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Literary Review
Classics Revisited
Critique of American provincialism
BY RAVI VYAS
An American Dream, Norman Mailer, Andre Deutsch, First published, 1965.
Who but an iconoclastic American writer (if not a Chinese or Russian in the euphoria of revolutionary fervour) would describe his country “as the land where a new kind of man was born”? The war against Vietnam was only the ghastliest manifestation of what could be called “imperial provincialism” (now it’s Iraq) which afflicted America’s whole culture— aware only of its history (if at all), insensible to everything that was not part of the local scene. The best examples of the provincialism of American literature (in the widest sense of the word) are the writings of Norman Mailer who advertised himself as “the best writer in America” and the most lucid critic of his country’s megalomania.
Mailer often boasted that his one great ambition was to write the Great American novel which “Dostoevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal and Tolstoy; Proust and Spengler; Faulkner and Hemingway” (all classicists) might come to read. Mailer offered the best critique of American society; all he wanted to do was “to alter the nerves and marrow” of the nation, to “change the consciousness” of his times. There was no limit to his egomania and he chose the most unconventional forms to express it like Advertisements for Myself in his later years. You got the first whiff of it in The Armies of the Night where Mailer saw the homeland of his new men as “once a beauty of magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty with a leprous skin”.
But before we get down to his American Dream there is a point to be stressed because of all those obits that have appeared: Mailer was not a novelist; he was an essayist, first and last, who used the language of the novel but remained grounded to the old-fashioned leg work and observation. What he wrote in his numerous books — 40 and over, quite apart from his journalistic pieces — was “faction” or the artful mixing of fact and fiction. You read Mailer to be better informed and entertained at the same time.
Anchored in facts
All his “fiction” was anchored in historical fact, but the factual references never weighed too heavily on our mind or interrupted the flow of the narrative. And all his central characters are easily identifiable, too rich in brilliantly illuminated passions, vices and whims to be confused with the mere person of the novelist. Some critics have dismissed Mailer’s heroes as cardboard cut-outs but they all had the one virtue a character needs to possess between hard covers: vitality. If he comes to life in our imagination, he passes the test. Mailer built his fictional alter ego into some of the most authentic literary figures of our times.
An American Dream (1965) is Mailer’s Presidential novel. Kennedy appears in the first sentence and reappears just before the climax. (Kelly returned. “It was Jack,” he said to me. “He said to send you his regards and commiserations… I didn’t know you knew him.”) In between are dramatised some of the qualities needed of an existential President. Rojack, Mailer’s hero — university president, TV personality, ex-Congressman and war-time hero — reacts to his impulses and accepts the risks of acting on them; he is responsible to his buried madness. In one chapter, he murders his wife and then without a trace of remorse, rapes his German maid. He cons the police, makes up with the underlings of the Mob, tests on his nerves the seductions of suicide, gambling and physical daring. He believes in extra-sensory communication, and has muddled thoughts about God and the Devil. All Rojack seems to say is, “Psychopaths of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your cool.”
In An American Dream, Mailer’s hero has lost his cool. His tone is hectic, sometimes raucous, and above all anxious. But he is the authentic American man who doesn’t know where he is going, but is on its way. Mailer tries to catch the sensations as they come and chart them as they sink into the psyche, to watch, as it were, the present reverberating into the future. To shock, in fact, is the book’s chief aim — to change the climate of opinion. But the shock works on two levels, one superficial, more or less frivolous, the other serious.
No limits
Frivolity first. Rojack is constantly daring himself — with drink, with sex and with suicidal situations like walking round the parapet of a skyscraper. Miller is daring the American public to be outraged with what’s happening around them. But it can’t be done because in America everything is acceptable; the shock threshold is so high that nothing matters any more. This accounts for that shrill edge of frustration. Rojack’s father-in-law has slept with all the girls, including his own daughter but so what? Hence sexual exhibitionism is passé. Nobody really cares what people do to each other in bed; after all, it’s harmless, it has been said and done before, and it’s not political.
Yet, in a devious way, it is an instrument of politics. All those sex novels and naughty films, the unchanging bogus sex, all those empty faces and mass-produced silicon bosoms are the new opiate of the masses. So, the more sex and pornographic films offend only those blank “totalitarian” forces that are running American life. But these are the majority and it isn’t silent any more. When Kennedy went to the White House, Mailer wrote that America would have to go back to its existential beginnings, its frontier psychology to discover itself. Mailer has created Rojack as the frontiersman in search of the elusive future but he has to shock to break the sea frozen inside him.
Undercurrents of society
Mailer’s strength as an essayist/novelist has always been his sense of which issues are on the edge of erupting into the American consciousness. An American Dream speaks of the violence and schizophrenia that lies just below the surface in an affluent society. But these values in themselves are not a concept original to Mailer or America. The psychiatrist, R.D. Laing has said that “madness” may give you a truer and deeper insight into your own reality than “sanity”. May be this is what Mailer has done here: to shock people into recognising the undercurrents that run their lives and society; it was written to change things a bit.
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