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

Despite the prevailing negative vehemence with which Norman Mailer’s ''An American Dream'' has been greeted by reviewers, it is qualitatively the most substantial of his four novels, a salutary contribution to contemporary American literature, and a repudiation of the sociological truism that early success inevitably rots artistic talent. How paradoxical then, if seriously conceived, is Mailer’s alleged intention, reportedly embodied in a recent London ''Observer'' interview, to abandon the United States because of the novel’s harsh reception! A man delighting as much in physical and literary battling as Mailer ought to welcome sparring partners without worrying about such matters as envy, pique, brutality, and misunderstanding. He surely knows that a forceful essayist and fictionist will garner retaliation; instead of fleeing, he should welcome all occasions for additional tests of his courage. This idea, at least, is a major motif in ''An American Dream'', whose central character (Stephen Richards Rojack) transcends his disgust for American life, its persistent manhandling of him, by developing heightened sensuous and muscular powers. Yet, it is apparent in the novel’s conclusion, which finds the transcendent Rojack heading for Guatemala and Yucatan as Sergius O’Shaugnessy in ''The Deer Park'' earlier sought sanctuary in Mexico, that Mailer does not foresee the possibility of reconciliation with American life as presently constituted.

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.  

Many readers may be more sickened by Rojack in process of existential metamorphosis than by the condition from which Mailer extricates him. This ironic fate has haunted Gregor Samsa of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” whose conversion to a giant insect tends to make him more repulsive to some than the petty bourgeois job and family he has sloughed off. However, the engaged contemporary novelist finds it difficult to construct a major character whose fight from society purifies him of all its negative qualities. Furthermore, such a writer cannot easily conceive of the disappearance of those negative qualities which have not been induced by social conditioning, for which the character himself may be held responsible. Should the novelist undertake to disregard his understanding of the interrelationship of man and society, he will also be discounting the similar insights provided by social and individual depth psychology and assuring that his fiction will be trivial and irrelevant. Finally, the more impregnable, sacrosanct, and virtuous the condition of the entity against which the existential hero struggles, the more of a repugnant outcast does the latter seem to be. Measured by the Judeo-Christian code as refined by modern Western civilization, he is Antichrist, a heretical criminal; in his own judgment, however, he is a saint inaugurating the far ranging transvaluation of values urged by Nietzsche. The closest parallel to the world of Mailer’s existential hero is medieval Europe, where priests were permitted to bray in church, plague was a seasonal visitor, strong odors were ubiquitous, witches rode broomsticks, the Dance of Death was an endless festival, God and the Devil fought obdurately and incessantly for man’s soul, and the onlooking prize could not readily differentiate between the two competing champions.  

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.  

Rojack’s worldly success is incapable of preserving him from a despair so vast that he is brought to the verge of suicide. The idea of death has haunted him since he killed four German soldiers on the battlefield. A fear of dying mingled with a yearning for release from the agony of terror coursed through him then beneath a cold, bright moon before he executed the enemy. Now, years later, the moon again kindles his awareness of death: “Yes,’ said the moon, ’you haven’t done your work, but you’ve lived your life, and you are dead with it!”” But Rojack, despite his wish for annihilation, refuses to destroy himself, cries: “ “Let me be not all dead.’” And in fright turns for sustenance to the love of his wife: “When she loved me . . . her strength seemed then to pass to mine and I was alive with wit, I had vitality, I could depend on stamina, I possessed my style...I had to see her. I had a physical need to see her as direct as an addict’s panic waiting for his drug.”  

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 monologue and dialogue similar to that in ''The Barbary Shore''.  

Such novelists are frequently accused of writing purple passages. When highly charged poetic prose is torn out of the context in which it functions admirably-particularly when it is imbedded in the prose of a reviewer or critic-it does take on an overwrought and ridiculous character. Some brief samples of Mailer’s prose are in order, however, regardless of the risk. A description of the Negro jazz musician whom Rojack beats up and throws down the stairs:

I have deliberately avoided referring to Mailer’s public role, that which he has sought and that which has been thrust upon him by virtue of private behavior that has been brought to public attention, because it has no bearing on the quality of ''An American Dream''. There is an advantage in being able to approach the work of a contemporary without being informed about his escapades, marriages, and political judgments, without having been at a party where he beat up another guest and was in turn tossed out into the gutter. ''An American Dream'' demands such innocence because Mailer has so systematically cultivated a public personality, has so insistently involved himself in public affairs, that up-to-date knowledge of his public involvements will prejudice judgment of his novel. I doubt, for example, that some of the conservative implications of Rojack’s explorations of the possibilities of freedom, courage, and violence will be apparent to those irritated with his self-advertisement, his cocky, intimate discussions of friends or ex-friends such as James Baldwin, Vance Bourjaily, and Calder Willingham, his posing for an ''Esquire'' photograph in a boxing ring. For Rojack comes to regret his total renunciation of reason and discipline, his mistaking of aggressive violence for courage, his imprudent neglect of love. And yet, to deny expression to the seething underground American dream for fear of the consequences is to die without having exhausted possibility: “In some, madness must come in with breath, mill through the blood and be breathed out again. In some it goes up to the mind. Some take the madness and stop it with discipline. Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is the growth of madness denied.”