Norman Mailer and the Cutting Edge of Style/Why Are We in Vietnam? and The Armies of the Night: Difference between revisions

As political autobiography, ''The Armies of the Night'' ranks with, or a little above, such a crucial twentieth-century confession as George Orwell’s ''Homage to Catalonia''. More interesting than its historical, political value, however, is the way in which its plot recapitulates so precisely the experiences of such previous Mailer characters as Hearn, Lovett, O’Shaugnessy, Rojack, and D.J.—but now with “Norman Mailer” himself as the hero and central fictive character of the book. The cutting edge of style, that saving grace which allows a man, even in the midst of an insane world, to hew out for himself an island of responsive and civilized humanity, has finally been applied to the character who has always been Norman Mailer’s most interesting and most carefully sculpted hero, Norman Mailer. Indeed, viewing Mailer’s career as a movement, first from explicit political argument toward internalization of politics, and thence back outward to a redefined “public” political stance, we can say that ''The Armies of the Night'', at the most obvious level of style, completes that two-part process. ''The Naked and the Dead'' is told from the point of view of a third-person, omniscient narrator, the most conventional and conventionally “public” of narrative modes; whereas all of Mailer’s later novels are first-person narratives, moving—from Lovett to D.J .—in the direction of an ever more idiosyncratic, ever more “private” version of the speaking “I.” ''The Armies of the Night'', with brilliant paradox, manages to be Mailer’s most intimately confessional “novel” (indeed, it is only analogically a novel at all) and at the same time marks his return, after twenty years, to the third-person narrative form. He is not “I” in the book, but “Mailer,” “Norman Mailer,” “the Reporter,” objectified to himself. It is a habit of style which Mailer has repeated in his later journalism—''Miami and the Siege of Chicago'', ''Of a Fire on the Moon''—to less point, and which has indeed become something of a tic in the reportage of the seventies (as in Tom Wicker’s rather self-indulgent use of the device in his otherwise splendid account of the Attica Prison riot, ''A Time to Die''). But, at least in ''The Armies of the Night'', it can be seen as one of Mailer’s most original solutions to his life-long quest to transmute the embarrassments of the private self into the stuff of the truly political imagination.  

So he describes himself addressing the crowd at the theater, in the full intelligence of his manic style, even to the contemptuous self-denigration of the word, ''dwarf'' (and once again, one cannot help but think of the connection between this kind of parody and the demonic monologues of Lenny Bruce). Like the narrative of D.J., Mailer’s speech here is the self-parodistic admission of inauthenticity which might, with luck and courage, cure itself and enter fully into the world of a humanized politics. And, in ''The Armies of the Night'', the self-cure works, for Mailer concludes his narrative with one of the most moving articulations of political commitment an American in this century has managed to create.