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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 group as they personify the attitude of their country. Though the boys, when alone in the forest, experience a fear of a “red in tooth and claw” Nature, they experience neither understanding nor compassion for its purity and beauty. As from the beginning, the animals are only a means to easing inner tensions through violence. In fact, both boys regret not being armed in order to kill while they are “loving” Nature. Mailer seems to suggest that what hunters experience through Nature is not love at all, but rather a tremendously satisfying justification of one’s instinctive and overwhelming need for violence.
+This would partially explain the apparent contradiction occurring in the subsequent episode. When night comes, D.J. and Tex form camp and try to sleep. As D.J. lays next to his friend, he is immersed in the grandeur and majesty of the night time mountain forest. In his own words, D.J. “could have wept for a secret was near, some mystery in the secret of things, of trees and forest all in dominion to one another” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=211}}. At last he seems to be understanding the wild!
+Up until this moment Mailer’s novel has been written in an obsessive stream of obscene language and electronic-media jargon. The description of
+the night, however, is delivered in a reverent, almost corny, passage of classical Nature writing worthy of a Thoreau or Wordsworth.
+But the similarity to other books about Nature ends abruptly, changing into a strange and ominous parody. As D.J. experiences the “secret” drawing nearer, he simultaneously feels a sexual desire for Tex. This odd dealing with latent homosexuality at first seems to destroy the sense of serenity Mailer has so painstakingly described.
+At first glance, he seems to have thrown in an innocuous homosexual scene just to meet some politically correct requisite. But on second glance, this sexuality comes into focus as a natural force within D.J.—and by inference, all the sons of the American State. As might be expected, it is a violent sexual urge and D.J. considers the dominancy he would prove over Tex if he forced his friend into a role of subservient sexual partner. He is refrained from action only by the fear of failure to dominate. By now, it should be obvious that Mailer equates sex and violence as forever spliced in the American mind. They are two branches with the same root mired in the psychology of the beast.
+Up until this very moment, there seems to have been hope for D.J. He has seen through the hypocrisy of his father, rejected the Darwinian biological imperatives of his country, proven his personal courage in the face of death, and found a type of grace in Nature.
+But with the welling up of his violent and sexual “urges” comes the end of hope for D.J. He never grasps the full meaning of his experiences. Instead of recognizing that he is tyrannized by his own “wise blood” (or “urges”), he mistakenly assumes that he is receiving messages from a God of the cosmos. Instead of understanding that his violence is something to be overcome, he accepts it as not only natural but divine. He comes within a hair of finding the true meaning of his experience, only to misinterpret the entire lesson. D.J. finally finds God, but instead of psalms, he hears the command,“Go out and kill—fulfill my will, go and kill” {{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=219}}. God is not there for him—only the Beast.
+And for that reason, all the violence and domineering sex in him seems to be justified and affirmed. Like the Nazi gunners with ''Gott mit uns'' inscribed on their belts, D.J. believes that God is “on his side” so long as he follows his natural impulses, even if it means constant fighting and killing if necessary to remain on top of the human herd and get what he wants in the sexual and material sense.
+In this sad way, D.J. becomes his own father, with the same sad hypocrisies and the same sad justifications. The book ends with D.J. and Tex waiting to go to war in a fever of happy anticipation. Their last words are “Vietnam, hot dam.”
+Why Are We in Vietnam? is Mailer’s most profoundly pessimistic book. Mankind as allegory fails to realize that he has a choice to lift himself
+above the brutishness of raw Nature. Instead, he allows himself to be a subject of Nature, thus becoming just another brute. He fails to discern good from evil. He fails to understand that he—personifying mankind—is becoming a force as powerful as God and the Devil because he can
+choose.
+This was Mailer’s maturing perception of a “good” God and an “evil” Devil in the late sixties. Perhaps the root of this belief can be found in this statement in ''Advertisements for Myself'', from an essay written a few years earlier: <blockquote>God’s destiny is flesh and blood with ours, and so, far from conceiving of a God who sits in judgment and allows souls, lost souls, to leave purgatory and be reborn again, there is the greater agony of God at the mercy of man’s fate, God determined by man’s efforts, man who has a free will.... {{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=91}}</blockquote> This conception is precisely the one presented in Mailer’s 1968 bear hunt and his 2007 portrait of Adolf Hitler as a boy. God, Man, and Nature are not one, not made up of the same substance. Man is neither the consciousness nor the conscience of God. Mankind is a third determining force in the Universe.
+Mankind can and must realize itself as a determining factor in the development of life. Curiously, all of Mailer’s literary work, except ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'', emphasizes the moral responsibility of the individual to fight the suffocating restrictions of society, especially when society is dominated by the laws of Nature, not man. This more than anything illustrates Mailer’s abhorrence of American interference in Vietnam. “We did it to prove we are the meanest, biggest, baddest dog on the block,” he seems to be saying. We were allowing our natural instincts to rule our actions. Thus, Mailer is not concerned with the destruction of another country so much as he is concerned with our self-destruction.
+If his allegory holds true throughout the novel, we must conclude that America as a society failed to will itself more sophisticated than the beasts in the woods when it sent its army to Vietnam. America failed to choose attainment of universal justice and compassion. In Mailer’s terminology, especially now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we must conclude that our attempted bullying of Vietnam was nothing less than demonic, as it represented the antithesis of divine.
 ===Notes===