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Why Mailer Matters: Difference between revisions
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{{byline|last=Lennon|first=J. Michael|abstract=Perhaps no career in American literature has been as brilliant, varied, controversial, public, productive, lengthy and misunderstood.{{efn|Presented at the Mailer-Jones Conference, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas-Austin, November 10, 2011}} }} | {{byline|last=Lennon|first=J. Michael|abstract=Perhaps no career in American literature has been as brilliant, varied, controversial, public, productive, lengthy and misunderstood as Norman Mailer’s.{{efn|Presented at the Mailer-Jones Conference, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas-Austin, November 10, 2011}} }} | ||
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Mailer was the most important public intellectual in the American literary world for over 30 years, and along with other figures such as William Buckley, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag, helped establish the creative writer as important a commentator as politicians, pundits and professors. | Mailer was the most important public intellectual in the American literary world for over 30 years, and along with other figures such as William Buckley, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag, helped establish the creative writer as important a commentator as politicians, pundits and professors. | ||
==1.== | ==1.== | ||
{{NM}} was the key innovator in the new wave of participatory journalism that took place in the in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He argued that there were no immutable boundaries, no lines drawn in heaven, between the genres, and demonstrated this by drilling holes through all the watertight compartments dividing them. Mailer once described himself as “a Nijinsky of ambivalence,” and he was able to deploy the warring parts of his psyche as both actor and observer, protagonist and witness, and thus achieve the enviable status Walt Whitman described as “being in and out of the game, watching and wondering” — and doing. The consummate artistic control he exercised over his persona enabled him, in ''[[The Armies of the Night]]'' (1968) and succeeding works, to shift from The Beast to The Ruminant with ease, jumping from one to the other like circus acrobats leaping from one horse to another and then back again. Thus, he was able to avail himself of the techniques and powers of journalism, historical narrative, biography, autobiography, and the novel — always the master form for him because of its tendency to engulf and ingest other forms. I would add, however, that it was the idea of the novel, and its aspiration to range wide yet dive deep, that inspired and allowed him to plunder and reshape the other forms. His actual novelistic achievements, while brilliant, sit in the second row behind his successes in the polemical essay and several kinds of nonfiction narrative, including one often passed over too quickly—biography. As Richard Poirier once wrote, Mailer was Melville without ''Moby-Dick'', George Eliot without ''Middlemarch'', and Mark Twain without ''Huckleberry Finn''. But with ''The Armies of the Night'' and ''[[The Executioner’s Song]]'' (1979), he has his ''Walden'' and his ''Crime and Punishment''. | {{NM}} was the key innovator in the new wave of participatory journalism that took place in the in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He argued that there were no immutable boundaries, no lines drawn in heaven, between the genres, and demonstrated this by drilling holes through all the watertight compartments dividing them. Mailer once described himself as “a [[w:Vaslav Nijinsky|Nijinsky]] of ambivalence,” and he was able to deploy the warring parts of his psyche as both actor and observer, protagonist and witness, and thus achieve the enviable status Walt Whitman described as “being in and out of the game, watching and wondering” — and doing. The consummate artistic control he exercised over his persona enabled him, in ''[[The Armies of the Night]]'' (1968) and succeeding works, to shift from The Beast to The Ruminant with ease, jumping from one to the other like circus acrobats leaping from one horse to another and then back again. Thus, he was able to avail himself of the techniques and powers of journalism, historical narrative, biography, autobiography, and the novel — always the master form for him because of its tendency to engulf and ingest other forms. I would add, however, that it was the idea of the novel, and its aspiration to range wide yet dive deep, that inspired and allowed him to plunder and reshape the other forms. His actual novelistic achievements, while brilliant, sit in the second row behind his successes in the polemical essay and several kinds of nonfiction narrative, including one often passed over too quickly—biography. As Richard Poirier once wrote, Mailer was Melville without ''Moby-Dick'', George Eliot without ''Middlemarch'', and Mark Twain without ''Huckleberry Finn''. But with ''The Armies of the Night'' and ''[[The Executioner’s Song]]'' (1979), he has his ''Walden'' and his ''Crime and Punishment''. | ||
==2.== | ==2.== | ||