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The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Wise Blood of Norman Mailer: An Interpretation and Defense of Why Are We in Vietnam?: Difference between revisions

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He neither admires nor loves his father, feeling instead a horror when he looks into Rusty’s eyes. There he sees “voids, man, and gleams of yellow fire....” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=37}}. Students of Mailer will quickly recognize D.J. as the personification of “The White Negro.” He is a hipster, a sensitive psychopath who operates only in the present, with no precedents, no preconceptions.  
He neither admires nor loves his father, feeling instead a horror when he looks into Rusty’s eyes. There he sees “voids, man, and gleams of yellow fire....” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=37}}. Students of Mailer will quickly recognize D.J. as the personification of “The White Negro.” He is a hipster, a sensitive psychopath who operates only in the present, with no precedents, no preconceptions.  


Mailer had used this theme before. Virtually all of his fiction up till and including ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' is centered on this one fixed idea: If the fate of twentieth-century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=304}}
Mailer had used this theme before. Virtually all of his fiction up till and including ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' is centered on this one fixed idea: <blockquote>If the fate of twentieth-century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self. {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=304}}</blockquote>


D.J. is so different from his father primarily because he grew up in a super-accelerated society where no sooner is one standard established than it is destroyed and superseded by another. No value system lasts for more than a few months before it must be dismantled and replaced. To infinitely compound matters, he must exist in a society that is literally held hostage by its own government, with the subsequent threat of impending annihilation.
D.J. is so different from his father primarily because he grew up in a super-accelerated society where no sooner is one standard established than it is destroyed and superseded by another. No value system lasts for more than a few months before it must be dismantled and replaced. To infinitely compound matters, he must exist in a society that is literally held hostage by its own government, with the subsequent threat of impending annihilation.


To exist as a free individual in such a society means waging eternal war against the rigid conformity imposed by the state and corporate bosses. D.J., if he is to retain his personal integrity, has to face American life as a “white Negro,” forever on the edge of life, tottering as it were on the brink of Nietzsche’s abyss. Though this interpretation of D.J. might be debatable, Mailer himself hints at such a relationship between D.J. and the existential hipster. Many times D.J. interrupts his monologue to suggest that he is not really a “Texas Wasp,” but rather a “black-ass cripple Spade and sending from Harlem” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=224}}.


This singular literary device not only accentuates the existential state of D.J., it implies that American youth as personified by D.J. is hopelessly divided in half, with two separate and distinct personalities. In this sense especially, D.J. becomes a valid microcosm of the macrocosmic youth rebellion of the 1960s, where even the most bitter protester was torn between love of country and love of individual freedom. We who have survived long enough to peer into the twenty-first century can still relate. We love the country but hate the scene.


We have spent so much space on D.J. with good reason. He represents more than the divided youth of high-technology America in the 1960s. Indeed, he represents more than Mailer’s embattled existential hero. He represents as well the inescapable Catch-22 of modem times: divorcing one’s self from society means loss of security. But being part of society means loss of freedom, because society is still ruled by the dictates of other people or of Nature. You’re either in lock-step with humanity or you’re all alone. One means a loss of self; the other means to live in perpetual anxious isolation.
It is only with Mailer’s maturing mind that we find a third possibility— that the individual can be free without alienating himself from human society. This freedom comes with the understanding that humanity is not necessarily in the dictates of Nature. Mankind can choose between good and evil. (Hence the importance of democracy.) Mailer’s variance from the existentialism of the post war French intellectuals is profound. Man is not alone in the Universe. Morals are not moot. Good and Evil not only exist in the eternal moment, they suggest the existence of a not allegorical God and Devil!
This astonishing conclusion can be seen in Mailer’s 2007 novel ''The Castle in the Forest'' (New York: Random House, 2007) and his nonfiction interview about God with his authorized biographer Dr. Michael Lennon, appropriately entitled ''On God: An Uncommon Conversation'' (New York: Random House, 2007). We have to pay attention because Norman Mailer’s genius cannot be denied.
But there is no such realization seen in Mailer’s 1968 novel ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' In it, protagonist D.J. gives up his freedom of choice by acquiescing to the “wisdom of the blood.” By submitting to the dictates of Nature (that is,“instinct”), D.J. loses all control of the hunt, to say nothing of his life. He learns nothing from his encounter with “that Cannibal Emperor of Nature’s Psyche” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=200}}. And having learned nothing, he is subsequently doomed perforce to confronting life with the animalistic shallowness of his father. In the end, he lacks the courage to be free and voluntarily gives his will over to instinct.


===Notes===
===Notes===
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