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The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/"Their Humor Annoyed Him": Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in The Castle in the Forest: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/"Their Humor Annoyed Him": Cavalier Wit and Sympathy for the Devil in The Castle in the Forest (view source)
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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. | 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. | ||
The cosmological vision has been reiterated in all of Mailer’s major works, including ''Ancient Evenings'' (1983), ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (1991), and ''The Gospel acccording to the Son'' (1997).<ref> | |||
Lennon, J. Michael. “Mailer’s Cosmology.” Modern Language Studies, 12:3 ~Summer 1982!: 18–29.</ref> In each of these novel’s (if we allow for ''The Executioner’s Song'' as a “nonfiction novel”), the struggle between divine forces explains the relation between apparently insignificant actors in ways that factor out what Mailer calls “the Absurd.” The divinity potential of quotidian existence is the binding material in Mailer’s cosmos, with “divinity” meaning extraordinary, magical, and foundational. The experience of the divine overlaps with the extraordinary in the manner of aesthetic wonder, and this commonality allows Mailer to find God in the aesthetic aspects of sexual experience, but the divine must be more than ''merely'' extraordinary. | |||
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