CLASSIC REVISITED
The great American dream
Ravi Vyas
WHEN Norman Mailer turned 80 in January, he said, while theorising on writing and politics, that "if we don't go to war with Iraq, George W. Bush is going to feel ill... It doesn't matter what they're up to in Iraq. It doesn't matter if they have nuclear bombs or not or whether they are ready to do chemical warfare. They're not a danger, but they are absolutely a position in the world we need militarily. Dominate Iraq, dominate the Near East, and then get China in a position to make China the Greece to our Rome. September 11 was the `open sesame', the path to world empire," the path to the Great American Dream. Way back in 1965, Norman Mailer, the Grand Old Man of American letters wrote the definitive presidential novel, An American Dream, that gave an idea of the psychic realities of the United States, the violence of it all. And it isn't just the violence of the libidinal drives, but also the violence of the frustration, prejudice, power and the whole seething, envious antagonism of the American city. It was the incredibly insulting tone of American life, the murderousness that has proliferated like cancer in the U.S. that ultimately reeked of the Self. Violence and schizophrenia became values in themselves in the search of the Good Life.
An American Dream is a political novel. It was written to shock people into recognising the subterranean forces that ran their lives and society. Rojack, Mailer's hero — university professor, TV personality, ex-Congressman and wartime hero (you simply have to be some kind of show-biz personality to get anywhere in the U.S.) — is alive to his impulses and accepts the risks of acting them out; he is responsible to his buried madness. The divided Self elaborates the thesis of the psychiatrist, R.D. Laing that madness may give a truer and deeper insight into an individual's own reality than sanity. Therefore a cultivated madness may be a quality to strive for.
In one chapter, Rojack murders his wife with considerable satisfaction and then, with slightly less, works it out with his German maid. But that isn't enough. He dispenses his libido on lost girls, cons the police, fixes the Mafia Mob. He has also a little thing going with ESP (extra-sensory perception), is in vague touch with the spiritual world and has muddled thoughts about God and the Devil — mostly the Devil. All this, it is implied, has given Rojack the skill of riding the power circuit of big money, political influence and smart espionage or one-up-manship.
In An American Dream, it appears Mailer has lost his cool: his tone is hostile, sometimes raucous, and above all anxious, as if to tell his folks to change things a bit before it is too late. Here Mailer gives no clue that he has written the most alive and intelligent prose of his generation, a style that is swarming with ideas and insights, imaginative depth and intellectual pressure brought together effortlessly that had made his Naked and the Dead (1948) the finest book to come out of the Second World War. (There has always been a toss-up between Mailer and Saul Bellow, with Bellow getting a slight edge.) But the raucous style was necessary to shock, to shake American complacency in the 30-hour journey through every imaginable hell — a panorama that took on the dimensions of an American myth. Yet, the stylistic parallels with some of his earlier writings — Naked and the Dead, Advertisements for Myself, Armies of the Night, The Deer Park — are all there:
I took a step toward him. I did not know what I was going to do, but it felt right to take that step. May be I had a thought to pick up the whiskey bottle, and break it on the table. The feeling of joy came up in me again the way the lyric of a song might remind a man on the edge of insanity that soon he will be insane again and there is a world there more interesting than his own.
Shago retreated a step, the blade held out in his open palm, his wrist dipping to some beat he heard in the mood. Looking at that blade was like standing on the edge of a huge cliff, one's stomach sucking out of one, as one's eye went down the fall. I had a moment when I remembered the German with the bayonet, and my legs were gone, they were all but gone; I felt a voice in me sending instructions to snatch the whiskey bottle and break it now that he was out of reach and so could not slash me with the knife, not without taking a step, but the voice was like a false voice in my nerves, and so I ignored it, and took another step forward against all the lack of will in my legs, took the step and left the bottle behind as if I knew it would be useless against a knife. My reflexes were never a match against his. What I felt instead was an emptiness in his mood which I could enter.
Mailer tries to catch the present sensations as they come spontaneously and chart them as they sink down into the psyche, to watch, as it were, the present reverberating into the future. To shock, in fact, is the book's chief aim. Rojack is continually daring his own self — with drink, with sex and with attempted suicide like walking the edge of a parapet of a skyscraper. Rojack's father-in-law goes one better — he has slept with all the girls including his own daughter.
You may say there is far too much explicit sex here but the sexual exhibitionism becomes, in a devious way, an instrument of politics: sexual deviation, titillating films, the unchanging, bogus psychologising about mutual orgasms, mass-produced bosoms looming behind every bill-board is the new opiate of the masses. Mailer obviously believes that the more sex a book has the less it offends those blank, totalitarian forces that were running American lives. When everything is in excess, nothing appears to be so.
There is a kind of madness in Rojack's excesses but it is not the grand, controlled madness of Dostoevsky or Lawrence's absolute certainty of intuition: he is far too cerebral and this is what makes him dangerous. Mailer's preoccupation with way-out experiences are backed by formal existential excuses that would seduce you to accept them: the line between understanding and justification in any case can be very thin. Rojack does his wild acts on the spur of the moment and then justifies them because of this or that reason rather like the man who observes, looking back at some failed experiment, "Well, you know, it seemed a good idea at the time."
Mailer's strength as a novelist and essayist has always been his sense of which issues are on the edge of erupting into American consciousness. But there is one issue that is a constant: America, as a political and social organisation, is deeply committed to a cheerful way of life. "Don't worry, be happy", as the ditty goes. If the search for the elusive happiness means bombing some place back to the stone age, so be it. It is the mind that we need to get at and it is this psyche that Norman Mailer talks about in his eternal American Dream.
An American Dream, Norman Mailer, Mayflower paperback, 1966 edition.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
