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The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Woman Redux: de Kooning, Mailer, and American Abstract Expression: Difference between revisions
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Mailer was clearly aware of his painterly writing in the new expressionist manner as he references the “ultra-violet” lighting and green the color of guacamole, as in a painting by Vincent Van Gogh or Henri Rousseau. Indeed, Deborah’s hallway wallpaper seems like a jungle background “conceived by Rousseau” with its “hot-house of flat velvet flowers, royal, sinister, cultivated in their twinings.” They breathe at Rojack “from all four walls, upstairs and down.{{Sfn|Mailer|1965|pp=13–14, 21}} The world looms large, all distorted, angular, pulpy and surreal. Rojak thinks: “There was something so sly at the center of her, some snake . . . guarding the cave which opened to the treasure.”{{Sfn|Mailer|1965|p=34}} He thinks about her own duality, good, evil, and then realizes: “But what I did not know was which of us imprisoned the other, and how? I might be the one who was . . . evil,” he concludes, “and Deborah was trapped with me.”{{Sfn|Mailer|1965|p=37}} | Mailer was clearly aware of his painterly writing in the new expressionist manner as he references the “ultra-violet” lighting and green the color of guacamole, as in a painting by Vincent Van Gogh or Henri Rousseau. Indeed, Deborah’s hallway wallpaper seems like a jungle background “conceived by Rousseau” with its “hot-house of flat velvet flowers, royal, sinister, cultivated in their twinings.” They breathe at Rojack “from all four walls, upstairs and down.{{Sfn|Mailer|1965|pp=13–14, 21}} The world looms large, all distorted, angular, pulpy and surreal. Rojak thinks: “There was something so sly at the center of her, some snake . . . guarding the cave which opened to the treasure.”{{Sfn|Mailer|1965|p=34}} He thinks about her own duality, good, evil, and then realizes: “But what I did not know was which of us imprisoned the other, and how? I might be the one who was . . . evil,” he concludes, “and Deborah was trapped with me.”{{Sfn|Mailer|1965|p=37}} | ||
As Mailer questioned the idea of being imprisoned for both men and women, he faced down the feminists during the inflammatory 1960s and 1970s. I applaud his bravado when he recognized in ''The Prisoner of Sex'' that he is the fall guy in a world of one-liners that resists complex arguments. Although Hemingway faced down his fair share of criticism in his day, no one equals Mailer’s fearlessness in speaking out for the primal purity of our sexual identities in love that cant, hypocrisy, and pretension smothers. He argues that “love is more stern than war” and that “people can win at love only when they are ready to lose everything they bring to it of ego, position, or identity.” “Men and women can survive,” Mailer states, “only if they reach the depths of their own sex down within themselves.”{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=147}} Part of that might well involve them slashing away at the phony, sniffling exteriors. Part of that might involve the hatchet approach that both de Kooning and Mailer implemented in their art to show how this delivery “over to the unknown” cannot happen when people assume stances rather than take risks. He concludes adamantly that the “physical love of men and women, insofar as it | As Mailer questioned the idea of being imprisoned for both men and women, he faced down the feminists during the inflammatory 1960s and 1970s. I applaud his bravado when he recognized in ''The Prisoner of Sex'' that he is the fall guy in a world of one-liners that resists complex arguments. Although Hemingway faced down his fair share of criticism in his day, no one equals Mailer’s fearlessness in speaking out for the primal purity of our sexual identities in love that cant, hypocrisy, and pretension smothers. He argues that “love is more stern than war” and that “people can win at love only when they are ready to lose everything they bring to it of ego, position, or identity.” “Men and women can survive,” Mailer states, “only if they reach the depths of their own sex down within themselves.”{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=147}} Part of that might well involve them slashing away at the phony, sniffling exteriors. Part of that might involve the hatchet approach that both de Kooning and Mailer implemented in their art to show how this delivery “over to the unknown” cannot happen when people assume stances rather than take risks. He concludes adamantly that the “physical love of men and women, insofar as it [is] untainted by civilization, [is] the salvation of us all.”{{sfn|Mailer|1971|pp=140–141}} But herein lies the rub and the essence of Mailer’s beautiful artistic violence. Civilization taints love to the degree that pretense and dishonesty rule and to the degree that civilization fails to see the larger harmonious picture. | ||
“When you make love,” Mailer said, “whatever is good in you or bad in you, goes out into someone else. I mean this literally. I’m not interested in the biochemistry of it, the electromagnetism of it, nor in how the psychic waves are passed back and forth, and what psychic waves are. All I know is that when one makes love, one changes a woman slightly and a woman changes you slightly. . . . If one has the courage to think about every aspect of the act—I don’t mean think mechanically about it, but if one is able to brood over the act, to dwell on it—then one is changed by the act. Even if one has been jangled by the act. Because in the act of restoring one’s harmony, one has to encounter all the reasons one was jangled.” In essence, he concludes, one needs to test oneself.{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=189}} | “When you make love,” Mailer said, “whatever is good in you or bad in you, goes out into someone else. I mean this literally. I’m not interested in the biochemistry of it, the electromagnetism of it, nor in how the psychic waves are passed back and forth, and what psychic waves are. All I know is that when one makes love, one changes a woman slightly and a woman changes you slightly. . . . If one has the courage to think about every aspect of the act—I don’t mean think mechanically about it, but if one is able to brood over the act, to dwell on it—then one is changed by the act. Even if one has been jangled by the act. Because in the act of restoring one’s harmony, one has to encounter all the reasons one was jangled.” In essence, he concludes, one needs to test oneself.{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=189}} | ||