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The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/An American Dream: American Existentialism: Difference between revisions
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{{dc|dc=T|he 1950's was a decade of anguish for Normal Mailer,}} who has often discussed the identity crisis he suffered following the runaway success of his first novel, ''The Naked and the Dead''.(1) Mailer’s meteoric emergence as the author of an astonishing bestseller thrust Mailer into a public position from which there was no obvious next move. If he kept writing WWII novels, he might have developed into a self-parodist. If he experimented with new forms, he might be derided as an upstart. If he stopped writing books altogether, he would be a one-hit-wonder. The two novels Mailer produced during this decade, ''Barbary Shore'' (1951) and ''The Deer Park'' (1955), both testify to the strain of this crisis. They are haunted parables of inertia and surveillance. Their protagonists have only the most provisional sense of who they are and drift through their stories with their moral compasses spinning arbitrarily from north to south and back again. If ''The Naked and the Dead'' bears the common first-novel sign of wearing its influences too openly, the same can easily be said of the two following novels. While ''The Naked and the Dead'' refers to Dos Passos, ''Barbary Shore'' unselfconsciously pays homage to European novelists, particularly Camus and Koestler, while ''The Deer Park'' is drenched in the style of Californian writers, particularly Hammett and West. Throughout these novels, one senses that Mailer is still casting about for a style. By his next work of fiction, ''An American Dream'' (1965), we have the Norman Mailer we recognize, as if he had risen up from some literary ooze into his most recognizable form, up to his most characteristic literary devices; recklessly pitting God against the Devil, interlarding his social, sexual, and literary lives into one another, and writing every sentence as if it were his last. In the stylistic transition from the sophomore novels to ''An American Dream'', we observe Mailer in the act of creating himself. Mailer himself was self-conscious of this evolution in his writerly identity. The turning point in ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1958) is chapter three (of five), “Births,” in which Mailer describes the fundamental rearrangement of | {{dc|dc=T|he 1950's was a decade of anguish for Normal Mailer,}} who has often discussed the identity crisis he suffered following the runaway success of his first novel, ''The Naked and the Dead''.(1) Mailer’s meteoric emergence as the author of an astonishing bestseller thrust Mailer into a public position from which there was no obvious next move. If he kept writing WWII novels, he might have developed into a self-parodist. If he experimented with new forms, he might be derided as an upstart. If he stopped writing books altogether, he would be a one-hit-wonder. The two novels Mailer produced during this decade, ''Barbary Shore'' (1951) and ''The Deer Park'' (1955), both testify to the strain of this crisis. They are haunted parables of inertia and surveillance. Their protagonists have only the most provisional sense of who they are and drift through their stories with their moral compasses spinning arbitrarily from north to south and back again. If ''The Naked and the Dead'' bears the common first-novel sign of wearing its influences too openly, the same can easily be said of the two following novels. While ''The Naked and the Dead'' refers to Dos Passos, ''Barbary Shore'' unselfconsciously pays homage to European novelists, particularly Camus and Koestler, while ''The Deer Park'' is drenched in the style of Californian writers, particularly Hammett and West. Throughout these novels, one senses that Mailer is still casting about for a style. By his next work of fiction, ''An American Dream'' (1965), we have the Norman Mailer we recognize, as if he had risen up from some literary ooze into his most recognizable form, up to his most characteristic literary devices; recklessly pitting God against the Devil, interlarding his social, sexual, and literary lives into one another, and writing every sentence as if it were his last. In the stylistic transition from the sophomore novels to ''An American Dream'', we observe Mailer in the act of creating himself. Mailer himself was self-conscious of this evolution in his writerly identity. The turning point in ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1958) is chapter three (of five), “Births,” in which Mailer describes the fundamental rearrangement of | ||
the self-understanding that he experienced between the proofs of ''The Deer Park'' and his extensive revisions: “I turned within my psyche I can almost believe, for I felt something shift to murder in me” (234). This distinctly Mailerian conversion is informed by his identification with the new street culture of hipsterism. Among those contemporary commentators who read ''Advertisements'' as the lamentations of a failed novelist, a representative voice is Charles I. Glicksburg, who writes | the self-understanding that he experienced between the proofs of ''The Deer Park'' and his extensive revisions: “I turned within my psyche I can almost believe, for I felt something shift to murder in me” (234). This distinctly Mailerian conversion is informed by his identification with the new street culture of hipsterism. Among those contemporary commentators who read ''Advertisements'' as the lamentations of a failed novelist, a representative voice is Charles I. Glicksburg, who writes: | ||
{{quote|What Mailer never comes to grips with is the fundamental question of how Hip provides a viable aesthetic for the writer of fiction... Mailer’s negative and confused ‘theology’ will not serve to promote his career as a novelist, for Hip has no direct bearing on the problem the writer faces when he settles down to the task of composing fiction. There is no such mythical creature as a Hip novelist. (33)}} | {{quote|What Mailer never comes to grips with is the fundamental question of how Hip provides a viable aesthetic for the writer of fiction... Mailer’s negative and confused ‘theology’ will not serve to promote his career as a novelist, for Hip has no direct bearing on the problem the writer faces when he settles down to the task of composing fiction. There is no such mythical creature as a Hip novelist. (33)}} | ||
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Mailer has told us that “there is one single burning pinpoint in the vision in hip: it’s that God is in danger of dying” (''Advertisements'' 380). In ''An American Dream'', it is a tenet of Rojack’s existential philosophy that “God’s in a war with the Devil, and God may lose” (236). Everything Rojack sees and does in the thirty-two hours of his story is inseparable from this vulnerability of God to the predations of the Devil. The random sequence of events that constitutes the narrative plot of the novel is transformed through | Mailer has told us that “there is one single burning pinpoint in the vision in hip: it’s that God is in danger of dying” (''Advertisements'' 380). In ''An American Dream'', it is a tenet of Rojack’s existential philosophy that “God’s in a war with the Devil, and God may lose” (236). Everything Rojack sees and does in the thirty-two hours of his story is inseparable from this vulnerability of God to the predations of the Devil. The random sequence of events that constitutes the narrative plot of the novel is transformed through | ||
Rojack’s existential theology into a mythological odyssey. By some mystical coincidence, Cherry shares Rojack’s conviction about the metaphysical dimension of human choices. She is haunted by “the idea that God is weaker because I didn’t turn out well” (197). Kelly, moreover, gleefully plays the role of the Devil which Rojack’s intuitions have assigned to him. Rojack is really in the world he has philosophized, and so every action he performs is fraught with a significance that bears no relation to its worldly consequences, but represents a victory or a defeat on a universal and hence invisible plane. Rojack’s murder of his wife is obviously a sickening crime in the worldly sense, but to look for the substance of Rojack’s actions in the factual pragmatic modality would be to make a hash of Mailer’s story. One of the most radical achievements of this book is its complete dislocation of heroism from conventional morality. If Rojack is a hero or a villain, a warrior for God or the Devil, it has nothing to do with how we feel about uxoricide or, in the case of Ruta, anal rape. Rojack perceives the moral character of his actions by their alignment with an entirely intuitional sense of symbolic valences. The result is that every moment of Rojack’s story is saturated with a significance that is immediate but at the same time mysterious and ambiguous. Even Rojack can never be sure that he is reading the valences accurately: “Am I now good?” he wonders after killing Deborah, or “Am I evil forever?” (38). It is surely one definitive fate or the other—that is the metaphysical dimension of Rojack’s belief-system—but there is no way to tell which one—and that is the existential twist. The result of the uncertainty is that Rojack has to try again and again, yet he can never finally succeed. Like Sartre’s anguished consciousness, Rojack is burdened at every turn with the urgent responsibility of deciding the fate of mankind and the universe. Should he come in Ruta’s ass or in her vagina? Should he follow Shago to Harlem or obey Kelly’s summons? Should he walk the parapet or scoff at the absurdity of such an insane gesture? Rojack’s actions in response to these seemingly trivial dilemmas have consequences that go to the root of Rojack’s sense of the universe, and they fill him with the dread of a sacred onus: “Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of anxieties, for I believed God was not love but courage” (204). This all-pervasive emphasis on heroic courage reconfigures the ennui characteristic of conventional existential fiction | Rojack’s existential theology into a mythological odyssey. By some mystical coincidence, Cherry shares Rojack’s conviction about the metaphysical dimension of human choices. She is haunted by “the idea that God is weaker because I didn’t turn out well” (197). Kelly, moreover, gleefully plays the role of the Devil which Rojack’s intuitions have assigned to him. Rojack is really in the world he has philosophized, and so every action he performs is fraught with a significance that bears no relation to its worldly consequences, but represents a victory or a defeat on a universal and hence invisible plane. Rojack’s murder of his wife is obviously a sickening crime in the worldly sense, but to look for the substance of Rojack’s actions in the factual pragmatic modality would be to make a hash of Mailer’s story. One of the most radical achievements of this book is its complete dislocation of heroism from conventional morality. If Rojack is a hero or a villain, a warrior for God or the Devil, it has nothing to do with how we feel about uxoricide or, in the case of Ruta, anal rape. Rojack perceives the moral character of his actions by their alignment with an entirely intuitional sense of symbolic valences. The result is that every moment of Rojack’s story is saturated with a significance that is immediate but at the same time mysterious and ambiguous. Even Rojack can never be sure that he is reading the valences accurately: “Am I now good?” he wonders after killing Deborah, or “Am I evil forever?” (38). It is surely one definitive fate or the other—that is the metaphysical dimension of Rojack’s belief-system—but there is no way to tell which one—and that is the existential twist. The result of the uncertainty is that Rojack has to try again and again, yet he can never finally succeed. Like Sartre’s anguished consciousness, Rojack is burdened at every turn with the urgent responsibility of deciding the fate of mankind and the universe. Should he come in Ruta’s ass or in her vagina? Should he follow Shago to Harlem or obey Kelly’s summons? Should he walk the parapet or scoff at the absurdity of such an insane gesture? Rojack’s actions in response to these seemingly trivial dilemmas have consequences that go to the root of Rojack’s sense of the universe, and they fill him with the dread of a sacred onus: “Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of anxieties, for I believed God was not love but courage” (204). This all-pervasive emphasis on heroic courage reconfigures the ennui characteristic of conventional existential fiction (Barth’s ''The End of the Road'', Bellow’s ''Dangling Man'', Percy’s ''The Moviegoer'', Mailer’s ''Barbary Shore'') into the plot-driven suspense more characteristic of an action movie in which the hero is called upon in every scene to save the world. | ||
Closely connected to the mood of cosmic significance permeating every development in the plot of ''An American Dream'' is the manner in which Rojack is conceived as a character in contrast to Mailer’s previous protagonists. In ''Barbary Shore'', Lovett is planning to write “a large ambitious work about an immense institution... and about the people who wandered through it. The book had a hero and a heroine, but they never met while they were in the institution. It was only when they escaped... that they were able to love and so discover each other” (58!. Lovett, of course, is the hero of this story, clamped down under a set of circumstances that defer any possibility of personal transformation into the future. Indeed, we learn that this deferral is to be indefinitely and probably perpetually postponed for Lovett himself. In the final chapter, Lovett perceives, “If I fled down the alley which led from that rooming house, it was only to enter another, then another” (311). There is no escape from the institution, and therefore Lovett’s character is condemned to a state of suspended animation, incapable of the kind of potentiality that gives meaning to agency. Likewise, O’Shaugnessy spends most of The Deer Park wandering without direction in a fog of self alienation: “I didn’t know what was right, and I didn’t know if I cared, and I didn’t even care if I knew what I wanted or what was going on in me” ~224!. O’Shaugnessy’s final scenes are charged with an urgency and a will toward self-transformative encounters that echoes Mailer’s own experience of existential rebirth. In O’Shaugnessy’s closing thoughts on the kind of writer he will aspire to be, we hear Mailer’s distinctive new voice: “I know that finally one must do, simply do, for we act in total ignorance and yet in honest ignorance we must act, or we can never learn, for we can hardly believe what we are told, we can only measure what has happened inside ourselves” (326). | |||