Sandbox Space for John William Corrington's "An American Dreamer" Essay

AN AMERICAN DREAMER BY JOHN WILLIAM CORRINGTON

There is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream-life of the nation.
"The Existential Hero" in The Presidential Papers

The lines above provide both the myth and the text for understanding Norman Mailer's recent work. If one cannot grasp the text, will not perceive the mythos, one is lost at the beginning. Such is precisely the condition of Mailer's critics: lost. Smashed in the face by Mailer's unbelievable vitality and matchless prose-wit, they move away from An American Dream as if Dial Press had booby-trapped that caricature flag on the dust jacket. At least so with the younger and cagier critics. One moves carefully in this territory. Mailer is certainly a pestilence and probably mad, the critic avers, but like any unbroken beast, he may yet be deadly to a tender reputation. He might, for all his words and merdes, become . . . "lastingly significant." And so, palpably unable to understand him, one fires explosive bullets from a long distance. Of small calibre. With a silencer. The critic's game, except when dealing with a surely worthless thing, is Safety First.

With notable exceptions. In the case of An American Dream, one such exception is Granville Hicks of The Saturday Review. His "Literary Horizons" is the column which asks the question, Is An American Dream a hoax or . . . something worse? He is confronted with a novel by the only man on the continent who has, at present, the faintest pretension to first rank, and, discussing the dust-jacket blurb (a practice generally confined to book-club ladies reviewing for The Flagstaff Sun) says,

The jacket indicates that serial publications had begun in Esquire before the book was finished: "Mailer undertook to write An American Dream under the same conditions of serial deadline that Conrad, Dickens, and Dostoevsky met in their day." (That, I think, is the extent of the resemblance between this work and the work of the aforementioned authors.)

But despite this disclaimer, An American Dream precisely locates in the tradition of Dostoyevsky and Conrad (at their best), though, in truth, the very idea of it would have sent Dickens back to the shoe-blacking factory in near-collapse. What, in plain and obvious fact, could be more Dostoyevshian than Mailer's plot? Is it less believable than The Brothers Karamazov? Is Rojack's motivation not more "typical" than the scrambled Nietzscheanism of Raskolnikov? if, as many commentators would have us believe, Dostyouevsky is a proto-existentialist, how-and why-are we to escape the vague and almost hallucinatory agony of a Russian student and deny a similar reality in Stephen Rojack?

References/Sources

[Corrington's An American Dreamer Essay]