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Mythic Mailer in An American Dream: Difference between revisions
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Mailer's characters are believable, although their actions are not always compatible with realism. However, Mailer believes that the characters in ''<u>An American Dream</u>'' are credible and that his plot is plausible. It is Mailer's melding of realism and romance that fuels the critical controversy. Ultimately, it is not the realistic Mailer, who produced The Naked and the Dead or The Executioner's Song, who is writing ''<u>An American Dream</u>'', but the romantic Mailer, echoing the romantics of the American Renaissance. Using elements of this genre, Mailer feels free to indulge himself by developing his own cosmology while giving his mythic work a particularly 20th-century flavor. Aldridge insists: | Mailer's characters are believable, although their actions are not always compatible with realism. However, Mailer believes that the characters in ''<u>An American Dream</u>'' are credible and that his plot is plausible. It is Mailer's melding of realism and romance that fuels the critical controversy. Ultimately, it is not the realistic Mailer, who produced The Naked and the Dead or The Executioner's Song, who is writing ''<u>An American Dream</u>'', but the romantic Mailer, echoing the romantics of the American Renaissance. Using elements of this genre, Mailer feels free to indulge himself by developing his own cosmology while giving his mythic work a particularly 20th-century flavor. Aldridge insists: | ||
<blockquote>The book's antecedents were not the novels of Henry James or Jane Austen but the romances of Cooper, Melville, and Hawthorne, and one of Mailer's contributions was to rehabilitate the form of the romance and adapt it to the literary needs of the immediate present. | <blockquote>The book's antecedents were not the novels of Henry James or Jane Austen but the romances of Cooper, Melville, and Hawthorne, and one of Mailer's contributions was to rehabilitate the form of the romance and adapt it to the literary needs of the immediate present.{{sfn|Aldidge|1966|p=161}}</blockquote> | ||
Mailer's complicated interlacing of fantasy and reality is a product of the 19th-century American romance as defined by Nathaniel Hawthorne in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables: | Mailer's complicated interlacing of fantasy and reality is a product of the 19th-century American romance as defined by Nathaniel Hawthorne in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables: | ||