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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 {{Byline |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |url=https://prmlr.us/mr03hic |abstract=In Norman Mailer’s fiction, the underlying poetics, although simplifying, is complex in its basic elements, which 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 statics help constitute. }}
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 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.{{efn|Gilmore writes in his letters of a romantic rapture nourished by separation and elaborated by fantasies of an afterlife with Nicole that is augmented by poetic and ritual models out of Ovid and the Egyptian Book of the Dead. This introduces elements of the magic into Gilmore’s quest for transcendence.}}
+I leave to your imagination the several incidentally disparate but structurally similar Mailerian narratives to be identified—for example, Tim Madden’s self-assertion ''vis-à-vis'' the domineering Captain Regency, Harry Hubbard’s progressive rites of passage into a fuller manhood from the precipices to Berlin to Miami to Playa Girón, and the eventually transcendent personal integration of Sergius O’Shaugnessy’s—at least if we see ''The 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,{{efn|The considerable scientific (especially biological) sophistication, or simply insight, of the biological facet of Mailer’s writing is as unappreciated when it comes to gender or illness as to anxiety (“dread”) and animal behavior. See {{harvtxt|Eysenck|1988}} and Adessa.}} 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.{{efn|The role of the magus seems missing from the biological formulation, undermining this biological analogy. However, if one recalls those ritual combat and courtship displays in which muscles or plumage expand to the consternation or enthrallment of the Other and the emboldening of the Actor, some aspects of the magus might even be encompassed by an analogy that joins some rudiments of Mailer’s narrative and the behavior of the living in close parallel. On the somatics of emotion, religious included, see note 6.}}
+===The Poetics and Fictional Powers===
+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.{{efn|Just how Mailer’s own metaphysics of a God and Devil locked in unresolved conflict might ground an alternative poetics, if any at all, is a topic I do not address here. {{Harvtxt|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} probably provides the best entre to relevant writing on such a metaphysics.}} 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|2006|pp=91–103}}{{efn|Not for nothing did Mailer publish an anthology of his work entitled ''The Time of Our Time'', organized as a social chronicle.}} 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.”{{sfn|Poirier|1999|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.”{{sfn|Poirier|1972|p=120}}{{efn|This absence of formal resolution takes on, among other forms, an absence of that sustained transcendence we call salvation. To draw on Moretti’s discussion of the ''Bildungsroman'', a genre with parallels to the frequently strong strands of protagonist development in Mailer’s fiction, this fiction tends to eschew the happy ending in which “story’s ending and hero’s aim fully coincide,”{{sfn|Moretti|1987|p=118}} and in which the protagonist’s transition is one from “youthful illusions to realism,”{{sfn|Moretti|1987|p=93}}, to “maturity,” as in the classical ''Bildungsromanen'' of the Fielding of ''Tom Jones'' and the Goethe of ''Wilhelm Meister'', of Austen and early Dickens.{{sfn|Moretti|1987|pp=15–73}} Instead, Mailer’s fiction is marked, like Stendhal and Balzac’s, by a world in which “there is a divergence of story and meaning, of factual reality and value judgment,”{{sfn|Moretti|1987|p=124}} in which youth “is not a teleological course ending in a superior maturity”{{sfn|Moretti|1987|p=118}} and in which maturity is not perceived as an “acquisition but as a lose,”{{sfn|Moretti|1987|p=90}} in which one is always pressed forward by a “persisting tension” between the “difference between the . . . achieved,”{{sfn|Moretti|1987|p=113}} in which “the combination of individual strife and historical change”{{sfn|Moretti|1987|p=110}} point forward to a Faustian ''streben'', an incessant striving, and backwards to a “political history” in light of which the “course” of the “individual’s formation” is twisted and contradictory.”{{sfn|Moretti|1987|p=80}} We have here not only psychological and narrative affinities between the post-Revolution and post-Waterloo fictions of Stendhal and Balzac and the post-Depression and cold War ones of Mailer, but similarities in relations of individual to history and society that are not foregrounded by my Mailerian poetics and that point to the ultimate importance of the analysis of Mailerian and history in unison (see note 1 and 15).}}
+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|1955|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.”{{efn|I think that O’Shaugnessy’s self assertion in “The Time of Her Time” would provide a more dramatically satisfying conclusion to ''The Deer Park'' than the ending just quoted. However, O’Shaugnessy sexually grasped transcendence in “The Time of her Time” is also transient. Intriguingly, Rojack’s final, ostensibly triumphant walk around the parapet at Barney Kelly’s penthouse ends short of completion. As Rojack “approached the wall, ten feet away, eight feet away, six feet away, Kelly came near.” Kelly “lifted the tip of the umbrella” to Rojack’s ribs and “gave a push to poke” him “off”; and off Rojack jumps.{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=260}} I thank Mike Melloy for bringing the truncated character of Rojack’s final walk on Kelly’s parapet to my attention.}}
 ===Notes===