The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Mailerian Dynasty: Narrative in a Structural Poetics of Mailer’s Fiction: Difference between revisions

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'''Structural Introduction'''

Structuralist analysis frequently traces a work’s meanings and powers to an underlying structure like the static semiotic infrastructure of binary oppositions in Levi-Strauss’ analysis of Amazonian myths, the dynamic narrative structure of Vladimir Propp’s slavic folk tale or of Will Wright’s classical western.{{sfn|Levi-Strauss’||p=1}} Structural analysis may also lead into a single, deep structure specific to a single author’s vision as in Bordwell’s poetics of the communitarian films of Yasujiro Ozu.{{sfn|Ozu|2018|p=2}} Here my emphasis is on the last, a creator-specific type of simplifying but empowering deep structure.  

In Mailer’s fiction, the underlying poetics, though simplifying, is complex in its basic elements. These basic elements as I see them are five: the physiological, psychic, social, cultural and transcendental. The poetics is also plural in its underlying statics and in the narrative dynamics that these stat ics help constitute. To quickly illustrate statics and dynamics with Western film examples, in the classical Western, static dichotomies like “outsider/ insider,”“wilderness/civilization.” Good/bad” and “weak strong” help organize materials. These statics in turn underlie the constitution of a dynamic narrative structures in which, typically, strong outsiders, just having ridden in from the wilderness, champion a weak and beleaguered community from strong villains ~as when Shane champions sodbusters against their cattle men adversaries!.

Here I look at basic elements, statics, and dynamics, in turn, for most of Mailer’s novels. I also do so for the first of his “factions, which is The Armies of the Night, and longest of them, The Executioner’s Song. In so doing I range over nearly a dozen works—both early and late, relatively realistic and relatively fanciful—in some detail. However, I especially stress The Naked and the Dead, The Executioner’s Song and Ancient Evenings.{{sfn|Mailer||p=4}}

The basic elements of Mailer’s novels match up pretty closely with Talcott Parsons sociological articulation of the analytical aspects of human phenomena and the human sciences, which are physiological, personality centered, social relational and symbolic.{{sfn|Mailer||p=5}} To these I add the transcendental. These elements—physiological, psychic, social, cultural and transcendental—underlie Mailer’s structural statics and all his work. The basic elements are present in all Mailer’s fictions right from The Naked and the Dead. Take the vivid physicality of the transport of the 77mm anti tank guns; and the vivid personalities of Cumming strategizing, Croft and Martinez conniving, Roth and Brown reminiscing about “back home.” Take the social relations involved in the dialogues of Goldstein and Ridges, in the conversations of Cummings and Hearn and the troops at the “Chow Lines,” as well as up and down the Anopopei chain of command. For cultural elements, take the shared language on the Chow Lines and the battling ideologies of Cummings and Hearn, Velsen and Roth. Transcendental elements tend to strongly intersect other elements. For example, we can perceive a degree of emotional exhilaration in Croft’s transient, intensely physical yet also transcendental sense of challenge and triumph in his ascent of Mt. Anaka. Moving beyond The Naked and the Dead, examples of the basic elements are numerous. For physicality, we may recall the felt electrical charge of anxiety as Rojack heads toward the assembly about Deborah’s corpse amidst the stopped traffic on “the Drive” and—a favorite of mine—when Provincetown Police Captain Alvin Luther Regency is so “on” at one point in Tough Guys Don’t Dance that, to quote Mailer, “if he had had a tail, it would have been whipping the rungs” {{sfn|Mailer||p=211}}. For the personality, we have Mailer’s agitated state approaching the stage to speak at Ambassador Theater in The Armies of the Night; Meni’s nuanced mental reflections on his relations to Mother, Father and Pharaoh; Gilmore and Nicole ~Harry and Kittredge! in revealing epistolary communion with each other in The Executioner’s Song ~and Harlot’s Ghost!. We also have an array of unforgettably vivid characters—Tim Madden’s father, Dougie, and Harry Hubbard’s father, Cal; Pharaoh Ptah nem-hotep, Queen Nefitiri and “little queen” Honey Ball; and Alois Schicklgruber ~aka Alois Hitler!. For social relations—the core stuff of the novel according to Northrop Frye—the list is endless: a favorite of mine is the rich social interplay among the vivid Ptah-nem-hotep, little Meni,Meni mother Had Nefertiti, and his Father Nef-khep-aukhem and the other guests at Evenings’ banquet, “The Night of the Pig.” For culture, we have the densely rendered U.S. Army, Hollywood and CIA worlds. We have stuff of Mickey Lovett’s conversation with revolutionary MacLeod, Hugh “Harlot” Montague’s conversations with Harry, Mailer’s own conversation with Robert Lowell on the Pentagon march or with a Hell’s Angel just afterwards while in Federal custody, the rituals of the Pharaoh’s court and temples, the tavern banter of Alois Shicklgruber and his drinking companions. For transcendence, we have Rojack’s communing with Cherry across a club room in the Village, Menenhetet at the side of Ramses II as he communes with Amon during a blood sacrifice, and Gary Gilmore’s self-designed striving after public moral rehabilitation through self-promoted execution. What I would stress about these basic elements is the broad range of modes of humanity at the foundations of Mailer’s work, a breadth that affirms Lee Siegel’s claim that “Mailer is one of the last Western writers to create a self-contained intel lectual universe out of strong, idiosyncratic convictions about the relationship between spiritual, psychic and social existence”.{{sfn|Mailer||p=2}}  

This takes the specific form of narratives of socio-physiological dominance and anxiety, of anxiety mastered through courage, love, sex or magic, and of a mastery that often attains a sort of transcendence—be it transient.{{sfn|Mailer||p=6}}

In The Naked and the Dead, the narrative is dispersed among numerous characters. Indeed, major, analytically distinguishable narrative strands can be traced for each of three principal protagonists—Lieutenant Hearn, General Cummings and Sergeant Croft—even though the three strands are intertwined. In his strand, Hearn is directly humiliated by Cummings when he succumbs to Cumming’s use of his authority to compel him to pick up a cigarette he has left on the floor of Cumming’s tent. The anxiety that ensues, complete with undercurrents of sexual domination that salt the wound of social degradation, is literally dreadful for Hearn. Yet resolution of the Cummings-Hearn agon, truncated by social and historical contingencies of Naked’s tale, never clearly arrives for Hearn. His initial humiliation by Cum mings is not offset by the assistance of powerful allies or amorous or erotic or magical agents. Instead, it is ended by an abrupt death: “At the ledge that faced the first grove he had stood up casually, had been about to motion the others to follow him, when the Jap machine gun fired. He toppled back among the men gathered behind the shelf” {{sfn|Mailer||p=523}}.  

In short, although the tales of Hearn, Cummings and Croft are all spurred forward by tensions and anxieties, Mailer’s poetics is not only dispersed across the tales. In each of these three stories, transcendence, if it comes at all,is borderline as well as transient. Hearn knows no transcendence. Cum ming’s knows merely “a fragile grain of pleasure ... a mingled pain and satisfaction” {{sfn|Mailer||p=623}} from his successful self-assertion over Hearn; and this is more than eclipsed by the rise of Dalleson in the wake of the patrol’s failure and Major Dalleson’s credit for the island campaign’s final success. Croft’s transcendent experience of the ascent of Mt. Anaka is short-lived, if not premature. As I hope to show, the course of the full Mailerian dynamic from oppression and anxiety through courage or magic ~or both! to transcendence is less dispersed among protagonists and more unequivocal in Mail er’s other novels. Still, Mailer’s work, though rich in spells of transient transcendence, is short on that more enduring transcendence that we commonly call salvation.  

The dynamic aspect of Mailer’s dynamic poetics is evident in Mailer’s next three fictions, Barbary Shore, The Deer Park and An American Dream. In the first, Mickey Lovett reacts to the trauma of World War II and the vehemence of post-War repression of revolutionary Lefts with an attempt at the theoretical transcendence of his political situation. In The Deer Park, Sergius O’Shaugnessy transcends his post-War and Hollywood moral confusion with a series of striving for personal regeneration and integration through political and sexual ventures that culminate most emphatically in his mastery of some arts of the toreador and the womanizer in the story/sequel entitled “The Time of Her Time.”  

An early, manifest expression of a poetics in Mailer’s fiction emerges in An American Dream. In this notably mythopoetic tale, Rojack actively responds to the impasse of his sexual humiliation before wife Deborah’s felt effrontery and the overbearing disdain of Deborah’s tycoon father Augustus Kelly. He does so, as he sees it, by strangling Deborah and with that act mustering the strength to clear his nervous system of psychic and spiritual pollutants, “hatred passing from” him as he strangles,” wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea, a bleak string of salts” {{sfn|Mailer||p=31}}. He ends in “a most honorable fatigue,” feeling that “flesh seemed new,” that he had “not felt so nice since I was twelve”{{sfn|Mailer||p=32}}. Rojack also demonstrates the power to break loose of any constrictions of Deborah’s post-humus hold on his superego. This is evident in his tryst with Ruta, his cool in the face of Roberts and fel low NYPD officers, and his ascent, despite opposition from Mobland romantic competition and from jazzman Shago Martin, toward the paradiso of Cherry’s love. Indeed, Rojack has the imagination and courage to encounter oppressive memories of the dead German ~and of the Moon! that had haunted him since the night of the German’s death during the War. This he does by going to encounter August Barney Kelly at his penthouse and the Moon on the penthouse’s parapet—indeed by encountering these challenges effectively. Nevertheless, once again, as with Sergius’ failure to dominate the entropic forces of Hollywood, we find a Mailerian protagonist who finally is not much freer or more self possessed than what is needed to hit the road on a renewed quest for wholeness.

The Mailerian dynamic gains salience in definition as we move away from its early manifestations in The Naked and the Dead. However, to most fully plumb the deep narrative structure of Mailer’s work, the richest focus is one on the naturalistically unencumbered poetry of Ancient Evenings. Here, Mailer’s poetics, relatively unencumbered by the demands of realism, is most richly elaborated. As the quotation from Oscar Wilde inscribed atop the front fly leave of the original Little Brown edition of Ancient Evenings reads, in warning to readers expecting a realistic text, “To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.”

In Evenings, the place to start is with the “The Book of the Gods,” specifically the tale of Set’s conflict with Osiris, Isis and two Horuses. Nearly all of Evening’s human stories mirror this tale of immortals. To recap the tale, Osiris is a victim of the vengeance of Set, who, enraged at Osiris’ coupling with his beloved wife Nephthys ~sister, alas poor listener, to Osiris and Set, as well as Isis!, strikes out at Osiris. Set first imprisons Osiris in a chest and, latter, when Osiris is freed from the chest by Isis, Set cuts Osiris up into fourteen pieces, which he disperses among swamps of the Nile delta. Though Isis’ champion Horus is killed as Set executes his vengeance against Oriris, a child named Horus ~here Horus II! is conceived by Isis and Osiris ~at the moment of the first Horus’ death!. This second Horus proves a better champion of Isis and Osiris than the first and accomplishes the recovery and reassembly of Osiris. Here Isis, Osiris, and the two Horuses function as a four-headed antagonist of Set and as a kind of four-headed protagonist for us the readers. This Osiran Cycle, as I dub it, experiences socio-physiological dominance and anxiety—Osiris and the slain Horus I most dreadfully—but it proceeds to triumph. To focus on Horus II as the circle’s most active force, through a series of bold and magical quests and combats involving incarnations into fierce bears and a magical potion made from the wasted seed of a failed attempt at buggery by Set. Horus II defeats Set and rises to a position of high power among the Gods and, in time, into a long and enriching love relation with Isis. Osiris is reassembled from one fourteenth part of his old form plus parts of other creatures and of waxen artifice. He is reassembled with such success that that when his Ka ~that soul which is a person’s “double”! “came forth from the eyes and mouth of His new abode ... His odor had the fragrance of the finest gardens of Egypt”{{sfn|Mailer||p=60-1}}. Thus, the narrative of domination and anxiety, courageous, amorous and/or magical response to these, and final transcendent resolution—amorous bliss for Isis and Horus II and a robust apotheosis for Osiris—is recounted in Ancient Evenings’ “Book of the Gods.”  

The story of Menenhetet’s great grandson Meni mirrors that of Osiris to a degree. In broad strokes, much of our experience of Meni is of a beleaguered, fragmented and anxious consciousness, caught, after much depredation, in an afterlife, an anxious body and psyche strikingly like that of Osiris ~or Sergius O’Shaugnessey early in The Deer Park, Rojack early in An American Dream, Mailer early in The Armies of the Night, Gilmore in most phases of The Executioner’s Song and Harry Hubbard in Uruguay!. However, neither little Meni’s rich, telepathically augmented social life nor his quests across worlds and times yield any courageous or amorously graced transformation and transcendence.  

It is the story of the elder Menenhetet’s ascent from his sexual use by Ramses II that most comprehensively expresses the Mailerian narrative. This tale mirrors the four-headed tale of the Osiran Cycle Horuses ~as Mailer’s more naturalistic narratives mirror the Mailerian poetics!. The elder Menen hetet ascends from the anxious depth of his sexual denigration by Ramses II. One phase of this ascent involves such courageous, if often brutish, actions as heroism at the battle of Kadesh and the slaying and raping of a group of brigands on the road to Tyre. Another phase involves the casting of magic spells—half potent, half pyrrich—often resulting in some transcendence. A third involves the regenerations and developments of love—Menenhetet’s affairs with the Tyrion whore, Honey Ball and Nefitiri. These affairs also deliver a degree of transcendence—most durably in the form of Menenhe tet’s gathering of his own reincarnation during his third coupling with Nefitiri.

In The Executioner’s Song, social reality imposes the constraints of particular documentary sources, their sheer descriptive weight, upon Mailer’s poetics. This is particularly so because, on the one hand, the poetics rather narrowly focuses on Gilmore’s central story and a few of its principals ~for example, Nicole Barrett! while, on the other hand, this story is embedded in numerous voices, many of them with their own narratives. In short, many narratives are present whose courses have no direct functions for Execution er’s most central narrative or Mailer’s poetics. Yet, amidst the rich Warp of Song’s social fabric, we find the stout Weft of Gary’s Gilmore’s tale, this patterned to the core poetic dynamic of a courageous effort to transcend the anxiety brought on by oppressive forces.  

First we have the poverty, corrective institutions and outsider status ~non-Mormon, low income! of Gilmore’s childhood and youth, complete with possibly excessive protestation that he was no punk: “I’m not a weak man. I’ve never been a punk” {{sfn|Mailer||p=359}}.Then we have those key stretches of Gilmore’s tale marked by the accumulating tensions and frustrations of Gilmore’s life following his first weeks living with Nicole Barrett, weeks of drinking and barroom fights, absenteeism from work and shoplifting, encounters ~first misdemeanor, then felonious! with the law enforcement and court personnel that begin to jeopardize Gilmore’s freedom, and, above all, fights and breakups with Nicole.When an interviewers asks Gilmore whether he had formed the concept to kill someone prior to his gas station and motel killings, Gilmore responds, “I can’t say. It had been building all week. That night I knew I had to open a valve and let something out”{{sfn|Mailer||p=799}}.These early events link forward to incarceration, trial and punishment. They anchor an overall narrative arc of mounting physical tension that reaches from the brief resolutions of murder to further anxieties brought on by the imprisonment and prosecution, to Gilmore’s pursuit of the execution for himself, and to Gary apparently striving ~with Nicole! after for a transcendent Liebestod.  

The Liebestod, or “love death,” is most directly, if ineffectively, pursued through the couples’ thwarted double suicide attempt ~although suicide of Nicole and simple execution for Gary might suffice for the lovers’ shared death and reunion for eternity!. This starts with Gary’s suggestions to Nicole that she commit suicide to accompany him beyond this life: “I’ve considered outright asking you to commit suicide”{{sfn|Liebestod||p=478}}. Gary responds exultantly to Nicole’s receptiveness: “You amaze me, the utter strength and beauty you show. It would be so easy for me to die.... If you choose to join me it would be much harder for you” {{sfn|Mailer||p=479-80}}. Shortly after each is in Intensive Care, following a round self-administered doses of Seconal, Deseret News journalist Tamera Smith writes that “death and suicide ... were the main topic in convicted killer Gary Mark Gilmore’s conversations with his girlfriend Nicole Barrett in the week preceding suicide attempts by both” {{sfn|Mailer||p=585}}. Indeed, two suicide notes had been written by Nicole to family and friends {{sfn|Mailer||p=568-573}}. Nevertheless, Nicole would survive despite a potentially lethal dosage; and the authenticity of Gilmore’s suicidal intent would be clouded. For example, the best calculation of the hospital staff caring for Gilmore would be that “he had taken half of a lethal dose”{{sfn|Mailer||p=590}}.  

On Gilmore’s decision to insist upon and strive for his own execution, the record is clearer ~Guest 142–153; Gilmore 342–345!. Although Gilmore’s motives for seeking execution are not fully knowable, a few are evident. One is a personally controlled end to the degradations of imprisonment. A second is attainment of a fantasized afterlife of relative “freedom” ~The Executioner’s Song {{sfn|Mailer||p=488}}.A third is public expiation through Gilmore’s confession of his killings and his public pursuit of implementation of the execution that has been legally declared fit punishment for his crimes. To quote Gilmore just after sentencing when asked if he would like to appeal,“You sentenced me to die. Unless it’s a joke or something, I want to go ahead and do it” {{sfn|Mailer||p=492}}.

In short, increasing physical stress and correlate psychic anxiety—both made palpable by Mailer’s art—ground Gilmore’s murders. Further, the murders emerge as acts of release from that anxiety and as means to an odd re-possession of self-respect accomplished through the embrace of public execution as a righteous, courageously sought, spiritually transcendent end. Gilmore’s stress and anxiety are rooted in the social oppression of probable parental abuse and definite prison assaults—inmate and guard, life threatening and rapacious. They lead forward, via the execution that Gilmore bravely ensures, to a resolution of some transcendence.11

I leave to your imagination the several incidentally disparate but structurally similar Mailerian narratives to be identified—for example, Tim Mad den’s self-assertion vis-à-vis the domineering Captain Regency, Harry Hubbard’s progressive rites of passage into a fuller manhood from the preci pices to Berlin to Miami to Playa Girón, and the eventually transcendent personal integration of Sergius O’Shaugnessy’s—at least if we see Deer Park as fully concluding with the events of “The Time of Her Time.”  

Earlier I cited Lee Siegel on the breadth of Mailer’s work. I’ll now allude to the science of biology, in particular to the theory of animal behavior,as it relates to the arc of the Mailerian narrative. In this the primary dimension that differentiates animals is “anxiety-equanimity.” The range of this dimension suggests to me the long arc of the Mailerian narrative from anxiety to transcendence. Furthermore, in the theory of animal behavior, the second major dimension is “timidity-boldness.” This dimension seems to me to loosely parallel a key span of the Mailerian narrative, the one linking protagonist’s transformation from anxious to transcendent states that reaches from the cowardly to the courageous.

Consideration of Mailer’s poetics advances understanding of the aesthetic merit as well as the construction of Mailer’s work. What can be said at once to telegraph some rudiments of such a contribution to aesthetic assessment is this. The range of the poetic’s basic elements, extending as it does across the physiological, psychic, social, cultural and transcendental can make for a work that is consistently rich in the breadth of its apprehension of the human experience and condition.14 Indeed, the work is rich not simply for the varieties of human experience and circumstance that it covers as captured by my five basic elements but for the breadth and depth of its writing within each category, perhaps the social and cultural above all {{sfn|lennon||p=91-103}}. Not only is the reach of the Mailerian story long, characteristic tensions between individual and society, domination and subordination, the cowardly and courageous, everyman and magus, and the mundane and the transcendent help drive the Mailerian narrative across its rich landscape in a long arc of great propulsive force.  

Less affirmative is a Mailerian narrative that, although it tends toward a transcendental resolution, seldom offers more than passing, partial and palliative moments of transcendence, even for the brave. The issue raised here resembles what Richard Poirier suggested in his review of Ancient Evenings when he wrote that Mailer does not offer the illusion “that there is something we want to know and that we will eventually know it, that a center will be located in a wilderness of possibility, that the true shape of a person’s life will emerge out of the mysteries that have shrouded it” ~“Mailer’s Strangest Book” {{sfn|Mailer||p=233}}. The recurrence in Mailer’s work of a merely transient transcendence as the principal resolution to narrative tension gives new meaning to Poirier’s earlier, but no less general, claim that Mailer shows a “willingness not to foreclose on his materials in the interest of merely formal resolution” ~Poirier, Norman Mailer 120!.16

Indeed, there is a modesty to Mailer’s poetics when it comes to the realization of human potential and, thus, to the finality of narrative resolution. This is perhaps well expressed by the final sentence of The Deer Park where Mailer writes, “Then for a moment in that cold Irish soul of mine, a glimmer of the joy of the flesh came toward me ... and we laughed together after all, because to have heard that sex was time and time the connection of new circuits was a part of the poor odd dialogues which give hope to us noble humans for more than one night” {{sfn|Mailer||p=375}}. I refer especially to Mailer’s choices of “moment” and “glimmer,” “rare” and “hope.” These fall short of salvation, in so far as I address the matter of narrative resolution. However, much could be said for the honesty of a vision that offers recurrent, hard earned “joy,” and “hope ... for more than one night.”

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Courtly Mailer: The Legacy Derby}}