User:CDucharme/sandbox: Difference between revisions

What are we to make of a carefully wrought fictional scene in which the Hitlers, before young Adi even comes into the world, adventure past ordinary naughty sex into pedal-to-the-metal analingus? In foregrounding sex acts of this sort in a book purportedly about radical evil, Mailer risks being discussed in terms of radical eccentricity.{{efn|Ron Rosenbaum, author of ''Explaining Hitler'',, warns Mailer against pursuing, in a rumored sequel to ''The Castle in the Forest'', a sexual explanation of Hitler’s evil. See his essay “The Last Temptation of Norman Mailer” for a convincing admonition about the limits of psycho-sexual explanations of Hitler.}} Or, one could say that approaching radical evil through sexual obscenity is artistically obscene. However we put it, the novel intentionally jars the reader just as much as ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), and the central narrative device of ''that'' novel was an act of fellatio between two ghosts in a tomb. Here is the sex act between Alois and Klara that Mailer’s young Hitler witnesses: We may remember that the last time we saw Alois, he was burying his nose and lips in Klara’s vulva, his tongue as long and demonic as a devil’s phallus. (Be it said: we are not without our contributions to these arts.) Alois was certainly being aided by us. Never before had he given himself so completely to this exercise, and quickly he had become good at it, and so quickly that no explanation is possible unless we are given credit as well. (Which is why we speak of the Evil One when joining in the act—we do have the power to pass these lubricious gifts to men and women even when we are not attempting to convert them into clients.) (98)

Mailer’s Hitler novel recapitulates his karmic unified-field theory of life in a number of ways. He consistently presented himself as an author with an important vision, one worthy of “the mind of Joyce” or Melville, since the mid-1950s, and critics debated whether he ever wrote his ''Ulysses'' or ''Moby Dick''. Mailer’s personal ambition, however, was never in question.

In ''Ancient Evenings'', which was composed during the Carter presidency, the weak, vacillating pharaoh Ramses IX must decide whether or not to trust the protagonist Menenhetet, a figure who has earned scorn in his attempts to accumulate visionary power through experiments with scatological ceremonies and incest. In this novel Mailer stages his idea that we must make “bargains with evil” into a historical setting that could be called “Before Good and Evil.” Mailer’s setting predates the monotheistic moral codes that undergird our language of morality, thus showing the Eurocentric view to be, in Chakrabarty’s terms, “provincial.” This incarnation of the Mailer vision is, then, radically Manichean, since the Egyptian gods are not centered by a transcendent notion of the Good, against which an evil force defines itself. One could, through cosmological backformation, interpret the theomachy between Osiris and Set as a war between good and evil. In any event, the nature of goodness is never really in question. Artistically modulated growth—a middle way between stagnation and the uncontrolled growth of cancer—has always been the sign of health in Mailer’s universe. Mailer’s praise of Osiris resonates exactly with the adaptations of John Dewey’s “live creature.”

“Yessir.” (Harlot’s Ghost 340)

Mailer’s critics ravaged him for presuming to write in the voice of Jesus, and Mailer clearly anticipates the charge when he has ''his'' Jesus say with nice condescension that the four synoptic gospels were good as far as they went, but they went too far. Mailer’s novelistic hubris, if it should be called that, is in presuming to know the views of God and the Devil and everything in between, but it is presumptuous of the critic to assume that Mailer is ever unaware of the effects of ego, as it is an important theme in all of the “epic” works here discussed: When one has become an overseer of death who holds the power to liquidate masses of people, one is also in great need of a very hard shell to the ego in order to feel no intimate horror over the price to one’s soul. Most statesmen who become successful leaders of a country at war have usually risen to such eminence already. They have installed in themselves an ability not to suffer sleepless nights because of casualties on the other side. They now possess the mightiest of all social engines of psychic numbification—patriotism! That is still the most dependable instrument for guiding the masses, although it may yet be replaced by revealed religion. We love fundamentalists. Their faith offers us every promise of developing into the final weapon of mass destruction. (405–406)

Antithetical elements call attention to one another, reminding readers of nothing so much as the presence of the author himself. Think back to Mailer’s character Roth in ''The Naked and the Dead'', and of Stephen Richards Rojack walking the parapet in ''An American Dream''. Mailer’s writings are full of intentional impasses and voracious chasms. Readers who cannot make the leap will quickly fly from the page and declare Mailer unreadable. How are we to make the leap from the pure (if uncertain) speech of Jesus back to the vulva of Hitler’s mother? Mailer’s narratives are visionary landscapes designed to engulf some readers while allowing others the chance to develop in admittedly idiosyncratic ways—but it is a mindless response to note Mailer’s stylistic self-reference without noting the antipodal contextualization of his stylistic “egotism.”

In genuinely frightening ways that inter-leaven the literary and the wicked, Mailer exacerbates our moral consciences; American literature has not been as darkly funny since Twain’s ''Letters from the Earth''. Twain’s and Mailer’s are good stories, and deep!

===Notes===