The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Mailerian Dynasty: Narrative in a Structural Poetics of Mailer’s Fiction: Difference between revisions

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Structuralist analysis frequently traces a work’s meanings and powers to an underlying structure like the static semiotic infrastructure of binary oppositions in Levi-Strauss’ analysis of Amazonian myths, the dynamic narrative structure of Vladimir Propp’s slavic folk tale or of Will Wright’s classical western.{{sfn|Levi-Strauss’||p=1}} Structural analysis may also lead into a single, deep structure specific to a single author’s vision as in Bordwell’s poetics of the communitarian films of Yasujiro Ozu.{{sfn|Ozu|2018|p=2}} Here my emphasis is on the last, a creator-specific type of simplifying but empowering deep structure.  

In Mailer’s fiction, the underlying poetics, though simplifying, is complex in its basic elements. These basic elements as I see them are five: the physiological, psychic, social, cultural and transcendental. The poetics is also plural in its underlying statics and in the narrative dynamics that these stat ics help constitute. To quickly illustrate statics and dynamics with Western film examples, in the classical Western, static dichotomies like “outsider/ insider,”“wilderness/civilization.” Good/bad” and “weak strong” help organize materials. These statics in turn underlie the constitution of a dynamic narrative structures in which, typically, strong outsiders, just having ridden in from the wilderness, champion a weak and beleaguered community from strong villains ~as when Shane champions sodbusters against their cattle men adversaries!.

Indeed, there is a modesty to Mailer’s poetics when it comes to the realization of human potential and, thus, to the finality of narrative resolution. This is perhaps well expressed by the final sentence of The Deer Park where Mailer writes, “Then for a moment in that cold Irish soul of mine, a glimmer of the joy of the flesh came toward me ... and we laughed together after all, because to have heard that sex was time and time the connection of new circuits was a part of the poor odd dialogues which give hope to us noble humans for more than one night” {{sfn|Mailer||p=375}}. I refer especially to Mailer’s choices of “moment” and “glimmer,” “rare” and “hope.” These fall short of salvation, in so far as I address the matter of narrative resolution. However, much could be said for the honesty of a vision that offers recurrent, hard earned “joy,” and “hope ... for more than one night.”

===Works Cited===

* {{cite book |last=Barthes |first=Roland |date=1974 |title=S/Z|url= |location=New York |publisher=Hill and Wang |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last= Bloom|first=Harold |date=2005 |title=Novelists and Novels |url= |location=New York |publisher=Checkmate Press |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Bordwell |first=David |date=1988 |title=Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema |url= |location=London |publisher=BFI Pub |pages= |ref=harv }}

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