drop the -ov from Raskolnikov’s surname, we have the Russian word for schismatic. The schism in the Russian Orthodox Church was a cataclysmic event in the second half of the seventeenth century that drove a permanent wedge between the so-called Old Believers and the reformers in the Church and had immense repercussions for the whole of society. (Rogozhin in ''The Devils'' is an Old Believer.) Raskolnikov is not a schismatic in the doctrinal sense; he is rather torn between the two halves of himself. On one side, he is a generous person who supports others, such as the Marmeladov family, by giving them money, even though he is living in virtual poverty himself. The other side of Raskolnikov is, as we know, that of a murderer. His friend Razumikhin's name comes from the Russian word for reason, ''razum'', and so it is appropriate that his role is to talk sense and reason into Raskolnikov. The full first name of Sonya Marmeladov, Sophia, is emblematic of her wisdom, which it means in Greek. She is the one who talks Raskolnikov into confessing and follows him to Siberia after his trial. The surname, Marmeladov, means exactly what it looks like in English and comports perfectly with the

Arguably the most enigmatic and terrible character in ''Crime'' is Svidrigailov. (I believe, with some others, that he may be the most perfectly drawn of all of Dostoevsky’s “great sinners.”) Unlike the other main characters, his name has no clear meaning, although it may suggest something like slipperiness. I find this also to be apposite for a man whose character eludes straightforward definition, a man who perceives no difference between good and evil, between deeds of extravagant philanthropy and acts of raw brutality, including murder. Dostoevsky also employs names of secondary characters with obvious comic connotations, such as that of Lebeziatnikov, whose name suggests a fawner, and Lippewechsel, whose German last name means

Mailer’s use of suggestive names most resembles the comic and satiric techniques of Dostoevsky, except that almost all of Mailer’s characters’ names have glaring sexual connotations, referring as they usually do either to a sex organ or the sex act itself. Rojack’s name is related to the nickname, “Raw Jock,” Mailer had when he played club football at Harvard. It seems too obvious to note that the area of the crotch is the fountain, so to speak, from which flows so much of what Rojack does in the novel. Equally obvious is the name of Ruta (as in the New York and New England pronunciation of rooter), and what can one say about Cherry’s name that has not already been said? Perhaps only the name of Shago, Cherry’s sometime lover, is somewhat less familiar, but it too fits in perfectly with the rest of these names, since it comes from the British and Australian English slang word to shag, which means to screw—in the sense of fornicate, of course.

Another name, this one not related to anything sexual, and certainly one of Mailer’s most extravagant, is that of Rojack’s wife, “Deborah Caughlin Mangaravidi Kelly, of the Caughlins first, English-Irish bankers, financiers and preists; the Mangaravidis a Sicilian issue from the Bourbons and Hapsburgs. Kelly’s family was just Kelly; but he had made a million two hundred times.”{{Sfn|Mailer|1965|p=1}} This incongruously hilarious string of surnames serves as a wonderful spoof on the pretensions and pomposity of Deborah and her family. Mailer loves to invest his characters with names that put us in mind, not only of certain ethnic groups, but also of social classes within them, as we see with Steven Richards Rojack, who is of both British and Polish origin, and as we will see later with Harry Hubbard in ''Harlot’s Ghost''.

At the end of ''Crime'' there is of course punishment, as Raskolnikov is, in the best Russian tradition, sent off to Siberia. At the end of ''Dream'', as Donald Kaufman puts it, we are left with “a crime without any ultimate reward or punishment.”{{Sfn|Kaufmann|2007|p=200}} Nevertheless, in both ''Crime'' and ''Dream'', the central characters are transformed at the end of the novel by their relationship with a woman, Sonya and Cherry respectively, and the future of both of them is open to speculation on the part of the reader. At the very end of the epilogue to ''Crime'', Raskolnikov has an epiphany in which he throws himself at Sonya’s knees, and this is the moment when his “regeneration” begins. In the case of Raskolnikov then, it is easy to conclude that he will forever be with Sonya, who acts throughout as a force for his salvation, as “the eternal feminine.” This outcome forces Bakhtin, who elsewhere argues forcefully for the polyphonic nature of ''Crime'', to characterize the end of the novel as “conventionally monological.”{{Sfn|Bakhtin|1973|p=34}}

The conclusion of ''Dream'', even though it also is found in a kind of epilogue, presents an entirely different situation, as Cherry has been murdered, and Rojack, after visiting Las Vegas in an act of homage to her and having a talk with her spirit in the desert, is alone on his way to Guatemala and the Yucatan. It seems clear that this ending leaves the hero in unresolved limbo. In this regard then, Mailer would seem to have created a more open-ended conclusion, such as that favored by Bakhtin, than Dostoevsky. Having said that, I hasten to add that there is a fundamental difference in the way Mailer builds his novels from the technique of Dostoevsky. For if Dostoevsky is the master orchestrator of polyphony, then Mailer is the master conductor of the antiphonic novel in which the voices of different characters act as a Greek chorus by repeating the same basic themes from different stances. Furthermore, the independence from a controlling authorial voice Bakhtin perceives in Dostoevsky’s characters is less evident in Mailer, whose characters often

In ''Dream'', Kelly is astounded that Rojack may believe that God is losing the war with the Devil and asks him, “I was taken by your declaration—did you really make it on television?—that God’s engaged in a war with the Devil, and God may lose.” Rojack replies that he is “not up to a discussion,” thinking to himself that “tonight I had a terror of offending God or the Devil.”{{Sfn|Mailer|1965|p=236}} Cherry has already chimed in with her own understanding of evil and how God is faring in his struggle with the Devil when she says, “there’s no decent explanation for evil. I believe God is just doing His best to learn from what happens to some of us. Sometimes I think He knows less than the Devil because we’re not good enough to reach Him. So the Devil gets most of the best messages we think we’re sending up.”{{Sfn|Mailer|1965|p=197}}

''Dream'' is told from the first person point of view of Rojack, whose voice and persona consequently pervade the novel. In the early drafts of ''Crime'', Dostoevsky originally began to write the novel from the first person point of view of Raskol’nikov, but he subsequently changed to the third-person omniscient point of view. Wolfe, who would usurp the role of author and effectively re-master the text believes that the first person stance of Rojack is a weakness of ''Dream''.{{sfn|Wolfe|1971|p=159}} I would argue that if ''Dream'' is not without its faults, Mailer achieves what he sets out to do in the novel by placing Rojack front and center. In any event, he wisely avoids imitating Dostoevsky’s narrative technique in ''Crime'', for to do so would likely have meant setting out on the path to an ersatz version of Dostoevsky’s novel rather than creating an independent work that sets up a dialogue with it. Furthermore, Mailer’s style in ''Dream'' is substantially different from Dostoevsky’s in ''Crime''. Dostoevsky’s style may be prolix at times, but in general his use of language is more restrained than that of Mailer, who uses an all out fusillade of images, including metaphors, some extended, and similes—virtually all types of images to create a kaleidoscope of imagery that suggests the manic but also controlled mind of Rojack.

Even if he is dealing with some of the same themes as Dostoevsky, Mailer is not bound by either Dostoevsky’s approach to them or to any possible resolution of them. On certain questions, as for example the question of guilt on the part of both murderers, Mailer follows a roughly similar approach to that of Dostoevsky. Both Raskolnikov and Rojack are tormented by guilt, which the former tries to assuage by constantly asserting that Alena the pawnbroker is “a louse,” while Rojack justifies himself with rehearsals of Deborah’s various perfidies and betrayals of him. In a real sense, then, they are both blaming the victims of their crimes.

On one of the central questions of both novels, Mailer formulates and develops his own approach to the problem of good and evil by depicting not so much the relationship between God and man as the struggle between God and the Devil. It would be tempting to say that he does this partly as a way of declaring his independence of Dostoevsky, except that I see no evidence for that. Even as Mailer openly borrows and plays on different themes and motifs from ''Crime'', and thereby invites comparisons with Dostoevsky, he remains free from Dostoevsky’s precedents to pursue his own ends. Nor in ''Dream'' does Mailer, wisely, attempt to treat all of the questions Dostoevsky deals with in ''Crime''. For example, although he acts at times as though he is invincible and he is extremely sure of his intellect, Rojack does not overtly attempt to see whether he can step across into the realm of the extraordinary men, as does Raskolnikov.

===Citations===

* {{cite book |last=Dostoevsky |first=Fedor |date=1991 |title=Crime and Punishment |translator-last=McDuff |translator-first=David |location=London |publisher=Penguin Books |ref=harv}}  

* {{cite book |last=Dostoevsky |first=Fedor |author-mask=1 |date=1972 |chapter=The Double |title=Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes from the Underground. The Double |translator-last=Coulson |translator-first=Jessie|location=London |publisher=Penguin Books |ref=harv}}

* {{cite book |last=Dostoevsky |first=Fedor |author-mask=1 |chapter=The Dream of a Ridiculous Man |date=1961 |title=Dostoevsky. Notes from Underground. White Nights. The Dream of a Ridiculous Man and Selections from The House of the Dead |url= |location=New York |publisher=The New American Library; Signet Classics |pages=204–226 |translator-last=MacAndrew |translator-first=Andrew R. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Kaufmann |first=Donald L. |title=An American Dream:The Singular Nightmare |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |date=2007 |pages=194-205 |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07kauf |access-date=2021-06-21 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Tolstoy |first=Leo |author-mask=1 |date=1993a |chapter=The Death of Ivan Ilytch |title=The Portable Nineteenth-Century Russian Reader |location=New York |publisher=Penguin Books |editor-last=Gibian |editor-first=George |translator-last=Maude |translator-first=Aylmer |pages=440-489 |ref=harv }}