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A Fear of Dying: Norman Mailer's An American Dream: Difference between revisions
A Fear of Dying: Norman Mailer's An American Dream (view source)
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Earlier I described ''An American Dream'' as existential. Those familiar with the writings of such Europeans as Kierkegard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Camus, Sartre, and Tillich will detect the existential substratum beneath Rojack's use of terms such as "dread, "failure," and "Being," his pondering of suicide and murder, his need to demonstrate courage in trials that under other circumstances would be foolish, exhibitionist posturings. I do not mean to imply that existentialism is all that underlies the novel, for Rojack-as one might expect from a professor of psychology- has obviously read Freud, Marcuse, Reich, and Fromm among others. Unlike Camus Koestler, and other novelists of ideas, however, Mailer does not permit his intellectual hero to provide systematic elucidations of his ideas. This results in some obscurity for the uninitiated, but to have explained the lacunae would have violated a novelistic structure designed to dramatize the death of rationalism. In most novels, events build up to a concluding climax. In ''An American Dream'', on the contrary, the climatic moment occurs at the beginning; the processes, concepts and values of reason are literally and symbolically destroyed at that stage. Thereafter only the psychic growth of Rojack is consequential; his perceptions must create a world where before there was merely arid thought disguising nothingness. | Earlier I described ''An American Dream'' as existential. Those familiar with the writings of such Europeans as Kierkegard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Camus, Sartre, and Tillich will detect the existential substratum beneath Rojack's use of terms such as "dread, "failure," and "Being," his pondering of suicide and murder, his need to demonstrate courage in trials that under other circumstances would be foolish, exhibitionist posturings. I do not mean to imply that existentialism is all that underlies the novel, for Rojack-as one might expect from a professor of psychology- has obviously read Freud, Marcuse, Reich, and Fromm among others. Unlike Camus Koestler, and other novelists of ideas, however, Mailer does not permit his intellectual hero to provide systematic elucidations of his ideas. This results in some obscurity for the uninitiated, but to have explained the lacunae would have violated a novelistic structure designed to dramatize the death of rationalism. In most novels, events build up to a concluding climax. In ''An American Dream'', on the contrary, the climatic moment occurs at the beginning; the processes, concepts and values of reason are literally and symbolically destroyed at that stage. Thereafter only the psychic growth of Rojack is consequential; his perceptions must create a world where before there was merely arid thought disguising nothingness. | ||
The viability of the novel, then, depends upon the manner in which Rojack recounts his observations, reflections, and experiences. And this is where the style of of ''An American Dream'' becomes all-important. No amount of preliminary knowledge existentialist thought or even of ideas already delineated in ''Mailer's Advertisements for Myself'' and ''The Presidential Papers'' could sustain the novel were its prose flat, uninspired, without psychological and poetic ramifications. It must be confessed that most of Mailer's earlier fiction would not encourage one to believe him capable of rising significantly above the merely serviceable, often stereotyped, awkward, and plodding language of ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''Barbary Shore''. Glimmerings of a fresh voice had begun to appear in ''The Deer Park'', it is true, but not until the appearance of "The Time of Her Time" in ''Advertisements for Myself'' did that voice assume recognizably individual character. Even after that there was reasonable doubt about its longevity; Mailer's critical statements about contemporary American writers and some of his expository prose were rich in texture, yet the poetry in ''Deaths for the Ladies and Other Disasters'' was embarrassingly crude, both musically and imagistically. Furthermore, "Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out," the prologue to a novel in progress which appeared in ''Advertisements for Myself'' and which Mailer heralded as a major opus, appeared a stylistic regression in its reliance upon an expository | The viability of the novel, then, depends upon the manner in which Rojack recounts his observations, reflections, and experiences. And this is where the style of of ''An American Dream'' becomes all-important. No amount of preliminary knowledge existentialist thought or even of ideas already delineated in ''Mailer's Advertisements for Myself'' and ''The Presidential Papers'' could sustain the novel were its prose flat, uninspired, without psychological and poetic ramifications. It must be confessed that most of Mailer's earlier fiction would not encourage one to believe him capable of rising significantly above the merely serviceable, often stereotyped, awkward, and plodding language of ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''Barbary Shore''. Glimmerings of a fresh voice had begun to appear in ''The Deer Park'', it is true, but not until the appearance of "The Time of Her Time" in ''Advertisements for Myself'' did that voice assume recognizably individual character. Even after that there was reasonable doubt about its longevity; Mailer's critical statements about contemporary American writers and some of his expository prose were rich in texture, yet the poetry in ''Deaths for the Ladies and Other Disasters'' was embarrassingly crude, both musically and imagistically. Furthermore, "Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out," the prologue to a novel in progress which appeared in ''Advertisements for Myself'' and which Mailer heralded as a major opus, appeared a stylistic regression in its reliance upon an expository monologue and dialogue similar to that in ''The Barbary Shore''. | ||
monologue and dialogue similar to that in ''The Barbary Shore''. | |||
I think it proper to suggest that Norman Mailer now ranks among the most interesting prose stylists in contemporary American literature as the result of his achievement in ''An American Dream''. It has taken a long time for the Hemingway dominated novelists, of whom Mailer was among the most distinguished with ''The Naked and the Dead'', to turn away from parodying Hemingway's plain style as the master himself did. An awful fear of the baroque paralyzed all but a few such as Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner, even though there was ample precedent for the baroque's boldly opulent effect in Poe, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Melville. For Mailer the baroque impulse offers a liberating direction enabling him to move from relatively unrevealing physical action and conventional speech to an unlocking, and frequently a crystallization, of the imprisoned emotional physiological states which are his prime concern. The devices Mailer employs include similes, interjections that break up a sentence, series of clauses that break up a sentence, series of clauses that circle up and out in the Faulknerian manner, sharp vernacular phrases and rhythms, vividly varied speech patterns, and colorful descriptions of objects. ''An American Dream'' brings Mailer into the ranks of the lyrical novelists, those who are bridging the gap between poetry and prose. | I think it proper to suggest that Norman Mailer now ranks among the most interesting prose stylists in contemporary American literature as the result of his achievement in ''An American Dream''. It has taken a long time for the Hemingway dominated novelists, of whom Mailer was among the most distinguished with ''The Naked and the Dead'', to turn away from parodying Hemingway's plain style as the master himself did. An awful fear of the baroque paralyzed all but a few such as Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner, even though there was ample precedent for the baroque's boldly opulent effect in Poe, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Melville. For Mailer the baroque impulse offers a liberating direction enabling him to move from relatively unrevealing physical action and conventional speech to an unlocking, and frequently a crystallization, of the imprisoned emotional physiological states which are his prime concern. The devices Mailer employs include similes, interjections that break up a sentence, series of clauses that break up a sentence, series of clauses that circle up and out in the Faulknerian manner, sharp vernacular phrases and rhythms, vividly varied speech patterns, and colorful descriptions of objects. ''An American Dream'' brings Mailer into the ranks of the lyrical novelists, those who are bridging the gap between poetry and prose. | ||