The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998–2008: Difference between revisions

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 Three essays return us to “The White Negro” in relation to racial anxiety. Andrea Levine, unlike many critics who have focused on the dialectic between white and black masculinity in “The White Negro,” claims that an anxiety concerning the vulnerable, white, Jewish body becomes central to the text. Mailer’s fetishization of the aggressive African American male actually serves to “obscure the image of the cowed, impotent Jew going meekly to the gas chamber” (61). Mailer’s (re)construction of Jewish male identity operates first by eradicating Jewish biological and cultural history, after which it deprecates femininity in order to recapture certain notions of white, Jewish masculine difference.
+Drawing on the historical example of Muhammad Ali’s verbal challenges to Terrell and the general dynamics at work in the boxing ring, Christopher Brookeman’s “Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee: Mythologies of Representation in Selected Writings on Boxing by Norman Mailer” shows how Mailer reconstructs society as existential and oral–as opposed to conceptual and literary–by rewriting it in the key of black boxing culture. He argues that Mailer’s model of African American culture did not depend on a sole fixation on blackness alone but, rather, arose from a complex interplay between African American cultural creativity and a dominant white culture. Muhammad Ali, Brookeman helps us see, was both an aesthetic and political guru of sorts, a source of “mythic defiance and confidence” which essentially became the foundation for the renewal of Mailer’s career. Ali and African American artists like him “challenged the gradualist liberalism of civil rights leaders and their supporters in the Democratic Party” (50).
+Finally, Shelly Eversley’s “The Source of Hip” compares Mailer and Kerouac’s treatments of interracial sex: “Hip happens as whiteness processes into blackness, at the moment when a cross-racial union of bodies suggests movement beyond rigid categories of identity, and ideally, toward the revelatory potential of integration” (261). Eversley finds that both Mailer and Kerouac “get fabulously close to the edge of integration’s potential” (266) but ultimately “participate consciously in a cultural economy that marginalizes individuals” that results in ultimate failure: “By fixing the line that separates ‘the Negro’ and ‘the white,’ they insure that there is no communion. They exemplify their own critique, a ‘failure of nerve’ and relinquish the opportunity to come, finally, to cross the most sacrosanct boundaries of postwar
+U.S. culture” (267). This is a detailed and perspicacious essay, but I wish the author would give us the measure of who succeeded. White authors, for a variety of reasons and toward a number of aesthetic and political ends, challenged soft and hard taboos and put blacks and whites in bed together. The suggestion is made early in the essay that Mailer and Kerouac moved toward interracial sex to revivify their declining careers, but Mailer’s character Wilson, the gut-soldier in The ''Naked and the Dead'', is proof that Mailer was interested in just this sort of transgression before he ever gained fame. It would be nice if a progressive political development came all at once, as complete as Athena when she burst out of her father’s skull, but some things take more time.
+Even the most formalistic approaches to Mailer’s work are connected to political perception. Very little has been written about Mailer’s achievement as an artist first and foremost. Mailer’s work would seem to sustain moral commentary much more readily than it does purely formalist appreciation, and critics such as Robert Merrill have complained that writing about Mailer’s life cannot sufficiently bolster claims that he is a first-rate American writer. According to Merrill, first-rate criticism of first-rate writing is needful, and in his 1992 revised Twayne study of Mailer, Merrill claims this burden has not been met. There have been a few attempts that warrant attention, however. In “Plexed Artistry: The Formal Case for Mailer’s ''Harlot’s Ghost''” David Rampton begins by squaring off against Richard Rorty, who in Achieving Our Country attacked Pynchon, Mailer, and several other writers in for being writers too ready to portray America with “mockery” or “disgust.” Rampton challenges Rorty on ideological grounds but then defends Mailer as an artist. Unlike the reviewers and critics who complain about the formlessness of ''Harlot’s Ghost'', Rampton demonstrates that Mailer’s work is patterned carefully and balanced almost obsessively. Rampton also draws attention to acts of reading in Harlot’s Ghost with a view to defending it on artistic rather than political grounds.
+Lennon’s “Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian” locates Mailer’s key claims to our attention in the region between clearly fictional and clearly non-fictional writing. Lennon carefully approaches what he
+describes as a “reversible dualism” between fiction and non-fiction, carefully avoiding prescriptive definitions of narrative forms. He concludes that Mailer’s primary purpose is not to blur genre so much as to engulf and ingest whatever form, stance or rhetoric he needs to carry his tales forward. Mailer succeeds in reminding us that there is no real difference between fact and fiction. Mailer was completely dedicated to the novel and to his role as a novelist, although the writer’s intentions and the reader’s own requirements may not coincide exactly
+Louis Menand, in the ''New Yorker'', located Mailer’s greatest achievements in the interplay between fictional and non-fictional selves, a proliferation of protean selves that some readers did not like very much at all. The sense we get from Menand is that Mailer did a great deal to humanize writing and to make it more honest:
+{{quote|Some readers found all these Normans obnoxious, a display of egotism. But Mailer was simply making apparent something that modern literature and, in particular, modern journalism preferred to disguise, which is that a book is written by a human being, someone with professional ambitions, financial needs, tastes and distastes, and this human being is part of the story whether he or she appears in the story or not. It was not important for readers to like this person; it was important to know him. Mailer did not put the first person into journalism; he took it out of the closet.}}
+===V. Mailer And Final Things===
+When Mailer is not read politically, he is considered eschatologically, but it is a false dualism to put Mailer’s politics to one side and his religion to the other. Discussions of Mailer’s beliefs about God, karma, the Devil, and the bureaucracy of hell don’t say very much when they do not flow into discussions of power relations.
+Whether or not we believe in an afterlife, we enjoy imagining our way into and around such beliefs, and several articles show how Mailer’s fictive constructions guide us through the land of the dead. In “Books of the Dead: Postmortem Politics in Novels by Mailer, Burroughs, Acker, and Pynchon,” Kathryn Hume highlights Mailer’s usage of “ancient ritual instructions” (417) in his novel ''Ancient Evenings'', emphasizing especially his investment in ancient Egyptian myths in relation to the postmodern, mainly secular world
+of the late twentieth century. She defends Mailer against accusations of obscenity by demonstrating that Mailer’s graphic representations of sexual and even excremental activities metaphorical celebrate forms of resistance that are at once spiritual and political. Against dehumanizing forces of modern life such as totalitarian ideology and unquestioned materialism, Hume argues, Mailer redeploys the imagery and ideas found in ''The Egyptian Book of the Dead'' in the service of liberation. This article could be said to read Mailer in a magical/utopian way, proceeding as ''Ancient Evenings'' does from underworld to reincarnation, whereas Hume’s book length study, ''American Dream'', ''American Nightmare: Fiction since 1960'', presents us with Mailer’s more dystopian underworld vision. In novels like ''An American Dream'' and ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'', Mailer fleshes out the “American Nightmare” by ironically distorting the heroic structure of descent and return (Hume 285); by problematizing notions of success, morality, and freedom (275!) and by portraying the running themes of lost innocence, of the dissolution of love in contemporary society, and of families with no future where children are not an expression of hope. These novels, Hume finds, generally project a demonic vision of America that undermines its rosier self-concepts.
+Two articles explore religious aspects of Mailer’s recent fiction. In “''The Gospel According to the Son'' and Christian Belief,” Jeffrey F. L. Partridge takes issue with James Wood’s contention that the novel’s fails. According to Partridge, Mailer’s reverential treatment of Jesus successfully and paradoxically
+dismantles the traditional Christian impulse to deify the Son. Mailer’s subtle revision of the gospel and his determined refusal to resort to merely shocking portrayals of Jesus make room for his characteristic explorations of the father/son relationship. Partridge also discusses Mailer’s metafictional inclusions of themes of writing, acts of authorship, and existentialism in the novel, as these formal elaborations amplify its theological concerns in resonant ways. In “Post-Holocaust Theodicy, American Imperialism, and the
+‘Very Jewish Jesus’ of Norman Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son'',” which is also in the ''Journal of Modern Literature'' cluster, Brian McDonald convincingly draws connections the thematization of evil in The Gospel According to the Son and American imperialism. Mailer, furthermore, revises the “gospel” form by focusing its polemical energy on the inner being of the divine figure, so as to foreground Jesus’ self-doubt instead of his external actions. By connecting Mailer’s reinterpretation of the life of Jesus to post-Holocaust theology and to American foreign policy, McDonald sensitizes us to variety of ways in which Mailer’s religious imagination resonates with timely political concerns.
+===VI. Who Mailer Was Now===
+Mailer outlived almost all of the post-WWII writers to whom he was most often compared. He received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for “Distinguished Contribution to American Letters” at the 2005 National Book Awards Ceremony, and Toni Morrison presented the award. Acknowledging Mailer as one of America’s “tallest lightening rods,” Toni Morrison in presenting the award praised him as a writer who is “Generous, intractable, often wrong, always engaged, mindful of and amused by his own power and his prodigious gifts, wide spirited.”
+The secular and the sacred, the political and the innermost personal, constitute one another, and this mutuality comes through powerfully and strangely in the epigraph from Kafka that Morris Dickstein chose for his 1999 study, ''Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970'': “Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes part of the ceremony” (i). This quotation takes us in two directions. Our need for order is such that the most blasphemous actions imaginable, should they continue regularly, are retrofitted in the imagination such that they become religion itself, part of the ritual they had previously upset. But then we think about established religious
+forms and wonder: when was this priest a leopard? By “leopards” Dickstein means outsiders; a Jew or a homosexual or an ethnic minority was a leopard but is now a priest. Mailer was a leopard but is now a priest. In his opening autobiographical prelude, Dickstein describes the shift in his reading from sacred to secular-sacred: “As I grew disenchanted with the religious texts I had grown up on, secular literature became a kind of scripture for me, a continuous commentary on living in the world” (x). Writers like Bellow,
+Mailer, Vidal, Roth, Updike, O’Connor, Ellison, Nabokov and others were “like Kafka’s ravenous leopards, invading and disrupting the sheltered precincts of our literary culture” (x). The old-time religion to which these writers remained true was always Modernism: “Bellow, O’Connor, Ellison, Malamud, Cheever, Updike, Baldwin, Mailer, and Roth were faithful to their aesthetic conscience, to the gospel according to James and Joyce, Kafka and Proust, even when the results showed up in their own faults of craft or character. They remained loyal to the novel even as its boundaries blurred and its hold on readers diminished” (20). Mailer is more than prominent in Dickstein’s pantheon; though Dickstein does not say that any one of these writers was first among equals, Mailer’s name is indexed over 120 times–more than any other writer.
+But let me not close by counting entries in an index as if one were a reincarnation of Melville’s “Sub-sub-librarian,” a collector of extracts and whatnot. Even a review of so many reviews of Mailer’s world should end like this:
+{{quote|We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods. (''Ancient Evenings'' 709)}}
+We began by noting that Mailer prided himself as one who wished to intentionally exacerbate the consciences of the complacent. Mailer never stopped doing this, and it would seem he got better and better at it, but the market for exacerbation seems to have dried up. “Our dead hearts” prevail for the moment, but the right words in the right order create fields of magnetism, and the thunderous illuminations Mailer has left for readers await us, generously and patiently.
 ===Notes===