The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Norman Mailer in the Light of Russian Literature: Difference between revisions

The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Norman Mailer in the Light of Russian Literature (view source)

Revision as of 18:54, 23 June 2021

9,490 bytes added , 23 June 2021

no edit summary

KVAtta

15

edits

@@ Line 416: / Line 416: @@
 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.
+Both ''Anna Karenina'' and “The Death of Ivan Ilych” contain some of the
+most important and telling portraits of the Russian peasant in all of Tolstoy’s work. In ''Anna'' the peasant Theodore, or Fedor in Russian, has just the
+sort of straightforward, intuitive approach to life that Tolstoy’s hero Levin,
+who says that he doubts everything, envies and would like to emulate. And
+in “Ivan Ilych” the peasant Gerasim is the only one who deals naturally and normally with Ivan’s slow, grim death. Of course no one can put a final
+word on ''Anna Karenina'', but there is one more thing that should be noted
+here. ''Anna Karenina'' is, in a fundamental sense, a model for so much of
+what Mailer writes in general, and specifically in ''Castle'', for ''Anna'' is a virtual template of not just the Tolstoyan novel but of the Russian novel going
+back to Pushkin’s ''Eugene Onegin'' in that it combines several genres under the cover of one book. These include the family chronicle, a novel of psychological realism, elements of an historical novel, a novel of history itself
+(based on the burning questions of the day), a philosophical novel, and even a Romance, if only in parodic form. My claim is that all of these genres and all of these features are also prominent in ''Castle''. It is my contention that the reason, or at least one of the main reasons, that Mailer is so attracted to
+Anna and Ivan, and by Tolstoy’s works in the overall, is that in them Tolstoy addresses the great moral and philosophical questions directly, earnestly, and often with a didactic edge—just what Mailer does in his own novels.
+It remains to be decided whether the Coronation Chapter is just a digression, and whether it is or it is not, why Mailer spends so much time on the Coronation of Nicholas II, alias Nicky. In the first part of the Coronation
+Chapter, Dieter goes to great lengths to set out the folly of the Dummkopf’s having staked so much on Russia and on Nicky and Alix. Russia herself is a particularly problematic project, because, as Dieter puts it, “this was an
+amazing decision. To depend on Russia—so invested with corruption. So
+teeming with injustice. It was what we looked to find. Injustice was a yeast to
+inspire hatred, envy, and the loss of love” {{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=215}}. Dieter says that one of the main benefits of his participation in the Coronation of Nicholas II is that he
+“learned how to manipulate the will of the people.” He also “learned a good deal about God’s strengths and His increasing weaknesses,” including especially His inability to prevent the catastrophe of the gas chambers used in the
+holocaust {{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=213}}. Indeed, throughout the Coronation Chapter, Dieter is repeating and sometimes recasting the fear that Rojack and Cherry express in ''Dream'' that God may be losing the battle with the Devil. Dieter is of course not afraid but rather excited by this prospect. And he is puzzled as to why
+God would invest so much in Tsar Nicholas and his bride Alix. Dieter ventures that “The DK was no longer in full possession of His Faculties. Could that be true or was it false?” {{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=218}}.
+He then proceeds to test this proposition. The fact that he experiences “uneasiness” when he sees the beauty of nature, such as “a fine field, a rocky crag, peerless sunset ... the bedazzlements of grass when the dew is on the
+ground” {{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=218}} would seem to indicate that the DK has not lost all of his creative powers. Dieter therefore rationalizes that all of this was created long
+ago, but now “His force might be slackening” and the proof of that is that “humankind had become His least successful Creation?” {{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=218}}. And thus
+“were we now awash in the dithering of an old divinity. This Nicky and
+Alix—they seemed so naïve, so unfitted for any vast project” {{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=218}}. Certainly the lovey-dovey stuff of the diaries of Nicky and Alix could only convince the
+cynical Dieter of their ''naïvete'' and their lack of fitness to rule a country as unruly as Russia.
+Dieter is also good at highlighting other qualities of the last Tsar that
+made him a particularly inept ruler. In one of his speeches, he warns that
+people should not be “carried away by senseless dreams of taking part in the business of government .... Let everyone know that I will retain the principles of autocracy as firmly and unbendingly as my unforgettable late father” {{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=223}}. Dieter also shows well in a number of places that the indecisive and sentimental Nicky is utterly unlike his late father, Alexander III, and that he is only too aware of his deficiencies that comparison with his father illuminates.
+Mailer’s portrait of Nicholas II comports well with the historical and fictional sources with which I am familiar. In ''Doctor Zhivago'', for example, Boris Pasternak describes Nicholas as unpretentious, even timid, shy, and
+irresolute, and thus dependent on the guidance of Grand Duke Mikhail, when he is about to address his troops. Nicholas is unable to utter grandiloquent words about my people this and my people that, because to do so would have been both out of character and un-Russian. But Pasternak’s narrator wonders that a man so apparently mild mannered could also be an executioner {{sfn|Pasternak|1997|pp=120}}. In ''Castle'', there are hints of a darker, more brutal side to Nicky’s character, but there is nothing quite as direct as this. In ''Castle'', Nicholas gets angry with his people, especially in connection with the events at ''Khodynskoe pole'', but even then he also blames the lack of security and even himself for the calamity—what he calls the sin—that took place there. In
+''Castle', rather, the sense of impending doom both Nicky and Alix experience is developed throughout the Coronation Chapter. This, too, comports well with the histories of this ill-fated couple as I know them.
+The disaster of Khodynka is the central event of the Coronation Chapter and it is suffused with the spirit of Tolstoy. This is the Peasant Festival, an event that was staged for the people, one intended to entertain and reward
+them for their loyalty to the crown. Dieter is proud to inform us that his plan
+to attack at Khodynka (and attack at the Coronation itself) turned out to be
+the correct one from the point of view of the Maestro’s team, as around three
+thousand people perished in the crush that ensued there after the crowd stormed the stalls with the beer and the goods that were intended for them. For his part, Mailer indicates that ''Khodynskoe pole'', that is Khodynsky Field,
+was a principal site in the battle between the Dummkopf and the Maestro,
+and he does so in a thoroughly Tolstoyan fashion. There are two passages
+that are particularly noteworthy in this connection. The first is the one in the
+morgue, where many of the dead celebrants have been taken, when two corpses “rise up from a comatose state in unison and even cried out in unison” {{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=248}}. Shortly after, we witness two more returns from apparent death. In the first, when a man regains consciousness, his wife is ecstatic and cries out twice, "God is here!" In the second, when the family patriarch opens his eyes, his wife cries out, "the devil sent you back, you monster!" {{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=249}}.
+These ironic reversals of the expected are not just in the spirit of Tolstoy,
+they are virtually the same technique Tolstoy employed from his earliest to
+his latest works. Moreover, they form another part of the definite Tolstoyan
+subtext that runs throughout the Coronation Chapter. An example from Tolstoy’s Sevastopol stories illustrates Tolstoy’s method well. In “Sevastopol in May,” 1855, a shell falls near Praskukhin and Mikhailov and the former
+thinks, “Thank God, I’m only contused” {{sfn|Tolstoy|2006|pp=242}}. It turns out that “he had been killed on the spot by a shell splinter that had struck him in the middle of the chest” {{sfn|Tolstoy|2006|pp=243}}. Meanwhile, when the shell explodes, Mikhailov thinks to himself, “It’s all over!” What happened, however, is that “he had received a slight head wound from a flying stone” {{sfn|Tolstoy|2006|pp=244}}. If there is a difference between Mailer’s and Tolstoy’s approaches, I believe that we may conclude that Mailer’s is the more humorous of the two. Nevertheless, Mailer’s juxtaposition of the
+wife who cries out to God in thanks with the wife who curses the Devil in anger is also very like Tolstoy in that he wants to make doubly sure, absolutely sure, that we his readers get the point he is making—which is that God
+and the Devil had an equal part in the catastrophe of Khodynka.
+The Coronation Chapter shows, however, that this is not simply a one-on-one battle, as it is often thought, since as Dieter says, “there is a labyrinth of relations, after all, between the Maestro and the Dummkopf. I could list
+an endless register of the compromises, brutalities, games, and deceits on
+both sides” {{sfn|Mailer|2007|pp=233–34}}. With specific reference to the ceremony, Dieter says,
+ambiguously, “the Maestro took pride in smuggling his wares into God’s
+gifts” {{sfn|Mailer|pp=234}}. Does he mean that the Maestro, too, was responsible for some of
+the glory of the ceremony, or is this a clever restatement of the Adam and Eve and the Apple theme?