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The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998–2008: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998–2008 (view source)
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ambitious works such as ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983) receive a competent overview, but the study offers no real surprises. Each generation, at any rate, must write its own biography of a phenomenon such as Mailer, and Dearborn’s is the most complete portrait from this period, 1998–2008. Since Robert Lucid’s death, J. Michael Lennon has taken over the job of writing an authorized biography. | ambitious works such as ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983) receive a competent overview, but the study offers no real surprises. Each generation, at any rate, must write its own biography of a phenomenon such as Mailer, and Dearborn’s is the most complete portrait from this period, 1998–2008. Since Robert Lucid’s death, J. Michael Lennon has taken over the job of writing an authorized biography. | ||
... | Second book-length study: Barry H. Leeds, author of ''The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer'' (1969), has collected essays written about Mailer into a strongly affirmative reading of Mailer’s career, and ''The Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer'' is an extremely personal overview that brings together in one book the major concerns of Mailer readers. The book, we might say, is a series of conversations: Leeds has chapters on Mailer’s dialogue with Marilyn, Mailer’s political debates with American culture, and on Mailer’s long-term relationship with the boxing metaphor. There is also a chapter on the relationship between ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' and ''An American Dream'', one on ''Tough Guys'' in relation to Hollywood, and a reading of | ||
''Harlot’s Ghost''. Leeds leads a discussion of Mailer criticism, and finally he offers a personal testimony about his relationship with Mailer over four decades. Leeds insightfully discusses sexuality as an aspect of celebrity in his ''Marilyn'' chapter, and his focus on the notion of the psychic outlaw is, as we shall see, an enduring theme of Mailer criticism of the last decade: “Boxing has provided a significant moral paradigm throughout most of Mailer’s life and work” (57). Although this chapter really is exclusively about boxing, it announces another of our major themes in so far as Mailer, more than any other post-war American writer, personifies the agonistic conception of the writer theorized by Harold Bloom’s ''The Anxiety of Influence'' and related works. Leed’s fourth chapter,“The Mystery Novels: ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance: An American Dream'' Revisited” does something almost no one else does–it makes comparisons between Mailer at the height of his reputation and Mailer in the last few decades, when many critics have decided that he is past his sell-by date. I am perhaps alone in the view that Mailer, in the decades since ''The Executioner’s Song'', is at the height of his powers, an idea I had hoped to demonstrate by collecting essays on this period of Mailer’s work in the Fall 2006 issue of ''Journal of Modern Literature''. Leeds’ final chapters, “Mailer and Me” and “Into the Millennium” gather together various observations on the Picasso book, Oswald’s tale, and ''The Gospel Acccording to the Son'', noting the obvious point that it takes chutzpah (171) to rewrite the Gospel as a first-person narrative, but going on to say as well that the book has parallels to Mailer’s meticulous research into other cultures (''The Fight'') and historic civilizations (''Ancient Evenings''). Critics and reviewers have utterly failed to adequately appreciate Mailer’s historical research, preferring instead the fantasy that Mailer produced endless books that no editor could improve and which were entirely innocent of knowledge of the actual world. This is a slander that Mailer criticism should set itself the task of correcting. | |||
The third and fourth book-length studies were not published in the United States. Hongli Gu’s ''A New Historicist and Cultural Materialistic Study of Norman Mailer’s'' Work was published in China by Xiamen University Press. This book has many errors but it also has much to offer. Gu argues, along with New Historicists and Cultural Studies theorists of various stripes, that there is “a dialogical relationship between history and literature” (36). In assuming that Mailer is “the spokesman for American culture for about four decades” (38), Gu’s willingness to articulate connections between predominant trends between literary criticism and theory and Mailer’s own themes are worthy of more attention. | |||
Markku Lehtimäki’s ''The Poetics of Norman Mailer’s Nonfiction: Self-Reflexivity, Literary Form, and The Rhetoric of Narrative'' is, like Gu’s study, a version of the author’s doctoral dissertation. Neither author agrees with the critical consensus holding that Mailer was finished sometime around 1970. The study traces connections between self-reflexivity and literary form in Mailer’s work, comparing Mailer’s narratological innovations with the highly-developed conceptual schemes of contemporary theory. | |||
The title presents this study as a discussion of Mailer’s nonfiction, but Lehtimäki makes connections among all of Mailer’s works, and the delimitations of the title do an injustice to the thoroughness of the project. Whether or not the author meant it in this way, it would seem that the book has a strategy for recouping a center: the overstated claim. In arguing that “Norman Mailer’s work represents a third mode between the conventional categories of fiction and nonfiction,” Lehtimäki argues that “we need a systematic theory (poetics) for tracing the uncharted territory in the first place” (1). The problem here is that Lehtimäki, in a kind of scholarly tour de force, expends a hundred pages reviewing claims about this “uncharted territory” (a phrase he borrows from Eric Heyne). The overstated claim is not a criminal offense, but it leaves one thinking that the author’s desire for completion in his representation of narratological discourse has displaced a more developed thesis about Mailer. The claim that Mailer’s fiction is a third way | |||
is strong enough, but it is not really exceptional. The claim that his “own thesis is the first book-length study specially devoted to the poetics and problems of Mailer’s nonfiction” is taken without quibble or qualification, but the follow-up claim that “the strict distinction between fictional and factual narratives does not characterize the complexity and self-reflexivity of Mailer’s use of the literary form” (23) leaves one asking, Who ever thought it did? Barbara Lounsberry is faulted for “rather rigidly” separating works composed of “documentable subject matter chosen from the real world” from those that are “the writer’s inventions” (5), and Lehtimäki attempts to bring the languages of narratology and literary nonfiction to higher levels of precision, but it would enhance the focus and thus the ultimate force of the argument | |||
to allow more for the useful generalization. | |||
Those who are interested in Mailer’s life, work, and cultural milieu will also be interested in J. Michael and Donna Pedro Lennon’s ''Norman Mailer: Works and Days'', a thorough bio-bibliographical study that documents all Mailer publications, reviews, and major critical statements. The witty annotations make this volume an enjoyable read, and ''Works and Days'' also includes many unpublished photos and useful apparatuses such as the “ratings of Reviews” of Mailer’s twenty-seven key books. Lennon has assigned a numerical value to all reviews of the main Mailer books and has charted them from most to least successful. Where does ''Oswald’s Tale'' show up on this list? Just slightly above the center mark. Where is ''Of a Fire on the Moon'' within Mailer’s ''oeuvre''? It is the seventh book from the top, following ''The Executioner’s Song'' (1979). In a factoid world where many believe “there are no facts, only interpretations,” it is important to preserve the value of facts: ''Works and Days'' is the sort of tool that helps us keep a complex record straight.<sup>5</sup> | |||
===Notes=== | ===Notes=== | ||