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

{{dc|dc=A|mong the imperceptive and raucous}} commentaries on Mailer’s novels, this remark by [[w:Anatole Broyard|Anatole Broyard]] stands out as refreshingly clear: “the rock he throws usually has a message tied to it.”{{harvtxt|Broyard|1967|p=4}} In the case of ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'', the rock has been given much more attention than the message because it hit us at the wrong time and in an extraordinarily sensitive spot.

In D.J.’s words, “He sings the song of the swine.”{{harvtxt|Mailer|1959|p=34}} And in Mailer’s estimation, Rusty is analogous to the American corporate mind which would seek out a Vietnam to attack in order to release an explosive, repressed sexuality and reaffirm its status as pack leader of the world.{{efn|This metaphor is further expounded in {{harvtxt|Mailer|1971|}}, in which the author suggests that the American expedition to the moon was analogous to an ejaculation of spermatozoa towards the waiting egg cell.}} In Rusty—and the American corporate mind—Mailer sees the worst kind of genetic tyranny and conditioning by tribal mores.

As he is telling the story, we are bombarded by a curious, often annoying, adolescent style and a series of naive boasts. (This may be the one most disturbing aspect of an otherwise well-conceived satire.) In certain ways he does resemble his father: sneering boastfulness, shallow sexuality, arrogance, domineering stance. But he differs in a drastic way that forever separates the two from each other. D.J. knows the anxiety of self-awareness. As he puts it, he is a victim of “Herr Dread.”{{harvtxt|Mailer|1967|p=122}}{{efn|Though Mailer refers to his personal concept of dread, he apparently obtained his basic idea of “Herr Dread” from [[w:Søren Kierkegaard|Søren Kierkegaard]]’s dark philosophical classic, ''The Concept of Dread''. It is this awareness of spiritual emptiness which separates D.J. from his father.}} His intimacy with his own rationality produces a free-floating fear which plagues him constantly, nibbling at his confidence like a rat trapped within his chest. In his own words, D.J. “sees through to the stinking root of things” and “can watch his own ass being created. . . . ”{{harvtxt|Mailer|1967|p=35}}

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....”{{harvtxt|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: <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.{{harvtxt|Mailer|1967|p=304}}</blockquote>

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. {{efn|My use of Nietzsche’s abyss here refers to the anxiety associated with endless falling as conceived by Nietzsche in ''Beyond Good and Evil'' (New York: Boni and Liveright, no date), Chapter IV, aphorism 146: “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”}} 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.”{{harvtxt|Mailer|1967|p=224}}

human.}}  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.”{{harvtxt|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.

overloadings of massive damage report, and one last heuuuuuuuuu, all forgiveness gone.” {{harvtxt|Mailer|1967|p=156}} Back at the camp of Big Luke, D.J. has to admit that Rusty indeed placed the last shot. Rusty is silent for a few moments, perhaps embarrassed, but then says, “Yeah, I guess it’s mine, but one of its sweet legs belongs to D.J.”{{harvtxt|Mailer|1967|p=157}}

In the end, Mailer implies and perhaps confesses that there is nothing civilized about violence. The roots of murder and warfare are imbedded in the soil of our animal ancestry. As long as we justify our blood lust and hunger for sexual dominancy, we are not civilized men, but baboons and hyenas and wolves—at the best, monkeys. {{efn| It is possible that Mailer was heavily influenced by the anthropological theories popularized by the late Robert Ardrey in his 1965 best seller ''African Genesis'' (New York: Dell, 1961), in which it was postulated that mankind evolved from “killer apes.”}}

brush and the boys climb a tree. They sense their loss of power over Nature without their big guns because “this mother nature is as big and dangerous and mysterious as a beautiful castrating cunt when she’s on the edge between murder and love.”{{harvtxt|Mailer|1967|p=197}} {{efn| It is significant that Mailer uses the word “castrating” in reference to “mother” Nature. Without his rifle, D.J. is no longer dominant over Nature, and thereby sexually impotent.}} (Mailer’s distrust and downright hatred of technology comes through—his point is clarified perhaps more than is necessary.)

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.”{{harvtxt|Mailer|1967|p=211}} At last he seems to be understanding the wild!

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.”{{harvtxt|Mailer|1967|p=219}} God is not there for him—only the Beast.

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....{{harvtxt|Mailer|1959|p=91}}</blockquote> {{efn|Norman Mailer, “A Public Notice on ''Waiting for Godot'',” essay in ''Advertisements for Myself''(New York: Putnam, 1959).}} 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. {{efn| This quotation from ''Cannibals and Christians'' may help clarify Mailer’s position: “[T]he only explanation I can find for the war in Vietnam is that we are sinking into the swamps of a plague and the massacre of strange people seems to relieve this plague. If one were to take the patients in a hospital, give them guns and let them shoot on pedestrians down from hospital windows you may be sure you would find a few miraculous cures”{{harvtxt|Mailer|1966|p=91}}}}