The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Norman Mailer in the Light of Russian Literature

From Project Mailer
« The Mailer ReviewVolume 9 Number 1 • 2015 • Maestro »
Written by
Victor Peppard
Abstract: Norman Mailer, if not a Russian writer, is an author in the light of Russian literature. Mailer’s literary dialogue is most highly developed with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but he also has noteworthy connections with some twentieth-century writers, including Mikhail Bulgakov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. On the broadest level, Mailer shares a passion with his Russian predecessors for engaged fiction that is morally, philosophically purposeful, and which tackles the large, eternal questions of life, often in striking, disarming, or blasphemous ways. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Mailer each has his own distinctive concerns and techniques, yet all three of them examine questions such as the nature of good and evil, the nature of God and the Devil, and how we should live this life.
URL: https://prmlr.us/mr03pep

We are now well accustomed to reading and hearing about Norman Mailer in connection with a number of different literary and cultural traditions, including especially the American and the Jewish. What I propose to do here is to examine Norman Mailer, if not quite as a Russian writer, then as a writer in the light of Russian literature. I am, of course, not the first person to note the relationship between Mailer and Russian literature, but I believe there is much more to say on the subject. Although Mailer’s literary dialogue is most highly developed with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, he also has noteworthy connections with some twentieth century writers, including Mikhail Bulgakov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Mailer’s work displays a number of features that ally his work with that of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, some of which are readily apparent, as in An American Dream, and others of which are less readily perceptible but nevertheless significant, as in Harlot’s Ghost. On the broadest level, Mailer shares a passion with his Russian predecessors for engaged fiction that is morally, philosophically purposeful, and which tackles the large, eternal questions of life, often in striking, disarming, or blasphemous ways. Keeping in mind that Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Mailer each has his own distinctive concerns and techniques, all three of them treat questions such as the nature of good and evil, the nature of God and the Devil, and how we should live this life. Another important trait linking Mailer with the Russian writers Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that each of them is concerned with history, which is often the basis for their narrative and thematic structures. At the same time, each of them is also intensely concerned with their own epochs. As with the Russians, Mailer is relentless in pursuit of his goals, and, like them, he seems always to be on the attack, while taking no prisoners.

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”(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”(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. [a] 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.” [b]

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"(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.


CRIMES AND DREAMS

An American Dream contains a subtext of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment that is so apparent it should be called a supertext. As the jocular and somewhat condescending title of Tom Wolf's article on An American Dream, "Son of Crime and Punishment," suggests, connections between Mailer's novel and Dostoevsky's novel are, for the most part, right out in the open (151-61). My argument here is that in addition to announcing his seriousness of purpose and his ambitions for the novel, Mailer's implementation of a Dostoevskian supertext in Dream works as a productive stratagem, for it induces us to examine the questions Mailer raises in Dream in a double light, one that reflects back on Crime. At the same time, I argue that Dream, if not the equal of Crime, is more than just a poor offspring. It should also be pointed out that in one respect Dream really connects with all of the "big four" of Dostoevsky's novels, for at the heart of the plot of Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), The Devils (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), there lies murder, just as murder is at the base of Mailer's novel.

If we begin by looking at the overall structure of the two novels, we see a definite parallel in the early part of Dream with Crime. Book 1 of Crime comes to a cathartic climax with Raskolnikov’s killing of the old pawnbroker, Alena, and her sister, Lizaveta. From a compositional point of view, therefore, Dostoevsky sets himself the daunting task of rebuilding the tension inherent in the plot in the aftermath of the novel’s most dramatic and pivotal act. At the end of Chapter 1 of Dream, Mailer gives himself virtually the same assignment when Rojack murders his wife, Deborah. The manner in which the two authors deal with this challenge is, however, not the same.

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” (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" (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 saccharine character of Sonya’s father, a drunk who shares his woes with others in public taverns.


Notes

  1. See Bakhtin, especially pp.3–62, for his exposition of the polyphonic novel in Dostoevsky.
  2. See Mochulsky ~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.”

Citations

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