The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Reflections of Time Past: Pattern, Time, and Memory in Norman Mailer: Difference between revisions

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 In the humanities, music, literature, and art are quite obviously patterning devices. These different art forms take a few basic elements and arrange them—often as transformations in time—in a profusion of ways, all in order to express human meaning. The basic elements are often simple: in Western music a mere eleven notes from A to G# are arranged as a progression in time; in English Literature just twenty six letters and a few other symbols are required, arranged in linear time progression (a text decoded on a page from left to right, a story placed in time) or maybe in non-linear form (hypertext). In the visual arts, a few primary colors and a set of basic shapes (point, line, square, circle, etc.) and sufficient to generate the diverse beauty of Western art.{{efn|Patterning in time is obviously integral to both music and literature but seems less crucial in the visual arts, like painting. But from the perspective of Physics, a particular color is certain light vibrations per second and hence is a transformation (or pattern) in time. As Einstein saw with startling originality in 1905, a stationary light wave has no meaning. In addition, all forms of art and language are cultural transformations in time. The visual arts qualitatively changed when Masaccio (1401–1428) and others developed perspective: music patterns were different after Stravinsky from before.}} The elements, then, may well be simple: the resulting patterns are very complex. What we know as the artifacts of culture and civilization could be regarded as a vast array of meaningful patterns—from the sculpture of Ancient Greece to the late string quartets of Beethoven, from the poetry of Eliot to the colors and shapes of Picasso. Scientific theories and mathematical models can also be seen as patterning devices, an insight, I would argue, that goes back to William Herbert George and his The Scientist in Action.{{sfn|George|1936}}{{efn|Ahead of many others, W. H. George argued the human activity of patterning was at the heart of science and its theories. In the mid 1970s, I became aware of George’s significant role through a Mr. Frost who taught History & Philosophy of Science in the University of London’s Extra-Mural Department. Back in the 1930s, George had written: “To remove the human element is to remove science. When Newton formulated his law of universal gravitation he did not reduce by one the number of absolute truths too be discovered, he created a new pattern into which facts could be fitted. Einstein created still another pattern into which these same facts, together with others, could be fitted.”{{sfn|George|1936|p=19}} }}
+Developing this approach, we could argue that the novel and the story—like any other works of art—also create such patterns: we can regard story as a complex pattern of narrative, grammar, metaphor, metonymy, and other rhetorical devices. We may well be homo faber, but we are also Mankind the Storyteller. Peter Brooks has argued, “We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of past actions, anticipating the out-come of future projects, situating ourselves at the intersections of several stories not yet completed. The narrative impulse is as old as our oldest literature.” {{sfn|Brooks|1996|p=327}} Certainly the modern novel—unlike previous literary genres—does not offer simplistic explanations of the world or unchanging religious dogmas. Today, Grand Narratives are not much in fashion. But the novel does offer, I suggest, an implicit pattern, a bold attempt—indirectly and tacitly—to grasp the complexity of life. Actually, in contemporary religion, not all preachers and theologians would stress fixed dogmas rather than that kind of implicit pattern. Frederick Buechner, both novelist and preacher, has suggested that:
+{{quote|All theology, like all fiction, is at its heart autobiography, and that what a theologian is doing essentially is examining as honestly as he can the rough-and-tumble of his own experience with all its ups and downs, its mysteries and loose ends, and expressing in logical, abstract terms the truths about human life and about God that he believes he has found implicit there. {{sfn|Buechner|1982|}} }}
+What of the work of Norman Mailer? In his novels and in a work like The Armies of the Night,  we can see the relevance of Brooks’ words: “immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of past actions ... situating ourselves at the intersections of several stories not yet completed.” {{sfn|Mailer|1968p=327}} Certainly, Mailer seems more at ease with Buechner’s “mysteries and loose ends” than with “logical, abstract terms”—even, I think, in his final work, On God. In many ways, I would argue that his views on art and narrative are not too far from Whitehead, Brooks, and Buechner. He sees storytelling as an essential human characteristic, one of the ways we create patterns to make sense of the absurd. In The Spooky Art, Mailer says: “We tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of life. Narrative is reassuring. There are days when life is so absurd, it’s crippling—nothing makes sense, but stories bring order to the absurdity. Relief is provided by the narrative’s beginning, middle, and end.” {{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156–157}} So, Mailer’s stories—in whatever genre they are written—try to “make sense of life,” creating some kind of pattern. A little later in The Spooky Art, in his critique of Gore Vidal, Mailer almost echoes Eliot’s words in “East Coker”: “What I would argue, however, is that his particular tradition has become inadequate to our needs. The world is growing so genuinely complex (and perplexed) that it’s limiting to enclose it with aphorisms, no matter how brilliant. One has to qualify them." {{sfn|Elliot|1952|p=170}}
+I must admit that when I first began to read Mailer I found the breadth and complexity of his work difficult. Why couldn’t he stick with one genre, one type of writing? While Hemingway and Fitzgerald are hardly simplistic writers, even as a British native I felt somehow that I could find my way around their work. With Mailer, I was in a different realm, more surrealistic, absurd, and violent: this was no Norman Rockwell America. In part, this may be because his world is stranger and more disturbing than Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s—whether we call it a shift from Modernism to Postmodernism or whether we describe it in some other way. The pattern indeed has become “more complicated.” But in the breadth and ambition of his work, has anyone else captured the crazy, chaotic pattern of post-war and post-modern American society quite so perceptively as Norman Mailer? I think not. Making art, forming patterns, or creating spells—that was Mailer’s mission, whatever his critics said. As he himself put it:
+{{quote|The artist seeks to create a spell ... a spell equivalent to the spell a primitive felt when he passed a great oak and knew something deeper than his normal comprehension was reaching him. Per- haps the primitive felt close to what we feel when we see a great painting on a museum wall. {{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=148-149}} }}
+There is also another kind of pattern here. According to the OED, the word text is related to the word textile—that which is woven, a fabric—another kind of pattern, if you like. In her Carnegie Hall tribute entitled “Tapestry,” his daughter Susan Mailer said this: “Most people think of Dad as a great writer. I like to think of him as a master weaver." {{sfn|Mailer|2008|p=29}} As story-teller, Mailer can be seen as both a magician casting a spell and also a master weaver of complex but meaningful patterns. Eliot’s Four Quartets date from the period 1935–1942. {{efn|“‘Burnt Norton’, published in 1935, was written five years before the other three quartets, which were published within a year of one another: ‘East Coker’ in 1940; ‘The Dry Salvages’ in 1941; and ‘Little Gidding’ in 1942." {{sfn|Spender|1975|p=155}} }} A few years later, Mailer’s first work appeared, The Naked and the Dead. {{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Throughout his long life, Mailer has been weaving this “more complicated” pattern for our “strange” world.
+==="In My Beginning is my End": Mailer's Return===
+Many have commented that in the six-decade evolution from The Naked and The Dead to The Castle in the Forest, from the ordinary heroism of World War Two soldiers to the transcendent evil of Adolf Hitler, Mailer has in a real sense come full circle, he has returned to where he began. In an interview published in 2007, Mailer said that he had been thinking about Hitler “since I was nine years old,” that he “grew up with the idea of Hitler as someone who was going to kill Jews—and he succeeded by half. ” {{sfn|Lee|203-204}} His was the generation called on to face Hitler and fascism. Mailer realized that the battle for freedom—the battle against fascism—had to be fought again and again, fought in every generation. He knew that the greatest dilemma posed by Hitler was not so much the existence of his evil ideas as the fact that millions of ordinary Germans voted for him and supported him. It is not enough to admit the existence of fascism as a theoretical possibility: one has to face its awful attraction for some people—and not only in the 1930s. This would seem to be sufficient reason for Mailer to come full circle, to return in his final novel to the genesis of Hitler and fascism. “In my beginning is my end.”
+Mailer’s abiding interest in boxing and pugilism is well known: in The Mailer Review (2008), along with allusions to boxing in the memorials and tributes, there were major articles on boxing by Barry Leeds and John Rodwan. Leeds says that,
+{{quote|Boxing has provided a significant moral paradigm throughout much of Norman Mailer’s life and work.... Mailer has, indeed, perceived gladiatorial confrontation and violence as a central metaphor for his own artistic and personal struggles for growth, fulfillment, salvation. {{sfn|Leeds|2008|p=385-386}} }}
+Part of the attraction of boxing as such a metaphor is no doubt temperamental—that is simply part of who Norman Mailer the man was. But I wonder: how much does the readiness to use such martial metaphors arise from his experience as a soldier in World War II, an experience encapsulated in The Naked and the Dead?
+In his article, referring to An American Dream, Leeds goes on to say, “Rojack comes to represent what was best in the American character after WWII, what was shamelessly corrupted, and what Mailer suggests may be redeemed . . . ”{{sfn|Leeds|2008|p=393}} In his article, Rodwan suggests, “Fighters are heroic warriors, which is precisely how Mailer imagined writers, or at least himself.” {{sfn|Rodwan|2008|p=400}} In other words, the boxing metaphor could in part be an extrapolation of the warrior’s experience into peace time. Mailer the soldier became Mailer the fighter. We might posit a similar relationship between Hemingway’s Great War experience and his lifelong interest in the art and heroism of bullfighting. So, I suggest that Mailer’s WWII military experiences provide themes and metaphors for his later work as an author—from beginning to end of his published work—throughout his life. “In my end is my beginning.”
+===Pattern, Time, and Memory:Mailer's Significance===
+I have called this paper, “Reflections of Time Past,” alluding to Eliot’s meditation on time in Four Quartets, and reflecting on Norman’s passing. If we are scholars who value his life and work, we might ask what our next step could be. All literary, visual, and musical art—like other human artifacts—is of course rooted in time. Robert Scott describes literature as “making concrete” the tragic truth of life and death symbolized by the concept of entropy: “moments, chances, choices” are—in the end—lost in time. {{sfn|Scott|1991|p=81}} But while it is rooted in time, art is not necessarily bound by time. Art and literature represent a kind of cheating of entropy, a humanistic challenge to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. {{efn|The second law of thermodynamics concerns entropy, a scientific concept that has had some effect on our culture and literature. Entropy is a kind of unavailable energy, a manifestation of the chaos or randomness of a system.“In 1850 Rudolf Clausius ... said that there is energy which is available, and there is also a residue of energy which is not accessible. This inaccessible energy he called entropy, and he formulated the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics: entropy is always increasing. In the universe, heat is draining into a sort of lake of equality in which it is no longer accessible.” {{sfn|Bronowski|p=347}} }} Art and literature promise a form of immortality. The human artists and authors succumb to the Second Law and to death, but their creations live on. Three or four millennia after their various creators have gone, the narratives of Gilgamesh, Homer, and the Old Testament are still being read. {{efn|The oral traditions of The Epic of Gilgamesh may be as early as 2,000 BC, Homer’s Iliad perhaps dates from 1,000–800 BC, and the Old Testament sagas and narratives may date from 1,000 BC, the time of King David, or earlier. The written texts, of course, would be somewhat later.}}
 ===Notes===