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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 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 fictions, 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''.{{efn|I stress ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''The Executioner’s Song'' as, alongside ''The Armies of the Night'', the most broadly acclaimed of Mailer’s fictions. Because of its frequent distance from fiction that is, in part, due to its excursions into the essay and analytical historical forms, I do not stress ''Armies''. I stress Evenings, however, both as the most developed and as the least realistically inhibited expression of Mailer’s poetics (a point that I hope my discussion of it here will substantiate) and as because the bimodal reception to this work makes it at once a zenith and nadir of Mailer’s critical reception; see {{harvtxt|Bloom|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Burgess|1985|pp=132–133}} and {{harvtxt|Poirier|1999|pp=226–337}}. I somewhat limit my attention, largely ignoring ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' and ''The Gospel According to the Son'', which are the shortest of Mailer’s fictions, and ''Harlot’s Ghost'' and ''The Castle in the Forest'', which are the least complete with regard to closure of the stories of their respective central protagonists, namely Harry Hubbard and Adolf Hitler.}}
+===The Basic Elements===
+The basic elements of Mailer’s novels match up pretty closely with Talcott Parson’s sociological articulation of the analytical aspects of human phenomena and the human sciences, which are physiological, personality centered, social relational and symbolic.{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Parsons|Smelser|1956}}.}} 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 antitank 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 Anapopei 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|1984|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 Shicklgruber (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’s mother Hathfertiti, 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 intellectual universe out of strong, idiosyncratic convictions about the relationship between spiritual, psychic and social existence.”{{sfn|Siegel|2007|p=2}}
+===Statics===
+The emergent, ''molecular'' Mailerian statics help specify the characters and dramatic tensions that generate narrative. They consist of pairs of contrasting categories. One pair is individual-society (Hearn versus platoon; O’Shaugnessy versus Hollywood; Rojack versus police and business establishments; Mailer versus the Pentagon; Harry Hubbard vis-à-vis the CIA). A second couplet is dominant-subordinate (for example, Cummings over Hearn; studio head Herman over director Charles Eitel; Barney Kelly and Lieut. Roberts over Rojack; Pharaoh over Menenhetet; Captain Regency over Tim Madden; Bill Harvey over Harry Hubbard). A third and fourth are the cowardly-courageous and the everyman-magus. Here, Hearn retrieving his cigarette butt off the General’s floor illustrates the cowardly, while Hearn previously stamping out that that cigarette butt illustrates courage. Rojack on his first, failed walk on the parapet at Barney Kelly’s penthouse illustrates
+both the cowardly and a bit of everyman; Rojack on his last triumphant walk illustrates both the courageous and the magus. Menenhetet casting spells with Honey Ball against the bugger Pharaoh Ramses II does so as well.
+A fifth is the mundane versus the transcendent. O’Shaugnessy’s fractured consciousness may pass as mundane in the alienated Hollywood of ''The Deer Park'', but his sexual gymnastic in “The Time of Her Time” again attain an at least ephemeral transcendence. The funk of most of Rojack’s marriage is mundane; but Rojack’s regenerative sodomy with Ruta and exhilarating combat with Shaggo Martin again touch the transcendent. Menenhetet idling with his childhood friends in the Nile delta or training as charioteer taps little more than the mundane. However, the temporally restorative power of Menenhetet’s intercourse with the Secret Whore of the King of Kadesh touches the transcendent, and Menenhetet’s selfreincarnating embrace with Nefitiri transcends the finality of at least one death. Little Meni regularly transcends normal social and psychological limitation through his mind reading, especially in “The Book of the Child,” a veritable symphony of empathetic leaps of a sort prefigured by the leaps that Rojack makes into the mind of Cherry in ''An American Dream''. It merits stressing that transcendence in Mailer’s work tends toward not only to be frequent and salient but to be ephemeral as well. Menenhetet’s trysts with the Secret Whore of Tyre and with Honey Ball are interludes. Rojack’s ecstatic first witness of Cherry singing in a Village joint is a “rare moment of balm.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=99}} Sergius O’Shaugnessy’s long fuck with Denise Gondelman at the end of “The Time of Her Time,” although perhaps fullest and fittest conclusion to ''The Deer Park'' O’Shaugnessy’s saga, seems an end to O’Shaugnessy’s relationship to Gondelman.
+Terms are now in place for a discussion of the Mailerian dynamic.
 ===Notes===