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shown as double, sometimes multiple personalities. Before moving to a more
shown as double, sometimes multiple personalities. Before moving to a more
specific treatment of the double characters in ''Ghost'', I believe that it is
specific treatment of the double characters in ''Ghost'', I believe that it is
important here briefly to note the seminal role Russian fiction has played in the development of this character type in modern fiction.   
important here briefly to note the seminal role Russian fiction has played in the development of this character type in modern fiction.
 
The fictional representation of the dual or double personality embodied in the ''Doppelgänger'' of the German romantics, such as E.T.A. Hoffmann,
became one of the salient features in the works of Gogol and Dostoevsky. Gogol’s stories, such as “The Diary of a Madman” and “The Nose” (1836), play provocative but ambiguous variations on the dual personality. They serve as the immediate inspiration for Dostoevsky’s early stories, including most graphically “The Double” (1844). In this story, an aggressive, self-confident Golyadkin Jr. torments his timid and unsure other half, Golyadkin Sr. The nameless (anti) hero in “Notes from Underground” (1864) is Golyadkin’s more intellectual direct descendant, who oscillates between Schilleresque dreams of the sublime and acts of unspeakable nastiness. Subsequently in Dostoevsky, as we have seen with regard to Raskolnikov, all of
his major characters are profoundly divided within themselves. Numerous variations on this character type, including notably Stevenson’s "Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde,” Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” and Camus’s “The Stranger” comprise an important mini-line in modern fiction.
 
Mailer’s contribution to this tradition is his portrayal of the characters in ''Ghost'' either as actual or potential double agents. Those characters who are not spies, such as Jack Kennedy, the mobster Sam Giancana, and their lover Modene Murphy, with whom Hubbard also sleeps while trying to glean
information on Kennedy, are not double agents but rather double dealers in their personal lives, if not in their professional lives as well.  Murphy openly declares her need always to have two different lovers at any given time, and
her part-time paramour, Kennedy, acts in the same manner. Moreover, nearly all of Mailer’s characters in ''Ghost'' are double agents/characters within
themselves. For example, Radcliffe graduate Kittredge, the seemingly controlled, supremely rational, scholarly proponent of her own version of the Alpha-Omega theory of human personality, speaks with a ghost and becomes the passionate lover of first Harlot, then Hubbard, and finally Dix Butler.  She is also an exemplary and doting mother to her son Christopher. For his part, Harry Hubbard’s duality of personality breaks down along at
least a couple of lines, including especially the struggle within him between timidity and the urge to perform deeds of machismo. Like virtually all of the
other characters in ''Ghost'', Herrick Hubbard has at least one code name, two nicknames, Harry and Rick, and a false name Harlot gives him for his false passport, William Madden Libby. Although code names are the norm for spies, they too reflect the dual and sometimes duplicitous nature of the practitioners of this ancient profession.
 
Another seminal theme in Russian literature that is signaled by the title of Ivan Turgenev’s novel ''Fathers and Children'' (1861), usually translated as ''Fathers and Sons'', and is reflected in ''Ghost'', but only after it has been refracted
through Dostoevsky’s novels ''The Devils'' and ''The Brothers Karamazov''. The intense but fundamentally restrained and ultimately unresolved generational
struggle of Turgenev’s novel is transformed in ''The Devils'' into a battle royal with apocalyptic implications. In ''Karamazovs'', the father Fedor has spawned a brood that includes the innocent believer Alyosha, the resolute rationalist Ivan, the sensualist Dmitry, and an utterly corrupted bastard son Smerdiakov, who murders Fedor.
 
Mailer creates in ''Ghost'' a collective portrait of the American spy that has affinities with Dostoevsky’s representation of the ''Karamazovs'', as well as with his treatment of the conspirators in ''The Devils''.
 
The domineering father figure of Harlot plays a role that, broadly speaking, is not so different from the
one father Fedor plays in ''Brothers'', for Harlot is the progenitor of a whole generation of spies, each of whom represents a different approach to the profession, and of course to life itself. Not everyone in ''Ghost'' is a ''protégé'' of Harlot, since some of the others in his generation of the fathers are suspicious and/or envious and/or frightened of Harlot. Mailer’s multi-faceted depiction of the American spy contains true believers in the Company (CIA), such as E. Howard Hunt and the elder Hubbard, and also perhaps Rosen, at one end of the spectrum, and opportunists for whom espionage is nothing more
than a means of acquiring wealth or power at the other end of the spectrum. Dix Butler is the ultimate opportunist among these characters, someone with fearsome talents in all of the darker, violent arts of espionage, someone who uses them ruthlessly but for no defined purpose. Butler is the enigmatic, explosive, risk-taking side of Harlot drawn out to its logical extreme. He is the Smerdiakov of ''Ghost'' and is totally corrupt and completely without scruples; he is not so much a professional agent of espionage as a bastard agent, a rogue spy who, as he does in his assault on the Close, uses the skills he acquired in the Agency for murderous purposes. At the end of ''Ghost'', we do not know if Butler has killed Harlot, his spiritual father, but this scenario is a possibility that Harry Hubbard contemplates. (Kittredge’s conversation with what is presumably Harlot’s ghost would tend to support this
interpretation—at least for believers in ghosts.) Smerdiakov is driven to kill his father, Fedor, largely because he resents his father’s harsh treatment of him. We know less about Butler’s motives, but we cannot exclude resentment of and rivalry with Harlot. Ultimately though, we do not know what it is that drives him.
 
If translation of the title of ''The Devils'' had been done more carefully in the first place, perhaps scholars who refer to it in English would not be constantly forced to note that the novel has also been translated as ''The Possessed'', but that the most accurate version of the Russian title, ''Besy'', would be ''The Demons''. In this novel (which I believe is equal to anything Dostoevsky
wrote), Peter Verkhovensky assembles a motley crew of sycophants to kill a man with the ostensible purpose of using the murder to galvanize them into
something like a revolutionary cell. At the commission of the murder, which was clearly based on the Nechaev affair mentioned above, this rabble disintegrates into a pathetic pack of whiners and squealers, signaling the utter failure of the whole venture.
 
It would, of course, be a gross distortion to characterize Mailer’s depiction of the fiasco of the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion in these terms. One has to wonder, though, about the conduct of some of the CIA’s agents in their Cold War operations in Washington, Berlin, Uruguay, and Cuba, for among them were soulless ideologues, cynical opportunists, some of them with nothing less than demonic zeal and others with clearly criminal proclivities, engaged
in all manner of violations of legal and ethical norms, up to and including murder and attempted murder, in the name of the Company, and for some,
in the name of the cause. In so doing, they naturally used the justification that the enemy had to be met on its own unprincipled, ruthless, and brutal terms.
 
These positions are not, however, the judgments of Harry Hubbard, even though this is what he describes in his narration. Hubbard, who disdains the careerists, is himself not an opportunist and also not a complete true believer, vacillating between fearing and revering Harlot, his unconventional,
unpredictable mentor and protector, his spiritual father. Hubbard is often aware of the excesses committed by Harlot, Dix Butler, Bill Harvey, and others, but he seems willing to accept them as a necessary part of doing business in the Company. In his descriptions of the CIA’s extended campaign to
overthrow Fidel Castro, Hubbard is not concerned with the wisdom of the policy, but rather with demonstrating his own machismo by taking part in
the Bay of Pigs invasion and other incursions onto Cuban territory. In a fit of rage at losing double agent Chevi Fuertes, he “consecrates” himself to the
assassination of Fidel Castro (1229). Years later, Harry Hubbard maintains an attitude of detachment toward his involvement in the campaign against Castro and does not seem to question any aspect of it. Hubbard’s faith in the Company and in the country it is meant to serve remains fundamentally
unshaken until he comes to think that Harlot may have gone over to the Soviet side. The possibility of such a betrayal by Harlot forces Hubbard to
reevaluate everything he thought he knew and believed about his spiritual father, and in a real sense, everything he thought he understood about life.
 
David Anshen argues persuasively that ''Ghost'' contains a great hoax, that is, a hoax on the genre of the novel itself {{sfn|Anshen|2008|p=466-70}}. That is certainly an intriguing possibility. Another possibility is that ''Ghost'' is Mailer’s contribution to the genre of the unfinished novel. As we know, novels may be unfinished for a variety of reasons. The Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov worked on ''The Master and Margarita'', [''Master i Margarita''] {{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|pp=1967}} from the late 1920s throughout the 1930s, and was still making changes literally on his deathbed but was unable to finish the novel before he died in 1939. The German writer Robert Musil wrote a novel, ''The Man Without Qualities'' [''Der Mann
ohne Eigenschaften''] {{sfn|Musil|1995|pp=1930-1942}} over twenty years but was also unable to fin�ish it, as he continued to append to it a long series of variations on ''possible''
endings. In the case of ''Ghost'', as Anshen points out, Norman Mailer gave two different explanations for not finishing the novel. The first, as Anshen writes, was that Mailer believed that “technology has dehumanized espionage” {{sfn|Anshen|2008|pp=468}}. A more interesting explanation Anshen cites may be found in a BBC
interview quoted by Michael Glenday in which Mailer said, “the reader having been given the end and the beginning will conceive of ‘that middle’”;
then Mailer adds that if he does complete the novel, readers will have a chance to “check their version against mine” {{sfn|Anshen|2008|pp=135}}.
 
I wonder, too, whether there might be a more mundane reason. Perhaps the usually indefatigable Mailer may have said all that he had to say about the
characters, and even more so about the events they were involved in. ''Ghost'' was published in 1991, the same year the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a
state. That momentous event had the effect, willy-nilly, of changing our perspectives on the Soviet Union and its history.  It also made possible Mailer’s visit to Russia during which he conducted extensive interviews with people who had known Lee Harvey Oswald. I would further contend that on a certain level ''Oswald’s Tale'' is the sequel to ''Harlot’s Ghost'', at least with respect to
Mailer’s detailed portrait of the Soviet Union of the early 1960s. Whether it is or it is not, the tale of Oswald may have quenched Mailer’s appetite for the detritus of the old Soviet state for at least long enough for him to lose interest in ''Ghost'' as well.
 
In ''Ghost'', the greater philosophical and moral questions about human nature and the human condition are unresolved. That they will remain so is
suggested in a letter from Kittredge to Harry Hubbard where she quotes Harlot as saying, “It is painful in the extreme to live with questions rather with answers, but that is the only honorable intellectual course” {{sfn|Mailer|1991|pp=1206}}. I would add, moreover, that from the point of view of the author, beyond intellectual honesty, there is the question of artistic credibility. It is one thing to describe the often bizarre, criminal conduct of the CIA and its agents, but it
is quite another thing to claim to have found the answers to life’s eternal conundra. 
 
As critics of Mailer we seem intent on pinning him down with respect to his attitude toward the events and characters he describes. In ''Ghost'', this may
be a fruitless project, because the lens Harry Hubbard employs to see the world, except in certain places, such as the description of Desert Mountain
at the beginning of the novel, is not necessarily the lens of Norman Mailer. Together with the incomplete plot, this narrative stance renders any such judgments problematic and speculative.
 
Having mentioned Desert Mountain, I cannot resist a brief remark about the magnificent lyrical sketch of the island with which Mailer begins the
novel. Here his prose rhymes and has rhythm and alliteration, as in “I love
the piercing blue of Frenchman’s Bay and Blue Hill Bay, and the bottomless blue of the Eastern and Western Way” {{sfn|Mailer|1991|pp=4}}. And he creates a catalogue of flowers that will send all but an expert scurrying to the dictionary: “The old hayfields smell of redtop and timothy, and wildflowers bloom. The northern blue violet and the starflower, the wood sorrel and the checkerberry, painted trillium and wild geranium, golden heather and Indian pipe grow in our bogs and fields and on the sunny slopes of mountains in the seams between
ledges of rock” {{sfn|Mailer|1991|pp=5}}.
 
If the reader of ''Ghost'' begins to flag in the middle of Harry Hubbard’s correspondence with Modene Murphy, he or she can slip back to this splendid
passage of poetic prose as a quick refresher.
 
Mailer’s last novel with prominent ties to Russian literature is of course ''The Castle in the Forest'', which is itself in a way, perhaps at least two ways, also unfinished. Before moving to that discussion, however, I would like to examine Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son'' in relation to Mikhail Bulgakov’s portrait of Jesus/Yeshua in his novel ''The Master and Margarita'', because these two works resonate with and illuminate each other in some intriguing and important ways.
 
 
===Getting the Story of Yeshua Straight: Mailer and Bulgakov {{efn|I gave a talk on this topic at the Norman Mailer Society Conference in October 2007.}}===
 
The first chapter of Mikhail Bulgakov’s ''Master and Margarita'', which was written during the late 1920s and 1930s but only published for the first time
in 1967–68, opens with a conversation about Jesus between a Soviet literary bureaucrat named Berlioz and a poet named Bezdomny, whose name translates into English as Homeless. Ivan Bezdomny has written a poem in the anti-religious spirit of the times portraying Jesus in a most negative light.
Berlioz, however, claims that he has missed the point, which is that Jesus
“never existed at all” {{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|pp=5}}. While Berlioz continues to develop a series of examples from different world religions to buttress his argument, a strange-looking man comes up to them and butts into their conversation. This man,
who carries a walking stick with a black knob in the shape of a poodle, turns out to be, as we learn later in the novel, someone named Woland, who is Bulgakov’s version of a modern Mephistopheles in Moscow. (The name Woland
is almost certainly derived from the demon in German folklore called Wieland, who was responsible for putting the fetters on people in Hell.)  For
all of his supposed erudition, Berlioz does not recognize who Woland is, and neither does the less well-read poet Bezdomny. As a conclusion to the discussion about Jesus, Woland finally pronounces that, “no points of view arenecessary. He simply existed, and that’s all there is to it” {{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|pp=12}}.
 
For his part, Mailer, from all appearances, agrees with Bulgakov’s character Woland, because Mailer has written a novel called ''The Gospel According to the Son'' (1997) from the first person point of view of Jesus himself. Since both authors affirm that this Jesus did exist, the question becomes, what sort
of person, man, or god do these two authors portray him as. (I will refer to Jesus mainly by his Aramaic name, Yeshua, since this is what Mailer and Bulgakov also do for the most part in their novels.)
 
I should say early on that Norman Mailer was not familiar with Bulgakov’s novel when he wrote ''The Gospel According to the Son'' {{efn|Mailer told me this in a conversation we had in Tampa in 2006.}}. So I am not talking here about influence. Rather, I am interested in how these two versions of the Yeshua story intersect, contradict, and mutually illuminate each other. I am also interested in how these stories shed light on what I am calling the Urtext—Your text/Our Text of the story. Here I can not promise to perform any tricks in the style of Stanley Fish, who is proud of his ability to
make texts disappear throughout his ''Is There a Text in This Class?'' On the contrary, this text/story, which has four biblical versions and several apochryphal ones, which Bulgakov was familiar with, seems to me to be pretty strong
evidence of the persistence of certain texts rather than their disappearance. It seems to me that the persistence of the story of Yeshua and his friends—more on them later—is certainly an affirmation of the validity of certain branches of reader response-reading theory that maintain that the real story is one we construct, destruct, and/or reconstruct for ourselves from the Urtext—hence my little formulation Urtext[=]Your Text/Our Text. Finally, I would also like to speculate on what these two tales of Yeshua tell us about the ways in which
modern writers constantly retell “sacred texts”; are they desacralizing them or are they resacralizing them to suit their own purposes?
 
Since both Mailer and Bulgakov undertake to get the story of Yeshua straight, it seems that they must believe someone before them got the story
wrong. And this is indeed the case, and what is more, they do not hesitate to identify the principal culprit. In the second chapter of the ''Master and Margarita'' Bulgakov raises this very issue in an interview between Yeshua and Pontius Pilate. When Pontius Pilate asks Yeshua whether he really did advocate destroying the temple, as had been reported, here is what Yeshua says:
“These good people haven’t learned anything and they have mixed up everything that I have said. In general I’m beginning to fear that this mix-up will
last for a very long time. And it is all because he [Levi Matvei/Matthew Levi] writes down what I say incorrectly” {{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|pp=16}}. Yeshua goes on to say that,
“[Mathew] walks and walks alone with a goatskin parchment and writes unceasingly. But once I took a look at this parchment and was aghast. Absolutely nothing that was written down there did I ever say. I begged him, 'For God's sake burn your parchment!' But he tore it out of my hands and ran away" {{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|pp=16}}.
 
Mailer’s Son is just as skeptical about what his “scribes,” as he calls them, and in particular Mathew, are writing down about his sayings. He says that “They had me saying all manner of things, and some were the opposite of others. Matthew put so many sayings together; indeed, that he might as well
have had me not ceasing to speak for a day and a night, and speaking out of two mouths that did not listen to each other” {{sfn|Mailer|1997|pp=111}}.
 
Thus, for both Mailer and Bulgakov, Matthew turns out to be the perfect whipping boy for motivating their own versions of the Yeshua story. Bulgakov goes even further in developing Mathew, not just as someone who always gets the story wrong, but as a naïve but well meaning “goodie two shoes” who can’t seem to do anything right. For example, when Yeshua is on the way to being crucified, Matthew runs off to get a knife with which to kill Yeshua and thus spare him the ordeal of crucifixion, but he arrives too late.
 
Bulgakov’s Matthew is also, as new converts often are, a literal believer, a kind of pre-fundamentalist. At the execution of Yeshua, Matthew demands that God send a miracle to put Yeshua out of his misery after more than four hours on his post. When the miracle does not come, Mathew curses God,
calls him deaf and says, “You are a god of evil” {{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|pp=149}}. However, when a thunderstorm arrives soon after, Levi regrets that he was too hasty with his curses and now believes that God will no longer listen to him.
 
Let me now return to Yeshua and Pilate, for their interactions are crucial
to ''The Master and Margarita'' and are also very important to ''Gospel''. Pilate
figures importantly in both works, as one would expect, and he is also portrayed as highly intelligent by both authors. In Bulgakov’s ''Master and Margarita'', Yeshua is a philosopher who Pilate has whipped for constantly referring to him, not by his title, Hegemon, but as “good man.” Yeshua does
this because it is his habit to call everyone, including the brutal Roman centurion with the nickname of Mark the Rat Killer—he is the one who gives him a mild whipping—a “good man.” Pilate refers to Yeshua alternately as a vagrant philosopher, a holy fool who is insane, deranged, or mentally ill.
 
In Mailer’s ''Gospel'', Pilate also appears in the role of philosopher, when he says, “What is truth? Where there is truth, there will be no peace. Where
peace abides, you will find no truth” {{sfn|Mailer|1997|pp=219}}. And at the very end of ''Gospel'', Yeshua recalls these words of Pilate and concludes that since “in peace there was no truth, and in truth, no peace. For that reason I do not bring peace but a sword. I would wage war on all that makes less that we ought to be, less generous” {{sfn|Mailer|1997|pp=241}}. Mailer’s use of Pilate as a motivator of Yeshua’s own philosophy is as far as I know an innovation in his retelling of the story of Yeshua and Pilate. Furthermore, Yeshua’s employment of Pilate as a source of wisdom would probably appear to be blasphemous to some. For Mailer, however, the notion that good and evil, as well as their exponents, may be intertwined in an intricate nexus that is difficult or impossible for us to untangle, is virtually an article of faith, one that appears early in ''Gospel'', when
Yeshua wonders whether the Devil may also be capable of good deeds {{sfn|Mailer|1997|pp=15}}.
 
One of the most problematic and controversial aspects of Bulgakov’s ''Master'' is his depiction of Pilate’s guilt for his part in the crucifixion of
Yeshua and his eventual release from that guilt. This question is a vexed one for a number of reasons. Despite his considerable temporal power, Pilate’s options in this matter of executing Yeshua were greatly proscribed by local politics and custom. We know that his initial ruling—forgive my own synthetic paraphrase—“I see no guilt in this man” eventually yielded—here again my own synoptic version—to a combination of pressures from the
Sanhedrin and/or local popular opinion. One of Bulgakov’s innovations in his version of the story is, as just noted, to portray Pilate as having suffered great pangs of guilt over nearly two millennia for having lacked the courage to stop the execution of an obviously innocent man. What is more, during all of this time Bulgakov’s Pilate wanted to talk again with that eccentric
philosopher to whose execution he had acceded.
 
The most controversial part of Bulgakov’s story of Yeshua and Pilate takes place near the end of the novel, when Pilate is freed from his centuries’ long
torment and allowed to have his long desired conversation with Yeshua in the light of the moon. Virtually all critics view this passage to mean that
Pilate is ultimately rewarded with light, although I would point out that moonlight is far more ambiguous than its daytime counterpart. In any case,
the notion that Pilate should receive any release or reward at all is problematic because, as Gary Rosenshield writes, “Pilate himself recognizes that he deserves his reputation as a terrible monster among the Jews” {{sfn|Rosenshield|1997|pp=198}}— whatever guilt he may have experienced for however long.
 
Although I find Bulgakov’s attribution of a guilty conscience to Pilate an original twist on the story of Yeshua and Pilate, I doubt that it comports with
the historical Pilate. In this regard I find that Norman Mailer’s version of the story more persuasive, for Mailer depicts Pilate as a corrupt bribe taker who
makes a deal with the Sanhedrin to allow Yeshua’s execution for considerable personal gain. When one takes into account what we know about how
business was done in the Roman Empire, Mailer’s insight seems more than
plausible.
 
One of the more intriguing characters on the Jerusalem scene in the time
of Yeshua was his erstwhile friend Judas/Yehudah. Bulgakov, who is perhaps most inventive in his portrayals of Pilate and Woland, leaves us with
a fairly standard portrait of Yehudah, although he does give the tale a couple of twists. The first of these is that a young woman named Niza is
described as betraying Yehudah, who has come down to us as the archetypical betrayer. Also, Yehudah is executed by order of Pilate, who tells the head
of the secret police, Aphranius, that he has a premonition that Yehudah will
be executed (stabbed to death) the night of their meeting, and that the deed
will be carried out by one of Yeshua’s followers; the money he was to be
paid will be returned to Caiaphus. When Aphranius wonders that all this can be accomplished in the short time of one night, Pilate insists that it can
and that his intuition, which has never been wrong, tells him Yehudah will
be executed {{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|pp=262–3}}. Thus does Pilate, in the best mafia or KGB style, insure
that Yehudah will pay the ultimate penalty for what Pilate calls his “mon�strous betrayal” {{sfn|Bulgakpv|1996|pp=262}}.
 
In ''Gospel'', Judas receives an entirely different treatment. Here Yeshua is
wholly sympathetic with Judas, because he loved him and also because his
suffering would be greater even than his own. In Mailer’s version of the story,
Yeshua says,“No matter that Judas had betrayed me; he had also warned me” {{sfn|Mailer|1997|pp=214}}. Furthermore, Yeshua believes that Judas was the one among his disciples who knew most about the deals between Pilate and the local priests,
especially Caiaphas, who together with Pilate kept order in Jerusalem. Part
of this arrangement included Pilate receiving gold from the Temple in secret.
Yeshua says that Judas was not happy about these deals and that he was dissatisfied with him (Yeshua), because he (Judas) wanted to revolt against Roman rule. Finally, in ''Gospel’s'' version of the story, Judas gave back the silver coins and hanged himself {{sfn|Mailer|1997|pp=217}}.
 
Leaving Pilate aside at least for the moment, let us turn again to our hero, Yeshua. And when we think of Yeshua, we cannot but help thinking of mir�acles. The question of how both authors treat miracles is particularly tricky, if only because modern readers may or may not be amenable to believing in such miracles. Moreover, both authors stress the human aspects of Yeshua over the divine, or ostensibly divine ones. For the most part, Mailer’s Yeshua
downplays the more exaggerated versions of his miraculous performances, as for example when he gives a detailed explanation of how he fed the people in the wilderness by cutting up the bread and fish into small pieces. He
says that “this story was much exaggerated by Mark and Matthew and Luke. No angel appeared in the sky, nor did the manna that God gave to Moses
appear” {{sfn|Mailer|1997|pp=116}}. From a strictly realistic point of view, there is another rather
large miracle hidden here—actually it is in plain sight. And that is that Yeshua, in his post-mortal guise of course, has the privilege most historical
figures do not get to enjoy, which is to be able to answer one’s chroniclers even after one’s own death.
 
But there are numerous miracles in ''Gospel'' that, unlike the story about the
bread and the fish, are not rationalized. Many of these have to do with
Yeshua’s power to heal the sick and, most dramatically, in the case of Lazarus, raising the dead. In this instance, Yeshua declares, “I had the power to raise a man who had begun to rot” {{sfn|Mailer|1997|pp=144}}. Here I would like to note briefly that Tolstoy would have scorned both Bulgakov’s and Mailer’s portrayals of
Yeshua, for in his ''The Four Gospels Harmonized and Translated'' (published
first in 1902 in Russian and in English translation in 1904) he rigorously
rejects any intimations of the miraculous in all of the gospel stories, including the accounts of the birth of Christ, the business with the bread and fish in the wilderness, and the “raising” of Lazarus.
 
In Mailer’s ''Gospel'', Yeshua is uneasy with his ability to perform miracles; he is sometimes puzzled, even abashed at his talent. At one point, in speaking with a wise elder about his power to work miracles, Yeshua wonders whether the Devil also might not be able to use his power to do good {{sfn|Mailer|1997|pp=15}}. This thought forms an interesting intersection with Bulgakov’s ''Master and Margarita'', where the notion of the devil performing good deeds is given an
explicitly Faustian character. In fact, the epigraph to the novel is from Goethe’s Faust, and here is how it reads: “I am part of that power that forever wills evil and forever works good.” This notion is not developed in ''Gospel'', however, where Mailer is more concerned with Yeshua’s battle with the Devil, who he believes is constantly trying to outsmart him. Mailer’s portrayal of
Yeshua struggling to understand who he is and what his role in life should be
gives ''Gospel'' the decided flavor of a Bildungsroman, whereas in Bulgakov’s ''Master'' we encounter Yeshua only in his last days.
 
Bulgakov, who in other places in ''Master'' and elsewhere often deals in the fantastic and the supernatural, is much more measured in his treatment of Yeshua and the miraculous. There is one place, though, where Yeshua demonstrates powers that appear to be, if not strictly divine, well beyond the
capability of most mere mortals. This takes place in his interview with Pilate, when he figures out that Pilate is suffering from a migraine headache. Yeshua
says to Pilate, “your head aches, and it aches so badly that you’re thinking faintheartedly about death .... But your torments will soon end, and your
headache will pass” {{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|pp=17}}. Shortly thereafter he tells him that his headache is
over and that he should go for a walk in the gardens on Mount Eleon {{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|pp=18}}. As
we see here, Bulgakov’s Yeshua also has the power to heal, just as does Mailer’s. But Bulgakov’s Yeshua is also greatly concerned with his own situation,
which he sees as increasingly tenuous.  This is shown graphically when he asks Pilate, “Couldn’t you let me go, Hegemon?” asked the prisoner suddenly,
and his voice became anxious. “I can see that they want to kill me” {{sfn|Bulgakov|1996|pp=23}}
 
Because Norman Mailer (re)tells the story of Yeshua in the time of Yeshua and from the point of view of Yeshua—and, by the way, this narrative device
in itself is, as far as I am aware, an original gambit on his part that gives his version of the story a special character—he does not have the liberty Bulgakov takes to embody the Devil in a Mephistophelian guise and must deal
with the Devil directly. Whereas Bulgakov’s Devil in the form of Woland tests Muscovites of the 1930s with various temptations, especially money, the testing and contesting in Mailer’s ''Gospel'' is between Yeshua and the Devil, head on, so to speak. One might even say that Mailer sees the battle between Good and Evil and the battle between God and the Devil not in Goethian-Faustian
terms but in old-fashioned biblical terms. Moreover, Mailer conceives of modern history as a battle between God and the Devil, as he makes clear in
''The Castle in the Forest''.
 
At the end of ''Gospel'', Mailer, by way of the words of the Son, gives a laconic, and I would claim powerful, sweeping summary of history since the
time of Yeshua that begins with a reference to the original rift between Christians and Jews over exactly who he was and moves forward to virtually the present day. Using the Son as his mouthpiece, Mailer also remarks on how rich and pious are many Christians, “who are often greater in their hypocrisy than those who condemned me.” Yeshua is also critical of the ostentation of St. Peter’s in Rome, where there is more gold than anywhere in the world {{sfn|Mailer|1997|pp=239}}.
 
Yeshua says at the end of ''Gospel'' that he comes with a sword, but this is no
conventional battle sword, but rather the Son’s sword is designed to “wage
war on all that makes us less than we ought to be, less generous”{{sfn|Mailer|1997|pp=219}}. Mailer’s Son then concludes that it is not love “that will take us to our good end,
but is instead the reward we receive at the end of the hard road that is our life
and the days of our life” {{sfn|Mailer|1997|pp=242}}.Whatever version of the story we may or may not subscribe to, I think we can safely conclude here that this is Mailer’s version, this is his benediction on the story of Yeshua.
 
Contemporary young Russian readers of Bulgakov’s ''Master and Margarita'' appear to be captivated by a story that contains much magic and fantasy and some have even made a small cult of the novel, as is evident from the graffiti that cover the stairway of Bulgakov’s apartment in Moscow. One
wonders, though, whether they understand how profoundly moral a writer
is Bulgakov who, like Mailer, wants to set the record straight: there was in fact
this Jesus person, about that there can be no doubt. This statement of belief,
we should remember, flew in the face of official Soviet dogma at the time
Bulgakov wrote the novel, since the novel is set in an environment in which
a militant Atheism is the official doctrine of the Soviet state. I find it ironic,
particularly in connection with this discussion, that just as in the early stages
of Christianity, many Romans converted to Christianity in order to advance
their careers, so did many Soviets in the 1920s and 1930s advertise their
adherence to atheism—and thereby, of course, renounce any religious
beliefs—in order to move up the professional or bureaucratic ladders.
 
Perhaps even more interesting is the possibility that the character of
Yeshua, or even the philosophy of Yeshua, is not the main point at all. The
main point in both novels appears to be the authors’ determination to argue
their own truths about the nature of life and the struggle between the forces
of good and evil, god and the devil.
 
I asked earlier whether our authors are desacralizing or resacralizing the
“sacred text(s).” At the end of Gospel I would have to conclude that Mailer is resacralizing the text/story, but he is renarrating it in order to set a few things straight about the meaning of good and evil, peace and truth, and love and life.
 
In this respect, Norman Mailer shows once again that he is in fact a writer
in the Russian tradition of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. He attacks the largest
questions of life with bold narrative stratagems, such as a first person narrative from the point of view of Yeshua, or a story about Hitler from the point of view of one of his henchman. Just as did Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, both Bulgakov and Mailer take on the ''Bible'' and History (Bulgakov also
incorporates the Faust Legend for good measure) with confidence that they can interpret these most controversial and complicated texts for us.
 
 
===How Anna and Ivan Got Into the Castle {{efn|I read a paper on this subject called “The Coronation Digression—or is it?—in ''The Castle in the Forest''” at the Norman Mailer Society’s Conference in October 2008.}}===
 
I have some questions about Chapter VIII,“The Coronation of Nicholas II,”
in Mailer’s ''Castle'': is it just an entertaining digression that adds a little royal
Russian spice to an otherwise plebian set of characters, or is it an integral,
perhaps even crucial part of the novel? Furthermore, is this chapter meant
to point to something much larger on the same subject? The narrator of ''Castle'', the ever devious and dissembling Dieter, whose pedigree includes at a
minimum Laurence Sterne, Nikolai Gogol, and Dostoevsky, claims that his
participation in the events surrounding the Coronation were crucial to his
development as a “high devil,” while at the same time inviting us to skip the
chapter altogether. Dieter then throws in the teaser that Russia in 1895 is where and when he learned how to manipulate the will of the people and
that “I also learned a good deal about God’s strengths and His increasing
weaknesses.” More specifically, he had learned “that God would not be equipped to punish” [Hitler] for activating the gas chambers in the concentration camps {{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=213}}. Shifting gears again, narrator Dieter says, “If there are
readers who still will say, ‘I would rather go on with what is happening in Hafeld,’ I have a reply. ‘That is your right,’ ... just turn to page 261. Adolf Hitler’s story will pick up again right there” {{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=213–14}}. In other words, I dare you to skip the scintillating story I am about treat you with.
 
Without going into detail about the interesting loop Dieter’s patrimony
traces from English literature to Russian literature and finally to American
literature, let me say that this Sternian, Gogolian, and Dostoevskian heritage gives Mailer a tremendously flexible and versatile narrative stance that enables him, as does Gogol’s narrator in “The Overcoat,” to know all kinds of details and minutiae about large and small events and also to claim no
knowledge whatsoever about others. There are also many instances of ''praeteritio'', in which Dieter says that he will not, for example, describe the feast Nicky and Alix (Nicholas and Alexandra) partook of at their coronation and
then proceeds not only to describe the menu in detail but also the complexities of the social relations involved {{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=237–38}}. I would even say that Mailer absolutely revels in his use of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novelistic narrative techniques, as is evident in Dieter’s frequent motivation of his
ability to know certain things and not know others—depending on whether
he is able to penetrate the crowd of Cudgels, that is the angels who surround
Nicky and Alix, as he calls Tsar Nicholas II and Tsaritsa Alexandra most but
not all of the time.
 
For all of Dieter’s diversionary tactics, the voice of the Master-Author/
Narrator in the Coronation Chapter is clearly discernible. I say this because
throughout the Coronation Chapter Mailer develops his central theme of the
battle between the God and the Devil—one might argue the central theme
not just of ''Castle'' but of his work in its entirety—here in the guise of the
Maestro and the Dummkopf, in as thorough and graphic a manner as anywhere else in his fiction. In ''Castle'', as elsewhere, it appears that the Dummkopf, for all of his good will and noble efforts, is losing to the Maestro, who
seems able to outsmart, outwit, and out-trick his erstwhile rival. I say erstwhile, because in the Coronation Chapter, and even more so in the epilogue
to ''Castle'', Mailer suggests that the Dummkopf and the Maestro may actually be part of the same team, rather than the rivals they are usually understood to be.�
 
The Coronation Chapter might well be called the Russian Chapter, as it
displays both Mailer’s fascination with Russia and his considerable grounding in Russian literature. In ''Castle'', Mailer lavishes the extensive detail we find
in so much of his work, whether it be documentary or fictional, or one of his
special cocktails combining both, on his description of the characters and
events connected with the Coronation of Nicholas II. The bibliography of
''Castle'' contains fifteen works with a Russian referent, thirteen of which are
historical in nature, and two of which, ''Anna Karenina'' and “The Death of
Ivan Ilych” by Tolstoy, are of course fictional. Mailer is obviously and greatly
intrigued by the figure of Rasputin, to whom are devoted fully five separate
works in the bibliography to ''Castle'', not counting the others in which he is treated as well.  Excerpts from the correspondence between Nicky and Alix are one of Dieter’s principal sources of information about their respective
personalities and their relationship with each other. Throughout this chapter and throughout ''Castle'', Mailer is using historical exactitude in the service of fictional verisimilitude.
 
Tolstoy, who is a frequent presence in Mailer’s work, plays a pivotal role
in the Coronation Chapter where there is an explicit reference to Tolstoy in
Dieter’s characterization of Russian peasants. As often happens with Dieter this description is ambivalent and self-contradictory in the extreme. Claiming that he respects Russian peasants, Dieter says they look old before their
time, but are nonetheless as strong as draft animals and have the patience of
cattle. He finds them “Poor, ugly, big, strong, dumb men with their plain,
sturdy, and often misshapen wives might be mean, small-minded, ignorant,
bewildered, even stupefied, but all that could amount to no more than the
protective wax over fine jelly in a jar. Beneath their torpor, I could sense a
capacity to be strong, wise, generous, fair, loyal, even understanding, or so,
at least had Tolstoy and Dostoeyevsky harangued their readers” {{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=240}}. Finally,
Dieter sees the possible future genius of Russian peasants as a threat, since,
as he puts it, “our job is to reduce human possibilities” {{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=240}}. Almost no discussion of Russian peasants is complete without some reference to Tolstoy, but the addition of Dostoevsky here is somewhat puzzling. Is it a false lead, which was a frequent tactic of Dostoevsky himself, or is Dieter perhaps just showing off his erudition? It is not that Dostoevsky was without sympathy for peasants, it is just that this is a topic about which one might say Tolstoy
really did harangue us, but Dostoevsky did not. 
 
 
   
 


. . .


===Notes===
===Notes===
KVAtta
15

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