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with seven colored objects.... I became so proficient at these
with seven colored objects.... I became so proficient at these
equivalents that I saw hues so soon as I heard numbers. ~197–198!</blockquote>
equivalents that I saw hues so soon as I heard numbers. ~197–198!</blockquote>
Espionage is the art of metaphor. Representation allows transformation,
the alteration of “appearances” and signifiers creating powerful new meanings. This is what agents learn in their CIA schooling, according to Mailer.
They don’t just master symbols, metaphors, codes, and figures of speech;
they also master influence over others. This is Harlot’s specialty, what he
trains agents in, and he stresses that influencing individuals through the art
of espionage is linked with the struggle to influence history. This is made
particularly clear when “counter-espionage,” or developing double agents, is
taught by Harlot and practiced by Hubbard in Uruguay. Hubbard describes
feeling a loyalty to his “creation” Chevi Fuertes, a leftist won over to the CIA
who eventually defects to Cuba after the Bay of Pigs fails to create effective
characters or characters misunderstood by critics. Through these and other
episodes in the CIA, we see that Hubbard’s grand ambitions parallel Mailer’s, and interestingly, generally lead to failure.
It is not just Harry that can be seen as embodying elements of Mailer’s
worldview. Kittredge, a woman agent married to both Harry and Harlot at
different times in the novel, is a career psychologist and theorist for the CIA,
and she also articulates a theory of personality that shares much in common with Mailer’s views. ~Mailer’s worldview is frequently given voice in
almost all of his novels since An American Dream.! Her explanations of
human behavior are direct articulations of Mailer’s theories of the human
personality, to the degree that her theories seems straight out of Mailer’s
essays on Henry Miller, collected in the anthology Genius and Lust, or even
Mailer’s last collection of reflections, On God: An Uncommon Conversation.
15
She articulates, in great detail, Mailer’s oft-stated theory of the dual nature
of the human personality and the concept of the “Alpha and Omega” of the psyche; the two-sided, male-female, divided nature of the human personality. She explains that when one acts in a destructive or ineffective manner,
this should be understood as the inability to reconcile two sides of an individual’s personality. Although she has had a successful career as the CIA’s
in-house psychologist and philosopher, she has a problem: her career is failing. In fact, it is an interesting fact that despite her championing of Mailer’s
views, she is in despair. It is a sign of Mailer’s own self-critical ability to question his own perspective that characters fail and flounder despite articulating views close to Mailer’s. She writes:
<blockquote>Harry, for the last five years, I have carried this burden of woe,
doubt, misery, and burgeoning frustration...
Harry, life has always treated me as a darling, and for much
too long. If my mother merely adored me my father more than
made up for it.... My brain was so fertile that I could have gone
off to a desert island and been deliriously happy with myself. The
only pains I knew were the ferocious congestions attendant on
new ideas. ~556–557!</blockquote>
Mailer has described feeling as if he were the literary darling of critics after
his early success with The Naked and The Dead, which was extravagantly
praised, but followed by harshly treated subsequent novels, The Deer Park
and Barbary Shore. Clearly, Mailer knew what it felt like to have incredibly
“fertile” periods of creativity accompanied by frustration. Mailer has shown
a repeated willingness to air publicly the frustrations of being a writer in his
writing. Kittredge ends her despair, as Mailer so often has, by resolving to
“find a way to renew oneself.”
Despite her articulation of Mailer’s theories, she, like all the characters, is
unable ultimately to account for her sense of failure, and the theory fails.
What makes this reading important about Harlot’s Ghost is that the novel
functions as a testing ground for Mailer’s ideology, yet reveals the possibility of deconstructing that ideology. Mailer has stressed, in his essays and fiction, his conviction that courage and will determine success and that we
must be “existentially” responsible for the conditions of our life. Bravery and
honesty must be summoned and maintained and then we will be successful, Mailer claims. Mailer’s conviction is represented in An American Dream
when Stephen Rojack walks around an apartment building balcony ledge, staving off the attempt of a devil-like character to push him off. After this
act, Rojack, achieves inner peace and the novel resolves ~unpersuasively, in
my view!.
The problem of failure, therefore, is a problem in Mailer’s worldview. This
may explain the persistence of the supernatural in Mailer’s writings with the
frequent presence of powerful forces, pressures, and “ghosts” that serve to
constrict or destroy. The pseudo-metaphoric struggle between the individual spirit and supernatural forces ~in all their murky strangeness and mystery! is central in almost all of Mailer’s writing. These “ghosts” seem to serve
the function of calling upon individuals to achieve inner courage and
strength, and also, to explain the failure of these values.What must be noticed
is that all the agents in Harlot’s Ghost seem headed toward failure, precisely
because of intangible conditions that cannot be dealt with or understood—
then the novel’s abrupt ending leaves their lives and history suspended, with
Kittredge either speaking to Harlot or his ghost. Why doesn’t the novel
resolve this? It is as if Mailer stands at the abyss of a logic he will not face,
namely that courage and spiritual development cannot provide success in the
face of the impersonal forces of American society, and turns away out of fear
and frustration. But this turning away is actually supreme honesty for Mailer’s project since it reveals the true unresolved state of American society.
In Mailer’s writing, dualism has not been enough to explain away the
prevalent dread of failure. He has repeatedly supplemented his dualist explanation with “ghosts” and references to the battle between God and the Devil.
What are these strange powers that move and slip in all realms of Mailer’s literary life? The unknowable and the supernatural in Harlot’s Ghost is manifest in the character of Harlot himself. Harlot is the God-like figure of the
novel as Hubbard explains, “Harlot @is# a manifest of the Lord” ~75!, or when
he believes Harlot is dead Hubbard poses the question, “What would you do
if you received incontrovertible news that the Lord had died?” ~45!. However literally we take this, it is clear by the end of the novel that Harlot’s
status as a character who will reveal the mysteries of the novel is made problematic by his uncertain status as either dead, alive, or a ghost. History as an
absolute truth is blocked by the structure of American society in ways so
effectively represented in this novel, yet history itself is experienced as an
inexplicable failure by Mailer’s characters. They fail to effectively intervene
in history, most clearly in their efforts to defeat the Cuban revolution. This
explains the mysteries around Harlot and his “ghost”; how else to explain heroic efforts that fail, if you believe, like Harry Hubbard that “love @is# a
reward @for courage#. One could find it only after one’s virtue, or one’s courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity or loss, had succeeded in stirring the
power of creation” ~54!. Harlot, is amongst all else, the rival for Kittredge’s
affections, whom she seems to be talking with toward the end of the novel’s
chronology. Mailer himself states in On God, “my own experience tells me
that the degree one is brave, one finds more love than when one is cowardly”
~29!. The mysterious and ghostly is precisely the failure of ambition, of courage and the American dream ~if you work hard and persevere, you
succeed—if you fail it is your own fault!. Mailer, like his characters, is caught
in this duality: he subscribes to the American dream, yet realizes his own
experience doesn’t correspond to it. This requires mysticism to sustain the
dream. If you are worthy, the “powers of creation” will be stirred, but if you
fail the same powers will block you.
There is one other “author” who functions with a formal similarity to
Mailer in Harlot’s Ghost, namely Harlot. He is the master spy that is expected
to tell the truth and reveal all in the sequel. He has been the guiding influence on events, the person Hubbard describes as his own personal “master in
the only spiritual art that American men and boys respect—machismo”who
“gave life courses in grace under pressure” ~17!. He is the author of the ideology of courage that Hubbard develops. Of course, it must be stressed that
Harlot tests his willingness to face absolutes, to push beyond the limits, and
he fails during a rock climbing accident which reduces him to a wheelchair
and literal and symbolic impotence ~Kittredge leaves him after the accident
and marries Hubbard!, killing their son, and damaging his career. This suggests the limitations of Harlot’s framework and, by extension, Mailer’s.
Harlot, however, remains the author of the various plots that drive the
novel. In this sense, he is again like Mailer. He is expected to answer the questions that have been left unanswered and provide historical truth. Harlot is
the godfather to Hubbard, the god-like figure who would be in a position to
tell the truth and rise above the fray of conflicting interests and perspectives,
but he is left fundamentally unknowable as a character
==IV. The Novelist as the God that Fails and the Novel as Disinformation==
Close to the end of the novel, Hubbard has some disconcerting thoughts. In
a conversation with Bill Harvey ~a fictional character based on the real CIA
station chief! suspicion is cast upon the loyalty of Hugh Montague, a.k.a. Harlot, who has been the primary influence over Harry’s career. Could Harlot, one of the most powerful leaders of the CIA, actually be a Soviet agent?
This would make Harlot the complete opposite of everything he appears to
be and would call into question all the values and ideology that Harry Hubbard assumes. In addition, since Harlot explains all of his efforts in Manichean terms of serving God against the Devil ~echoes of Mailer!, and if
Harlot is a Soviet agent, then the absolute values assumed throughout the
novel, and taught by Harlot, either collapse into nihilism and become selfserving or reverse their position: God representing democracy and capitalism is really evil and the Devil of Communism is really good. This has
become a possibility that Harry’s experience with the CIA, particularly his
truly disastrous efforts to overthrow the Cuban revolution and assassinate
Fidel Castro, makes him inclined to consider seriously if the God of Capitalism is really the God or the Devil. How the entire novel is to be understood rests upon what side, if any, Harlot really serves.
Harry remembers a conversation with Harlot about God and Evolution.
Evolution threatens the theory of divine creation. In response, Harlot proposes the theory that God tricks man by setting up false appearances for
God’s protection to secure his function. Evolution explains things, but is a
“cover story” designed by God to confuse man. Harlot reasons: “ ‘You can say
the universe is a splendidly-worked up system of disinformation calculated
to make us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is
exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.’ ” ~1281!. This disconcerts Harry considerably since he is Harlot’s creation. Has the entire Cold War, or at least his part of it, been a massive
disinformation campaign? If so, has Hubbard been serving good ~God! or
the ~Devil!, and do these values reside in capitalism or communism, or some
third way? Also, the discourse of deception should make readers of this novel
suspicious since it suggests the novel itself might be a complex piece of trickery, precisely what the incomplete ending of the novel also suggests. If we go
back to an early Mailer interview, “Hip, Hell, and the Navigator” in Advertisements for Myself, we find Mailer talking about God in terms of the future
of the novel and creativity more broadly. In this interview, Mailer disarmingly jumps from conceptions of God, to conceptions of individual freedom,
to the place of the writer in history. In an interesting way, these levels of concern shift and alter into a common concern. He explains his conception of
God as “divided, not-all powerful; He exists as a warring element” and claims “we are a part—perhaps the most important part—of His great expression.”
~Advertisements 380! Mailer makes humans into characters in God’s great
novel. In both cases, language such as “God,”“His great expression” and “creation” directly connects God and the universe with the novelist and his
novel. In the interview Mailer goes on to make explicit this connection by
stressing the implications of his Gnostic brand of theology:
<blockquote>It @God as the source of expression# opens the possibility that the
novel, along with many other art forms may be growing into
something larger rather than something smaller, and the sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that
everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less
important. ~Advertisements 382!</blockquote>
The divine and mystical power of God allows new reservoirs of creative
energy for aesthetic expression. If, however, we compare Harlot’s statement
with Mailer’s earlier claims above, we detect an important shift. In both conceptions God is divided and warring, like a writer struggling to create works
that are true to personal vision but facing critical rejection. However, Harlot’s theology is based on a God that is a losing force and that does not trust
his audience. God needs to produce disinformation or his rule will be threatened by his creations. I suggest that Mailer’s theology, and Harlot’s, helps us
understand how to read Harlot’s Ghost and probe beneath appearances. Harlot, who plots Hubbard’s fate and orchestrated history, manipulates because,
like God, he needs to face the conditions of things becoming “smaller” and
“less important.” Therefore, what is at stake in this novel is precisely the possibility of the novel, in general, as a creative form which can reveal understanding about history and society ~which has always been Mailer’s stated
objectives!, or novels reduced to a minor expressive form. Mailer’s youthful
optimism and confident rebellion against shrinkage of human and expressive potential seem lost: as God, Harlot and the novel are in danger of being
revealed as weak frauds. If Harlot, who plays God with his Godson Harry,
not to mention the CIA as a whole with its missions and history, is really part
of an elaborate hoax, then the novel itself, by extension, threatens to be
revealed as inadequate to represent history. However, perhaps Mailer’s strategy is similar to what he projected onto a threatened God; the grand novel
that resolves history is disinformation. The lapse in this novel’s ending becomes full of implications for novel writing at large. Perhaps just this
deception is necessary since the novel is not expanding and growing larger
in our world of the television and the Internet but needs to be fought for in
new ways.
To pursue this idea further, it is necessary to return to a scene early in the
novel,~but late in Harry’s life! before he decides to travel to Russia, when the
news has come that Harlot is dead. Harry, after deceiving Kittredge with an
affair, and before she explains she will leave him for someone else, comes
upon Kittredge talking to Harlot. Since Harlot is thought to be dead, this is
quite strange. She is either delusional, talking to his ghost, or talking to the
real Harlot. However, Harry can never know or obtain answers, short of
finding Harlot, and the entire meaning of all that will come ~or has come
depending on the chronology taken in terms of Harry’s life or the narrative
structure of the novel! revolves around this ghost. Is it real or not? The
implications fundamentally shape the meaning of the entire novel and Harry’s relation with history. If Harlot is dead, then there can be no answers to
motivations, loyalties, and the meaning of historical actions. The only meaning Harlot can retain in the “death of God” scenario is as a figure in the personal memories of Kittredge and Harry. Further, Kittredge’s talking with
Harlot is madness, a delusion that truth can be revealed through communication. Harlot’s death is the end of the dream of making sense of history and
of the novel’s mysteries. If Harlot is alive, on the other hand, then meaning
can be made of his historical interventions ~he can be asked for the truth in
Moscow! and of history proper. If so, however, then his ghostly visage is illusory, a deception and fraud and the personal relations between Kittredge and
Harlot become thoroughly subjective and unreliable. Take your choice, Harlot can seemingly only function as truth on the personal level or on the political level—but not both.
To make sense of this ending, it is useful to return to Walter Benjamin. In
his essay on authors in capitalism, he claims that the true revolution that
writers can affect is one in terms of “technique”:
<blockquote>Before I ask: what is a work’s position vis-à-vis the production
relations of its time, I should like to ask: what is its position
within them? This question concerns the function of a work
within the literary production relations of its time. In other
words, it is directly concerned with literary technique. ~87!</blockquote>
This emphasis on “technique” is further explained by the claim that a progressive “technique” is defined as a type of writing which “will be better, the
more consumers it brings in contact with the production process—in short,
the more readers or spectators it turns into collaborators” ~98!.
This framework of Benjamin’s sheds new light on what can be made of
the apparent failure of the novel to resolve. Mailer himself has given two
explanations. At the time of the novel’s publication, Mailer promised to
complete the work after some time went by, but recently has stated that he
won’t revisit the novel because technology has dehumanized espionage. This
doesn’t seem persuasive to me because the novel’s scope is not contemporary espionage but historical episodes revealed through the voice of a fictional spy positioned to discover truth. Interestingly, in an earlier interview
for BBC, Mailer defends the form of the novel in a way that directly echoes
Benjamin’s concept of a transformation in technique, which transforms
authors into producers. He says:
<blockquote>The reader having been given the end and the beginning will
conceive of that ‘middle’; they know that the middle takes place
in Vietnam, and Watergate, and that the love affair between
Harry Hubbard and Kittredge ... was consummated in that
‘middle’ and they will think about it, and in their own mind—if
they like the book—they’ll come to the point where they conceive of that middle novel. Now, if I come along and write it in
the next few years, they’ll then be able to check their version of
the novel against mine. ~Glenday 135!</blockquote>
From the vantage point of “telling” the “truth of our times,” and on the level
of crafting an explicit plot resolution, the novel fails. The position of the
author is in decline—at least in terms of the author as the “hero”who reveals
history. Could the novel be taken as an elaborate hoax? Mailer, himself, at
some level, recognizes that there is no novelistic resolution to the level of
questions he poses. Even though Mailer planned to write a sequel, the results
remain: the incomplete novel becomes a radical formal experiment and gesture of making the readers into the “authors” of the sequel.Mailer stresses the
value of readers who “conceive” the ending. Given that the ending revolves
around the nature of the Cold War and the value of the relative sides, making the readers interpret the future “ending” means placing the readers as judges of history. Perhaps Mailer’s attachment to radical individualism and
existential courage is shown inadequate in the face of “ghosts”; that is, the
collective, overpowering force of history that cannot be revealed by an
“author” because they are beyond the purview of an individual. On the other
hand, out of this failure, meaningful truth is produced and revealed, precisely
out of abandoning the position of the author who tells all.Any answers given
by Mailer to the questions at the end of the novel would ring hollow since
they would force him to stand for or against the U.S. role in the Cold War by
making Harlot a hero or villain. True, the reader cannot end this novel with
the sense of completion or satisfaction traditional novels provide. Instead, we
are left to become the writers and producers—speculating and arguing about
how the novel that wasn’t written should end.We may consider whether the
public media-driven faith in the God-like claims about capitalism and
so-called democracy, which are supposedly outside of time and history and
beyond challenge are an elaborate hoax. Harlot may be alive or dead, and like
a possible “God” and “Devil” we cannot know, but we are put in the writer’s
place free from the authority of any divine will. It would be ironic if Mailer,
who, like his fictional CIA agents, has spent a career attempting to write the
great novel, decided not to, precisely so that by turning away from this project
and refusing a sequel, he forces us to rethink our relationship to novels and
history. This is where his great contribution can reside.
==V. Back to the Future==
Amylhester
88

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