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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

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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:  
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.){{sfn|Mailer|1983|p=98}}
{{quote|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.){{sfn|Mailer|1983|p=98}}}}


What shall we make of this? One possible response will be to link Mailer’s use of the Holocaust with that of Sylvia Plath.{{efn|See Gubar for a discussion of attacks on Plath for reducing the Holocaust to a metaphor.}} One could say each author uses the pain of others to provide historical ballast to pain that is really individual. It would be the height of egotism to use the deaths of six million in order to hide the idiosyncrasy of one’s pain or the eccentricity of one’s ideas.
What shall we make of this? One possible response will be to link Mailer’s use of the Holocaust with that of Sylvia Plath.{{efn|See Gubar for a discussion of attacks on Plath for reducing the Holocaust to a metaphor.}} One could say each author uses the pain of others to provide historical ballast to pain that is really individual. It would be the height of egotism to use the deaths of six million in order to hide the idiosyncrasy of one’s pain or the eccentricity of one’s ideas.
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The existential mystery animating Mailer’s visions has to do not with the existence of good and evil but rather with knowing which is which. Rosenbaum gives a name to the tendency to ground our moral awareness in a false absolute: ''argumentum ad Hitlerum''. When we can no longer endure uncertainties, when we have run out of negative capability, we appeal to Hitler to end the argument: ''Hitler'' was evil. The seduction of absolutist thinking, as Mailer shows in his Cold War articulation, is that we name the world in terms of Good and Evil and then proceed to identify our own actions and interests with the Good in self-interested and thus delusory ways:  
The existential mystery animating Mailer’s visions has to do not with the existence of good and evil but rather with knowing which is which. Rosenbaum gives a name to the tendency to ground our moral awareness in a false absolute: ''argumentum ad Hitlerum''. When we can no longer endure uncertainties, when we have run out of negative capability, we appeal to Hitler to end the argument: ''Hitler'' was evil. The seduction of absolutist thinking, as Mailer shows in his Cold War articulation, is that we name the world in terms of Good and Evil and then proceed to identify our own actions and interests with the Good in self-interested and thus delusory ways:  


{{quote|
“There is no emotion on earth more powerful than anti-Americanism. To the rest of the world, America is the Garden of Eden. Unmitigated envy, the ugliest emotion of them all.”
“There is no emotion on earth more powerful than anti-Americanism. To the rest of the world, America is the Garden of Eden. Unmitigated envy, the ugliest emotion of them all.”
“Yessir.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=340}}


As George Bush put it in the wake of the 9/11 (2001) attack on the World Trade Center, you are either with us or you are against us. You are either with God or the Devil. The tendency and aim of such a formulation is to make everyone into a “yes-man,” just like the CIA analyst in the quotation above who quickly says “Yessir” to Harlot, Mailer’s architect of American postwar paranoia. In ''The Gospel according to the Son'', Mailer resists the equal-and-opposite fallacy, ''argumentum ad Jesus'', in which one identifies self-with-Jesus-with-Goodness. Mailer despises the ways in which the Bush White House rolls together what Dieter of ''The Castle in the Forest'' calls “cheap patriotism” and “cheap prayer”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=386}}, but in ''The Gospel according to the Son'' Mailer wishes not to attack a “cheap” Jesus but to imagine an authentic one.{{efn|See ''Why Are We at War?'' if you doubt Mailer despises the mentality and policies of the Bush administration.}} Mailer’s authentic Jesus (as opposed to the authentic Jesus of mainstream Christians) is one who cannot know for sure what the effects of his actions will be. Though Jesus narrates his own gospel, Mailer denies us a text on which to build a fundamentalist worldview. Here is how Brian McDonald presents the narrative uncertainty in “Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the ‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel according to the Son”'': The story, Mailer’s Jesus reassures us, “is true,” but like a careful witness testifying under oath he is quick to add the caveat, “at least to all that I recall”{{sfn|Mailer|2006|p=2}}.
“Yessir.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=340}}}}
 
As George Bush put it in the wake of the 9/11 (2001) attack on the World Trade Center, you are either with us or you are against us. You are either with God or the Devil. The tendency and aim of such a formulation is to make everyone into a “yes-man,” just like the CIA analyst in the quotation above who quickly says “Yessir” to Harlot, Mailer’s architect of American postwar paranoia. In ''The Gospel According to the Son'', Mailer resists the equal-and-opposite fallacy, ''argumentum ad Jesus'', in which one identifies self-with-Jesus-with-Goodness. Mailer despises the ways in which the Bush White House rolls together what Dieter of ''The Castle in the Forest'' calls “cheap patriotism” and “cheap prayer,”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=386}} but in ''The Gospel according to the Son'' Mailer wishes not to attack a “cheap” Jesus but to imagine an authentic one.{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Mailer|2003}} if you doubt Mailer despises the mentality and policies of the Bush administration.}} Mailer’s authentic Jesus (as opposed to the authentic Jesus of mainstream Christians) is one who cannot know for sure what the effects of his actions will be. Though Jesus narrates his own gospel, Mailer denies us a text on which to build a fundamentalist worldview. Here is how Brian McDonald presents the narrative uncertainty in “Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the ‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel according to the Son”'': The story, Mailer’s Jesus reassures us, “is true,” but like a careful witness testifying under oath he is quick to add the caveat, “at least to all that I recall.”{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=2}}


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:
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:


[W]hen 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.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=405-406}}
{{quote|[W]hen 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.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=405–06}}}}


Dieter provocatively ranks Hitler as a “statesmen,” thus restating the A. J. P. Taylor argument that Hitler would have been counted a great statesmen if only he had died at the right time, but the honorific word is inverted when we see, in context, that the necessary condition for being a statesman is an ego, a psychic callous to protect one’s sleep from meaningful knowledge of one’s actions.{{efn|Readers would be wrong to assume that Mailer is agreeing with A. J. P. Taylor. It is part of Dieter’s worldview and it is in his personal interest to defend the kind of egotism that is an insulation against subtle awareness of the feelings of others. Lest we think—as his typical detractors certainly would—that Mailer is defending egotism of this sort, we should recall the image of Ramses II after the Battle of Kadesh, the pharaoh taking care to heft every single amputated hand of the vanquished Hittite soldiers while the rest of the army enjoy the spoils of war in the most libidinal way. Mailer’s Ramses II is, in this one respect at least, the ethical antipode to contemporary leaders who, according to Dieter’s own political realism, must ''necessarily'' shield themselves from awareness of the consequences of their actions.}} When Dieter stirs in “patriotism” and fundamentalism, it becomes clear that Mailer’s Hitler has been used as a “cudgel” to beat George W. Bush, a president who has been most politely described as “incurious” regarding the facts of the world.{{efn|Cenk Uygur, a blogger from ''The Huffington Post'', has entitled his column on President Bush’s lack of curiosity “The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush.”}} “Cudgel,” in ''The Castle in the Forest'', is the name devils such as Dieter give to the Angels, who cause beings pain in their sleep when their actions are hateful rather than loving.
Dieter provocatively ranks Hitler as a “statesmen,” thus restating the A. J. P. Taylor argument that Hitler would have been counted a great statesmen if only he had died at the right time, but the honorific word is inverted when we see, in context, that the necessary condition for being a statesman is an ego, a psychic callous to protect one’s sleep from meaningful knowledge of one’s actions.{{efn|Readers would be wrong to assume that Mailer is agreeing with A. J. P. Taylor. It is part of Dieter’s worldview and it is in his personal interest to defend the kind of egotism that is an insulation against subtle awareness of the feelings of others. Lest we think—as his typical detractors certainly would—that Mailer is defending egotism of this sort, we should recall the image of Ramses II after the Battle of Kadesh, the pharaoh taking care to heft every single amputated hand of the vanquished Hittite soldiers while the rest of the army enjoy the spoils of war in the most libidinal way. Mailer’s Ramses II is, in this one respect at least, the ethical antipode to contemporary leaders who, according to Dieter’s own political realism, must ''necessarily'' shield themselves from awareness of the consequences of their actions.}} When Dieter stirs in “patriotism” and fundamentalism, it becomes clear that Mailer’s Hitler has been used as a “cudgel” to beat George W. Bush, a president who has been most politely described as “incurious” regarding the facts of the world.{{efn|Cenk Uygur, a blogger from ''The Huffington Post'', has entitled his column on President Bush’s lack of curiosity “The Incredibly, Unbelievably, Stupendously, Incurious George Bush.”}} “Cudgel,” in ''The Castle in the Forest'', is the name devils such as Dieter give to the Angels, who cause beings pain in their sleep when their actions are hateful rather than loving.
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Mailer shows every awareness in his artful rendition of the Devil’s shaping hand that ''ego'' is one of the Devil’s most important tools, but then, most shockingly, he will put in a narrative turn that does nothing so much as foreground the author. Authorial egotism comes into the foreground of Hitler’s mind when he chooses among intellectual influences:  
Mailer shows every awareness in his artful rendition of the Devil’s shaping hand that ''ego'' is one of the Devil’s most important tools, but then, most shockingly, he will put in a narrative turn that does nothing so much as foreground the author. Authorial egotism comes into the foreground of Hitler’s mind when he chooses among intellectual influences:  


He certainly rejected Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him. It was too personal—as if they were much too pleased with what they were saying. Not serious enough, Adolf decided. The other two, Kant and Schleiermacher, he simply could not read. After Jahn, his highest pleasure came from the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers. That had also been assigned to his class. Those were good stories, and deep!{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=377}}
{{quote|He certainly rejected Goethe and Schiller. Their humor annoyed him. It was too personal—as if they were much too pleased with what they were saying. Not serious enough, Adolf decided. The other two, Kant and Schleiermacher, he simply could not read. After Jahn, his highest pleasure came from the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers. That had also been assigned to his class. Those were good stories, and deep!{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=377}}}}


Adolf uses the stories of Grimm to terrorize his younger brother Edmund, whom Mailer imagines as Hitler’s first murder victim: in a variation of the killing of Abel, jealous Hitler intentionally passes Edmund the measles that will kill him. This passage is one of a dozen or so highly literate moments in ''The Castle in the Forest'' in which Mailer positively revels in the ironies that were once so properly shocking, those attaching to the apparent incongruity of Nazis who loved Beethoven.
Adolf uses the stories of Grimm to terrorize his younger brother Edmund, whom Mailer imagines as Hitler’s first murder victim: in a variation of the killing of Abel, jealous Hitler intentionally passes Edmund the measles that will kill him. This passage is one of a dozen or so highly literate moments in ''The Castle in the Forest'' in which Mailer positively revels in the ironies that were once so properly shocking, those attaching to the apparent incongruity of Nazis who loved Beethoven.
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It cannot be said that this humor is inherently ethical. The freedom of humor (and it is this often disappointing freedom of the other to disappoint you that proves that the other is not a function of your own fantasy) has its horrible uses. Hitler’s ''literary'' torture of Edmund is one of the most grimly funny moments in a novel replete with dark humor. Young Adolf has been reading Edmund terrifying Grimm stories:
It cannot be said that this humor is inherently ethical. The freedom of humor (and it is this often disappointing freedom of the other to disappoint you that proves that the other is not a function of your own fantasy) has its horrible uses. Hitler’s ''literary'' torture of Edmund is one of the most grimly funny moments in a novel replete with dark humor. Young Adolf has been reading Edmund terrifying Grimm stories:


{{quote|
“Do you want another story?”
“Do you want another story?”


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“Then maybe I don’t want to hear it.”
“Then maybe I don’t want to hear it.”


“It’s about a young man who is ordered to sleep with a corpse. In time to come you, too, may have to sleep next to a dead man.” At this point, Edmund shrieked. Then he fainted.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|379}}
“It’s about a young man who is ordered to sleep with a corpse. In time to come you, too, may have to sleep next to a dead man.”  
 
At this point, Edmund shrieked. Then he fainted.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=379}}}}


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!
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!


Mailer’s laughter in ''The Castle in the Forest'' is not the raucous, adolescent laughter of America’s 1960s black humor fiction, a laughter that is always implicitly the laughter of an overly stable know-it-all ''we''.{{efn|One could say that Yossarian is a character who must act from isolation even when he crucially chooses to act for the sake of others, but I would still characterize the laughter aroused by the novel as more social. This we carried over quite smoothly
Mailer’s laughter in ''The Castle in the Forest'' is not the raucous, adolescent laughter of America’s 1960s black humor fiction, a laughter that is always implicitly the laughter of an overly stable know-it-all ''we''.{{efn|One could say that Yossarian is a character who must act from isolation even when he crucially chooses to act for the sake of others, but I would still characterize the laughter aroused by the novel as more social. This we carried over quite smoothly
from the novel to the film ''M*A*S*H'' and to the buddy-scenarios of the television version as well. Consider the narrative situation of ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'', Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo narrative: however iconoclastic and anarchic the voice of Raoul Duke, this road novel depends for it’s effects on internalizing the “we,” so Duke is accompanied by Dr. Gonzo, his Samoan attorney (who is based on Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Mexican-American political activist). If we look through ''Castle'' carefully, we will see that Mailer has, again and again, done without the protections of an imaginary men’s club.}} We laugh at the bureaucrats in ''Catch-22''. There’s an unsettling oddity to Mailer’s style, though, an awareness that, like Dieter’s, Mailer’s humor is both on the mark and a bit to one side of the main stream of events. Mailer does not pretend to be in the ethical center, and the rude, cruel, and invasive qualities of his “diabolical” narrative technique are, he will not let us forget, essential elements in our own conventional mind-set. The castle in Mailer’s forest, the redemptive beauty that makes the pain and failures of such unappreciated masterpieces as ''Ancient Evenings'' and ''The Castle in the Forest'' bearable, is always a repetition and ever-free variation of a cavalier wit. As it is in the moment in which Adolf tortures his brother with literature, Mailer’s humor is genuinely funny and, at exactly the same time, resoundingly grim. Put- ting his own idea that our best is often closest to our worst into the mouth of Himmler, Mailer turns into the pain of his own humor and allows—encourages, actually—the nasty identifications his harshest critics made of himself and his work, that he was violent and cruel and “patriarchal” in the sense in which patriarchy is a synonym for Fascism. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to this cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably ''alone''.{{efn|None of this article could have been written if I had not been told the joke about lawyers and sharks by Professor Winfried “the Hun” Schleiner of UC Davis twenty years ago.}}
from the novel to the film ''M*A*S*H'' and to the buddy-scenarios of the television version as well. Consider the narrative situation of ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'', Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo narrative: however iconoclastic and anarchic the voice of Raoul Duke, this road novel depends for it’s effects on internalizing the “we,” so Duke is accompanied by Dr. Gonzo, his Samoan attorney (who is based on Oscar Zeta Acosta, the Mexican-American political activist). If we look through ''Castle'' carefully, we will see that Mailer has, again and again, done without the protections of an imaginary men’s club.}} We laugh at the bureaucrats in ''Catch-22''. There’s an unsettling oddity to Mailer’s style, though, an awareness that, like Dieter’s, Mailer’s humor is both on the mark and a bit to one side of the main stream of events. Mailer does not pretend to be in the ethical center, and the rude, cruel, and invasive qualities of his “diabolical” narrative technique are, he will not let us forget, essential elements in our own conventional mind-set. The castle in Mailer’s forest, the redemptive beauty that makes the pain and failures of such unappreciated masterpieces as ''Ancient Evenings'' and ''The Castle in the Forest'' bearable, is always a repetition and ever-free variation of a cavalier wit. As it is in the moment in which Adolf tortures his brother with literature, Mailer’s humor is genuinely funny and, at exactly the same time, resoundingly grim. Putting his own idea that our best is often closest to our worst into the mouth of Himmler, Mailer turns into the pain of his own humor and allows—encourages, actually—the nasty identifications his harshest critics made of himself and his work, that he was violent and cruel and “patriarchal” in the sense in which patriarchy is a synonym for Fascism. We cannot make sense of the last two decades of Mailer’s writing career without paying attention to this cavalier wit, which is, at its heart, almost invariably ''alone''.{{efn|None of this article could have been written if I had not been told the joke about lawyers and sharks by Professor Winfried “the Hun” Schleiner of UC Davis twenty years ago.}}


===Notes===
===Notes===
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* {{cite journal|last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |title=Mailer’s Cosmology |url= |journal=Modern Language Studies |volume=12 |issue=3 |date=1982 |pages=18-29 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal|last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |title=Mailer’s Cosmology |url= |journal=Modern Language Studies |volume=12 |issue=3 |date=1982 |pages=18-29 |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1983 |title=Ancient Evenings |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1983 |title=Ancient Evenings |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}
*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dial |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dial |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}
*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman |authormask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |url= |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1997 |title=The Gospel According to the Son |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman| authormask=1 |date=2007 |title= Why Are We at War |url= |location= New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1991 |title=Harlot’s Ghost |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman |authormask=1 |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |url= |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first= Norman| authormask=1 |date=2003 |title= Why Are We at War |url= |location= New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal|last=McCann|first=Sean|title=The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism|url= |journal=English Literary History|volume=67|issue=1|date=2000|pages=293–336|access-date= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal|last=McCann|first=Sean|title=The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism|url= |journal=English Literary History|volume=67|issue=1|date=2000|pages=293–336|access-date= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal|last=McDonald|first=Brian|title=Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the 'Very Jewish Jesus' of Norman Mailer's ''The Gospel according to the Son|url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=78–90|access-date= |ref=harv}}
* {{cite journal|last=McDonald|first=Brian|title=Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the 'Very Jewish Jesus' of Norman Mailer's ''The Gospel according to the Son|url= |journal=Journal of Modern Literature|volume=30|issue=1|date=2006|pages=78–90|access-date= |ref=harv}}