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.

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 someone who flaps their lips.

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" (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” (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” (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 seem to be testing out the author’s own ideas in various contexts.

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” (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” (197).

As we see here, each character has his or her understanding of this war between good and evil and between God and the Devil, each expresses it in his or her own idiom, and each adds his or her ancillary addenda, but the basic thesis remains that God is losing. This pattern, of course, continues throughout Mailer’s works, since the war between God and the Devil is arguably the central concern of his fiction in the overall. Near the end of Gospel, Yeshua expresses the same fear of Rojack and Cherry in that his father may be losing ground to the Devil. Castle engages with this question as well but takes it in a new direction.

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 (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.

Looking at things from the other way, we can see that in Crime there is no “Russian Dream”; in fact, despite the hideousness of Raskolnikov’s crime, the novel does not describe a nightmare either. Although Crime contains extensive descriptions of abject poverty and drunkenness (the novel's original title was to be The Drunkards), it is neither an indictment nor an endorsement of the state of Russian society, and the Russian polity is not even on the agenda. In this respect, Mailer’s Dream is much edgier in its social and political concerns and implications. What Dostoevsky does share with Mailer though is a strong antipathy to the business class. In Crime, the successful business man Luzhin is abhorrent in his attempt to marry Raskolnikov’s sister Dunya so that he can fully exploit her vulnerability as someone who is much poorer than he and thus beholden to him. In Dream, Kelly is even more of a lecher than Luzhin, and his corrupt values and business practices cast him as a representative of what is wrong with the business class in America on the whole. (A fuller portrait of a character in Dostoevsky in the mold of Luzhin and Kelly is found in Rogozhin of The Idiot.)

Nor is Dream the “American Crime,” for only Dostoevsky can replicate himself, as he does so assiduously in his novels after Crime. I certainly do not imagine that I have had the last word on the many connections, disconnects, correspondences, and differences between Dream and Crime. For now, though, I have said my peace and would like to move on in this examination of Mailer’s dialogue with Russian literature to what I believe is a striking and unexpected link between Oswald’s Tale and Crime and Punishment


OSWALD AND RASKOLNIKOV: DID FATE MAKE THEM DO IT?

"Real life is only too eager to resemble a well-devised story." Isaak Babel, "My First Fee" (226).


Although Mailer was a master at mixing history with fiction and fiction with history, he also wrote a number of important works, such as Oswald’s Tale, which, aside from certain displays of artistic intuition and imagination, do not contain any fictional elements at all. Nevertheless, there is one moment in Oswald’s Tale when the story of Oswald as narrated by Mailer bears a striking, I would say even astounding resemblance, to a passage in Dostoevsky’s Crime. It should be noted here briefly that Dostoevsky, who was an avid follower of the contemporary scene in the newspapers, himself wrote a novel, The Devils, also translated as The Possessed, but literally The Demons from the Russian title, Besy, which is based on a real event, the so-called Nechaev Affair. A certain Nechaev murdered a man in order to create a bond of solidarity among a group of people he was recruiting to his own anarchorevolutionary project. (I deal with this again in connection with Harlot’s Ghost.) Crime, however, for all of its sociological realism in its description of St. Petersburg, is based on fictional events.

In Oswald’s Tale, Mailer develops the idea that Oswald thought that fate had put him at work in a place where President John Kennedy’s motorcade would pass by and he could not resist believing that he must take advantage of this coincidence. To substantiate this notion, Mailer quotes Priscilla Johnson McMillan in her book Marina and Lee: “the uncanny selection of a route that would carry the President right under his window could mean only one thing. Fate had singled him out to do the dangerous but necessary task which has been his destiny all along and which would cause him to go down in history” (781).

We know from her testimony to the Warren Commission that Oswald’s mother was obsessed with her place and the place of her son in history. In the epigraph to Oswald’s Tale, when Representative Boggs asks her to brief, she says that she cannot be brief, because, “This is my life and my son’s life going down in history." What is more, in later years she understood her son’s actions only in this light. My reading of Marguerite Oswald is that ultimately she is justifying her son’s murder of President Kennedy because it guaranteed his place in history, and thereby her own. Furthermore, she seems to have passed this obsession with one’s place in history to her son, together with a puerile rebellion against authority.

In Book 1 of Crime, during the time when Raskolnikov is alternating between his determination to kill Alena, the pawnbroker, who is a repulsive, greasy-haired usurer, and his doubts and compunctions about committing such a bloody, brutal act, as he happens to overhear two conversations involving her. In the first conversation, he overhears two people inviting Lizaveta, Alena’s step sister to visit them at seven o’clock in the evening the next day. The second is a conversation in a tavern in which a student tells an officer how rich the pawnbroker is and what a hideous and despicable person she is. The student suggests that it would be a good idea if one were to “kill her and take her money, in order with its help to devote oneself to the service of all mankind and the common cause" (80). To the officer’s objection that there is nature to deal with, the student replies that without correcting and directing nature “there would never have been a single great man" (81, emphasis added). Raskolnikov is greatly agitated by the coincidence of overhearing this conversation in which exactly the thoughts he had been having about the pawnbroker were expressed by the student, and it had “an extremely strong influence on him during the subsequent development of the affair: as though here some form of predestination, of augury had been at work ....” (81).

This is not the only uncanny link between Oswald’s Tale and Dostoevsky’s Crime, for in both works there is a second, follow-on murder committed by Raskolnikov and Oswald, and here again the motivation for both of them is nearly identical. In each case, the second murder signals the failure of the initial, ideologically motivated and carefully planned murder. Just as Raskol’nikov kills Alena, the pawnbroker’s unfortunate sister Lizaveta goes into panic when the latter surprises him just after he has murdered her sister, comparable to Oswald being surprised by the equally unlucky Officer T. J. Tippit, whom Oswald kills in his own panic. The great Russian short story writer, Isaak Babel, wrote once that “a well-devised story needn’t try to be like real life. Real life is only too eager to resemble a well-devised story” (First Fee 226), and so did it turn out in the case of Oswald, President Kennedy, and Officer Tippit.

With respect to Raskolnikov, we can only deduce that his panic-stricken action gives the lie to his well-rehearsed murder, which as in the case of Oswald as well, has at its base a false noble goal of improving the lot of mankind. Mailer, who is writing a work of documentary history while simultaneously exploiting the privileges of the author as super sleuth, spells this out explicitly in the case of Oswald:

As soon as he killed Tippit, the mighty architecture of his [Oswald’s] ideology ... came tumbling down. He knew Americans well enough to recognize that some might listen to his ideas if he killed a President, but nearly all would be repelled by any gunman who would mow down a cop, a family man—that act was small enough to void interest in every large idea he wished to introduce. (783)

I would only comment here that we might well conclude from Oswald’s murder of Officer Tippit that he was probably still in the frame of mind that he could somehow elude capture—after all, so many of his semi-legal and illegal escapades, such as his near killing of General Walker had gone undetected and unpunished for so long. The pseudo-ideological Oswald emerges again only when he has been arrested and interrogated.

One more thing ought to be noted: for all of the differences in character between Oswald and the fictional Raskolnikov, they were both megalomaniacs. Oswald, the no-account nonentity, an odd combination of braggart and loner, and Raskolnikov, the poverty-stricken university dropout, imagined themselves to be individuals much greater than they were. And each of them used murder in an unsuccessful attempt to “step across” into the realm of the great, the extraordinary.


SPOOKS, DEMONS, FATHERS, AND SONS

Harlot's Ghost is, after Oswald's Tale, arguably the most thoroughly "Russian" work, fictional or documentary, that Mailer has written-provided we stipulate it is Russian in a thoroughly Soviet guise. Except for a cameo appearance of the Russian poet Evgeny Evtushenko, a character with the nickname of Gogol (Hyman Bosqueverde), and a suggestion by the narrator, Harry Hubbard, that he might become the first to create “American samizdat” (35), the novel does not have an open, direct relationship to Russian literature, as do An American Dream and The Castle in the Forest. Rather, Russian literature reveals in Ghost more on character types and their development.

The most obvious way in which Ghost puts us in mind of the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is by its sheer massivnost’, that is massiveness, consisting as it does of 1,310 pages, including bibliography and notes, in the 1991 Random House cloth edition. In this regard, Mailer probably outdoes all Russian writers among whom his few rivals in this regard include Tolstoy in War and Peace and the eighteenth-century Russian author, Mikhail Chulkov, who wrote a satirical novel called Peresmeshnik (The Mockathon) that is so long that it is difficult to find anyone, even among specialists, who have read it through to the end. And we must not forget Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (author of the multi-volume Red Wheel series), with whom Mailer shares a consuming interest in history.

Harlot’s Ghost consists of a number of different genres that include the following: an historical novel, a novel of psychological realism, a Bildungsroman, a confession, a spy novel, a mystery novel, an epistolary novel, a family chronicle, a gothic tale with a nod in the direction of magic realism, a love story, and a brief but powerful lyrical sketch. In addition, moral, philosophical, political, and religious elements found in the novel may at any given moment verge into tracts on these subjects. The major novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are characterized by just this sort of grab bag of genres. If Tolstoy tends to favor the psychologically realistic historical novel and the family chronicle with a large dose of morality and philosophy, Dostoevsky employs psychological realism with dashes of the fantastic or gothic and the mysterious just to keep his readers guessing about what is “really” taking place; and his novels are also filled with, if not fraught with, moral and philosophical questions.

With respect to the overall narrative structure of Ghost, we may also perceive some similarities with Tolstoy’s technique of switching back and forth between different groups of characters over the course of his novels, including not only War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but also in a much shorter one, Hadji Murat, 1905, about an eponymous Chechen prince. In Ghost, Mailer has added some antiquarian spice to his more modern amalgam of fiction and document with his implementation of an epistolary technique in the many letters Harry Hubbard and Kittredge exchange with one another.

Norman Mailer’s fondness for first-person narrators is apparent in works such as An American Dream, Harlot’s Ghost, and The Castle in the Forest, where the narrators are full-bodied characters in their own right. It is, of course, irresistible not to seek links between Mailer’s views and those of his narrators. Mailer, after all, throughout his career deliberately thrust himself onto the public stage and was more than outspoken issues and events. I would urge circumspection, however, with respect to Harry Hubbard as a reliable source for Mailer’s opinions about the true state of the United States. There is certainly some of Mailer in Hubbard, but how much is difficult to say. Hubbard, who is primarily of Yankee stock, remarks that from his mother’s side he is one-eighth Jewish, “just enough never to know what to do about it” (76). In this respect, he resembles Steven Richard Rojack in An American Dream, who is some unspecified combination of Polish, English, and Irish. Mailer’s use of narrators, such as Rojack and Hubbard, with different ethnic strains in their background, is a clever way of simultaneously suggesting possible connections between himself and his narrators and also creating distance from them. It is also an effective means of underscoring their complex and often unresolved identities. If we need another biographical basis for Mailer’s gift for mimicry and mimesis in his creation of fictive narrators, we might cite his own multiple identities as a Brooklynite, a New Englander, and a New Yorker. Readers of Ghost might well swear he was also a Mainer.

Aside from his relationship to the author, there are important questions about Harry Hubbard’s reliability as a narrator that should be addressed. On both the visual and phonetic levels, the ever so Yankee name, Herrick Hubbard, looks and sounds suspiciously close to the name of Humbert Humbert, the firstperson narrator of Lolita, a novel by that most Russian and most American writer, Vladimir Nabokov (stress on the second syllables). Not only are Herrick/Harry Hubbard’s initials obviously identical to those of Humbert Humbert, but the surname Hubbard shares with the name Humbert four phonemes in the same order (h, u, b, r) and one allophone (d/t). Furthermore, m and b are both labial consonants, and unstressed a and unstressed e are identical schwa vowel sounds when spoken aloud. (Surnames ending in -ard or -ert are characteristically of Norman French origin.)

My claim here is that Mailer’s choice of name alerts us to the possibility that his own HH, if not as slippery and pathologically unreliable as Nabokov’s HH in Lolita, is nevertheless not to be completely trusted.

Early in Ghost, Harry Hubbard introduces us to his talent for dissembling and duplicity. This pattern is evident in his starting out to write a magnum opus he calls The Imagination of the State about the KGB and then switches to a memoir of his life in the CIA. Subsequently, in an act of cunning that is rich in multiple ironies, Hubbard uses his first project as cover for the second and real one, which was just as illegal in the US as would have been a memoir on the KGB written by a Soviet spy in the USSR.

In the fractured time scheme of Ghost, a frequent feature of much twentieth-century literature, Hubbard tells us about his relationships with Harlot and Kittredge at a later age before delving into his career as a spy for the CIA. Here, too, his ability to dissemble is on graphic display in the affair he conducts with his mistress Chloe, while at the same time professing undying love for his wife Kittredge. I should add here that Harry Hubbard is the first to acknowledge his doubts and weaknesses and that he is not without guilt, as shown when he speaks of his need to “cleanse my soul of Chloe" (39) before seeing Kittredge.

It seems reasonable to assert that a novel which begins with the word Omega will sooner or later introduce Alpha, and so it is with Ghost. The duality inherent in this pairing is pervasive in Ghost on a number of levels and is especially striking in Mailer’s portrayal of individual characters and, indeed, of human nature in general. The portrait of human duality found in Ghost is remarkably broad, inclusive, and virtually comprehensive as it ranges from the basic Alpha-Omega construct to transsexuality, touching on all manner of possibilities in between. Moreover, virtually all of the characters, from the central to the peripheral, in this doubly spooky book are shown as double, sometimes multiple personalities. Before moving to a more specific treatment of the double characters in Ghost, I believe that it is important here briefly to note the seminal role Russian fiction has played in the development of this character type in modern fiction.






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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