A Fear of Dying: Norman Mailer's An American Dream: Difference between revisions

{{DISPLAYTITLE:A Fear of Dying: Norman Mailer's ''An American Dream''}}

The attitude toward society revealed in ''An American Dream'' cannot be viewed in simplistic fashion as irreconcilable alienation. Such an evaluation of Mailer was made in Marcus Klein’s ''After Alienation'', which appeared before ''An American Dream''. Even without the testimony of this last novel, however, it should have been apparent from pieces in ''The Presidential Papers'', as well as from sections of ''Advertisements for Myself'', that Mailer was protesting aspects of American culture but not repudiating its future. For Mailer the promise of America reposes wholly in the individual, not at all in the society in which he is enmeshed. That society has tended to de-invidualize the individual, to reduce his sanctity and importance, while ensconcing him in ever-increasing material splendor. All of Mailer’s fiction beginning with ''The Naked and the Dead'' has emphasized the dangers to man from this de-individuation. But whereas in ''The Naked and the Dead'' and ''Barbary Shore Mailer'' was still hopeful about social reform, in ''The Deer Park'' and ''An American Dream'' the only meaningful reform envisioned is the transformation of the individual.  

As Rojack relates his story, sparing neither himself nor his auditors, the events are relatively unimportant. The plot, in fact, is banal; it can be found in any sensational American newspaper complete with photographs, in the pages of “detective” pulps in the crime paperbacks that clutter news-stands and bookstores. What Mailer set out to achieve was an increasing intensity of psychological and sensory perception by whose glow one could measure the extent to which his protagonist had escaped the banal and become aware of himself. If not read with equal perceptiveness, the novel will seem to be merely a piece of sensationalist hack-work produced to titillate a decadent audience.  

Stripped to its barest outlines, for example, Rojack’s murder of his wife in the first chapter and its salutary effects upon him are palpably horrid violations of prevailing morality. Mailers seeming unawareness of these implications may be construed as a symptom of irresponsibility so sordid and diabolic as to place the book outside the realm of tolerable art. But there are sufficient details imbedded in Rojack’s first-person recital before and after the murder to provide a tolerable perspective for the act and its aftermath, one which places later developments into a context with significant meaning.  

Although several reviewers have cited the above sequence as a manifestation of the novel’s incredible absurdity, few of them have given it the modicum of attention required to discern the underlying sense. Not much more effort than I have expended above is necessary to discover that ''An American Dream'' is a unified construction held together by visible themes, symbolic images, and the expanding consciousness of the narrator. The novel undeniably presents a highly personal vision of the mode of behavior proper for mid-twentieth century man-one which a reviewer need not affirm-but it has an internal logic that invests it with a dignity and aesthetic force that should be acknowledged.

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.  

{{quote|While we ascended, I felt the air burning from the shaft and some rich exhaust went out of my lungs as if I had fallen asleep in a room with a fire and awakened from a long sensual dream to discover that the fire had consumed the oxygen and my satyr’s heaven was compounded of suffocation. Up we went, rocketing the stories of the Waldorf, while the umbrella in my hand quivered like a dowsing rod, as if here, here, we had just passed some absolute of evil to the left, and there to the right an unknown concentrate, crypts of claustrophobia, abysses of open space, now through a distillate of from a long sensual dream to discover that the fire rod, as if here, here, we had just passed some absolute of evil to the left, and there to the right an unknown concentrate, crypts of claustrophobia, abysses of open space, now through a distillate of gloom—what depression surrounded the rich—and some compass of direction went awry in my mind; I had the physical impression we were moving through a tunnel rather than rising in a shaft; once again I felt something begin to go out of the very light of my mind, as if the colors which lit the stage of my dreams would be more modest now, something vital was ready to go away forever even as once, not thirty hours ago, I had lost some other part of myself, it had streamed away on a voyage on that instant when I had been too fearful to jump, something had quit me forever, that ability of my soul to die in its place, take failure, go down to the moon, launched out on that instant when I had been too fearful to jump, something had quit me forever, that ability of my soul to die in its place, take failure, go down honorably. Now something else was preparing to leave, some certainty of love was passing away, some knowledge it was the reward for which to live-that voice which I could no longer deny spoke again through the medium of the umbrella.}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fear of Dying: Norman Mailer’s An American Dream, A}}

[[Category:Full Text Articles]]