The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998–2008: Difference between revisions
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deeper responsibilities of historical memory. How does Mailer come off | deeper responsibilities of historical memory. How does Mailer come off | ||
compared to others?: | compared to others?: | ||
{{quote|By comparison to both Buckley and Dostoevsky, Mailer indeed seems reckless. What makes Mailer’s intercession so interesting in relationship to Dostoevsky’s is that like Dostoevsky he conceives his redemptive project in the broadest social and ideological terms. He even seems to have borrowed some of the rhetoric relating to the redemption of criminals directly from Dostoevsky, buttressing his sponsorship of [Jack Henry] Abbot—and the downtrodden in general—by framing it in a Dostoevskean progression from crime, imprisonment, and punishment to redemption. (696)}} | |||
Rosenshield attempts to understand the phenomena but not just to play “gotcha.” He knows that several of these famous writer-criminal relationships have had “unfortunate outcomes” (678) and that the writers are aware of the risks, but that the American hunger for redemption makes those risks seem worthwhile to American writers. | |||
Mailer never tried to be average, to tack toward the center, and so the idea that we can better understand the range of possibilities by comparing something, a name, with Norman Mailer and it will often yield good results. We see this in two elegiac pieces, one from the ''Los Angeles Times'' and one from the ''New York Times'' after Mailer’s death. Morris Dickstein’s triptych “Mailer, Paley, Vonnegut: Same Era, Different Voices” pays homage to three distinctly different talents but puts them together not just because they all | |||
died around the same time but rather to make a claim about scale. Sam Tanenhaus’ “Requiem for Two Heavyweights” makes a comparison between Mailer and William F. Buckley, one that seems both more apt (because of the way these two men related to the mass media) and more surprising, considering that they often debated the issues from opposite ends of the spectrum. For Tanenhaus, these two were “more than public intellectuals they were citizen intellectuals, active participants in the great dramas of their time, and eager at times to pursue their ideas in democracy’s more bruising arenas.” | |||
===IV. Mailer As A Political Symptom: Liberalism And Race=== | |||
One book in particular describes Mailer as having a political role that was at once pivotal and eccentric. George Cotkin’s ''Existential America'' works out the evolution of Mailer’s “giddy existentialism” (208) but ambiguously balances between saying that Mailer failed to maintain a position of leadership on the one hand and that he got himself ejected from such a role to maintain his purity: “By the 1960s a new generation had arisen to join in his critique of an existentialist perspective, certainly in terms of choice and commitment. But the student radicals would jettison the idiosyncratic theology of Mailer’s hip saints, and would reject much of his macho posturing” (207). Mailer’s errand, Cotkin writes, “required that he speak to the consciousness of an age without being part of it” (207). | |||
The best academic articles have tended to discuss Mailer as a repository of our psycho-social rebellion. Several of these articles have been collected in a clutch of articles on Norman Mailer in the ''Journal of Modern Literature''. James Ryan, Ashton Howley and Scott Duguid each discuss Mailer as a figure of resistance with some ambivalence: Mailer is at once the resister-inchief who was celebrated as “General Marijuana,” but, increasingly in the last several decades, Mailer has been seen as a symptom of what is wrong with the left rather than medicine for the ailment. In “‘Insatiable as Good Old America’: ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' and Popular Criminality,” Ryan argues for the achievement of Mailer’s often disparaged novel ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', which Ryan considers neglected by the critics because of its formulaic adhesion to the genre of crime fiction and also because, by Mailer’s own admission, it was written hastily because he needed money. Ryan shows how the populist form of the novel is well suited to its themes and allows Mailer | |||
a fresh angle on a favored theme, obscenity. The novel allows for fully fleshed treatment of American self-understanding circa 1980 in which vulgarity and obscenity (especially pornography) had become common cultural currency. Ryan points out that the repetitive structure of this populist form resonates with the structure of pornography, which in turn resonates with the American “diet of reality” (21). With the explosion of “reality culture” that has taken over contemporary popular media, Ryan’s analysis shows Mailer’s attention to America’s crude hunger for illusory “realities” to have been quite | |||
prescient. | |||
In “The Addiction of Masculinity: Norman Mailer’s ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' and the Cultural Politics of Reaganism,” Scott Duguid offers a sympathetic reading of Mailer’s treatment of masculinity in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' with the immediate aim of recovering the novel’s insight and thematic integrity. A larger ambition of this article is to address feminist disapprovals of Mailer’s work. He reads Mailer’s emphases on masculinity as a product of resistance to other ideological systems of power that can potentially compromise an individual’s sense of self. Further, masculinity is portrayed as “high dark comedy” in the novel with “narrative excesses” that point to its own “absurdity” points to Mailer’s awareness of its flaws (26). Duguid also takes a socio-historical approach to recognize the novel’s achievement, showing how its emergence coincided with “the cultural materialization of American maleness” (24). | |||
Similar to the work of Ryan and Duguid, Ashton Howley’s “Mailer Again: Heterophobia in ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance''” entreats critics to look beyond the populist form of the critically neglected film in order to give it the hearing it deserves. According to Howley, it deserves critical attention because it shows that Mailer’s debate with his feminist detractors continues long after ''The Prisoner of Sex''. Critics may be interested in further exploring the extensive formal links that Mailer sets up between Reichian psychoanalysis and the crime fiction genre, which differentiates (slightly) the novel from the usual crime story. Howley, Ryan, and Duguid, individually and collectively, make it quite clear that it is a bit of a slander to accuse Mailer of having an “unblinking investment in masculinity” when his books are, in fact, obsessive examinations of the perils of masculine identity. | |||
Three other academic articles take up Mailer’s role as–depending on whether or not you use the “L-word” to describe yourself–either the conscience of American liberalism or as the rightist fox in the leftist henhouse. In “The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of AntiLiberalism” Sean McCann positions Mailer’s entire novelistic ''oeuvre'' as a reaction against the dangers of a liberal politics. For McCann, Mailer’s literary obsession with a metaphysics of violence and his frequent depictions of sex (namely anal penetration!)point towards a more communitarian-based system of polity where members of a political community can debate and engage with pressing issues as a civic body, as against the individualistic self-assertion that Mailer thinks liberalism entails. McCann thus positions Mailer as a critic against the atomized and anomic individual that he thinks the political culture of liberalism creates, through his upholding of a vision of a community that taps into its collective culture, thereby accessing a more ideal political and social arrangement. McCann’s work is an astonishingly comprehensive effort, one that we would like to see as a fully realized book. However, the author knows too well why it would not be a good career move to do so. He begins by looking at the lavish praise Mikal Gilmore’s rather narrowly focused Shot in the Heart received: “There may be no better example of the way the world has changed around Norman Mailer than the recent critical esteem showered on Mikal Gilmore’s memoir ''Shot in the Heart''” (293). “To put it lightly,” McCann admits, “Norman Mailer has gone out of style.” From this sad beginning, though, he tells the story of why Mailer went out of style. Basically, Mailer won the battle against the dragon and so put himself out of business: | |||
{{quote|For more than three decades Mailer wrote as if he were engaged in a life or death struggle with a gargantuan enemy, a manyheaded beast whose ability to absorb antagonists, swallow injuries, and engulf opposition, gave it the invulnerability of a mythological creature. It was the hideous immunity of this animal that Mailer always used to justify his literary outrages ... The great surprise of Mailer’s career, however, turns out to be that the enemy unexpectedly expired. In a twisted manner, Mailer’s side won. (295)}} | |||
We will not attempt to summarize all the developments of this fascinating article, but will just suggest that McCann’s reading of ''Ancient Evenings'' as a response to America’s turn toward identity politics in the early 1980s brings this article to its astonishing close. It is highly recommended. | |||
In another excellent article, T. H. Adamowski works similar ground when he hypothesizes in “Demoralizing Liberalism: Lionel Trilling, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman Mailer” that Norman Mailer (alongside Lionel Trilling and Leslie Fiedler) contributed to the demoralization of liberalism just before and after WWII through inadvertent critiques of liberalism from ''within'' its confines. Mailer began to portray ''forms of totalitarianism'' within liberalism itself after ''The Naked and the Dead'', effectively attacking liberalism from both the Left (in his paranoiac mode) and the rightist legacy of the counter Enlightenment tradition (that includes de Maistre, Lawrence, and Heidegger). By going beyond Trilling and Fiedler’s portrayals of liberals as political dupes, Mailer was ultimately prescient in his portrayal of liberals as weak and compromising, since he anticipated the 1960s adoption of this same notion. “Never let the troops become demoralized.”Adamowski writes near the conclusion of his article: “They might desert to the other side” (891). Closing with the triumph of Neo-Conservativism, the suggestion is, somewhat, that Mailer is to blame. Alan Petigny’s counterstatement “Norman Mailer, ‘The White Negro,’ and New Conceptions of the Self in Postwar America” from the inaugural issue of The Mailer Review in an interesting rejoinder to the idea that Mailer et alia brought down the house of liberalism, as Petigny argues that Mailer and Company misconstrued the Eisenhower decade: “In ‘The White Negro,’ Mailer seemed to regard white middle-class America as | |||
uptight and sexually repressed. While partially correct, Mailer failed to see what the majority of Americans at the time, and till this day, fail to see: a great and broad liberalization that was unfolding almost unnoticed during the fifties” (186). Petigny closes with an interesting paradox: “Norman Mailer’s hand-wringing about the lack of individuality in American Society was not a substantiation of his claims but of the reverse,” since the resonance of “The White Negro” was in fact “Evidence of an ascendant spirit during the postwar era–one which was more secular, more expressive, and–in the aggregate–less conformist than anything that had come before” (192). So three full cheers for literary liberalism. | |||
Three essays return us to “The White Negro” in relation to racial anxiety. Andrea Levine, unlike many critics who have focused on the dialectic between white and black masculinity in “The White Negro,” claims that an anxiety concerning the vulnerable, white, Jewish body becomes central to the text. Mailer’s fetishization of the aggressive African American male actually serves to “obscure the image of the cowed, impotent Jew going meekly to the gas chamber” (61). Mailer’s (re)construction of Jewish male identity operates first by eradicating Jewish biological and cultural history, after which it deprecates femininity in order to recapture certain notions of white, Jewish masculine difference. | |||
===Notes=== | ===Notes=== | ||