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

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}}

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}}.

[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}}

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}}

“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}}

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.}}

*{{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=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=2007 |title= Why Are We at War |url= |location= New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv}}