| Norman Mailer (1923–2007) is a brilliant, varied, prolific, and controversialAmerican writer. In a span of more than six decades, Mailer’s literary works havebeen endowed with special mission to demonstrate his constant and serious concernsabout social evolutions in America. As a conscientious American writer, Mailer wantsto “write huge collective novels about American life”(Mailer,1982:147) and “aboutmatters that are very American”.(Mailer,1982:189) In his works, Mailer intends torepresent various social contradictions and crises in America where moderntechnology, rationalism and free market economy are altering Americans’consciousness. On the way to achieve his ambition, Mailer leaves us many freshcharacters that are lonely in private life, cannot be accepted by the mainstream society,and are determined to counter against American society with full strength. From suchfigures of Mailer’s style, we can trace the rapid changes of his writing themes, histough determination to save American roots, his strong desires to assume the role ofAmerican Messiah, and especially his tormented mind.Mailer wins numerous awards and honors with his great literary works. He waselected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1967) and the American Academyof Arts and Sciences (1970); he won the1969Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, the1969National Book Award in arts and letters (Both for The Armies of the Night) andthe1980Pulitzer Prize in fiction (for The Executioner’s Song). However, he has neverobtained full recognition from the mainstream American intellectuals because of bothhis stylish nonconformity and his controversial views of American life and society. Asspokesman for the American conscience and American culture, he cares little aboutcriticisms from others. He posits himself at the center of American society, politics,culture and consciousness in a strong attempt to preserve American core value passedon from one generation to the other. Whatever his on-again, off-again hopes for socialand psychological revolution in America, Mailer has more typically looked to aradical or conservative style to wrestle the contradictions of American society. Although his thoughts experienced many changes, throughout his works, Mailer hasbeen involved in trying to discover American identity as a nation by relating thepromising American dream and the debasement of the millennial idea of America tothe complexities of the contemporary American scene, especially in the current masssociety. In so doing, he has pursued through his writing what he believes to be thehighest purpose of literature, which is to “clarify a nation’s vision of itself.”(Mailer,1966:98) Although America is developing toward what he feels strongly dissatisfiedwith, he is confident of American prospect. He is convinced that America is still the“a shining city on a hill”,“an empire of liberty”,“the last best hope of Earth”. Just asSacvan Bercovitch puts in The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the SymbolicConstruction of America that all American writers follow the rites of assent by meansof dissent in their literary works. Mailer inherits this literary tradition and develops it.Like other public intellectuals, Mail pours his concerns and discontents withAmerican social status quo, politics, economy and culture in his literary works, heharbors great ambition to save American roots and core values in the mass society. Heis an active fighter of “American Exceptionalism” and has been striving for hisambition to redeem America.Literature is not just the outcomes of the Zeitgeist, but mostly the opposites of it.Most of Mailer’s works record Americans’ consciousness in a changing society.Mailer takes initiatives to construct individual ideas that are conflicting with theZeitgeist. As a result, themes of Mailer’s works vary in different phases from radicalhipsterism, to rational left conservatism and finally to anti-liberalism.This dissertation endeavors to trace the mind changes of Norman Mailer within alarger political, historical and cultural context from the1940s to the new century tofind out how Mailer’s literary works interact with the context in their production andreception. Mailer is endowed with the capacity for “seeing himself as a battlegroundof history”. The embattled visions in Norman Mailer’s writings are the symptomaticprojections of and solutions to social and cultural contradictions. The failure of eachproposed solution is the objectification of the insolvable tensions between theindividual and the society, the ideal and the real, and the past and the present. Mailer is not alone in this dilemma. After all, the change in his mind is roughly incorrespondence with the shift in the Zeitgeist.This dissertation consists of three parts, including an introduction, the body and aconclusion. Chapter One explores the forming process of Mailer’s hip philosophy andthe first change of Mailer’s mind after the publication of The Naked and the Dead in1948. Mailer begins to refashion his life and therefore his personality. He acutely feelsthe repression on individuals from the totalitarianism in American society, andendeavors to find political ways for American dissidents, for example, liberalism inThe Naked and the Dead, socialism in Barbary Shore. However, in Barbary Shoreand The Deer Park, the radical political revolution proved to be ineffective andantipathetic to his liberal-minded character. Collective revolution having failed,Mailer turned to irrational anti-social hipsterism as a narrow escape from therepressive society. The immediate gratification of personal instincts and desires is themeans to free the individual from the repressions. His philosophy of hip is “rampantindividualism” as called by Killet Millet. It is directly against American society.The proposal put forward by Mailer in White Negro is utopian in the sense thatthe Negro does not refer to the black people alone. Instead, it refers to all those socialoutcasts who were not accepted by the dominant society. Mailer’s anger towards theAmerican system was due in part to his failure to be included in the mainstreamculture and literature. He believed that a writer, especially a novelist, may exertenough influences to compel the society to alter its direction through his literaryworks by changing the consciousness of its people first.It is hard to assess the real effect of his literary works upon the society whenMailer announced in Advertisements for Myself that “the sour truth is that I amimprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making arevolution in the consciousness of our time”.(Mailer,1959:17) It would beexaggerating if we say that the counterculture movement in1960s was the sole resultof Mailer’s efforts. More to the truth, the new sensibility in1960s was due to the newsocial crisis. In his essays, Mailer offered insight into this dilemma in Americansociety and indeed influenced some of the young people active in the movement. But when the movement was indeed undergoing in the direction prophesied by Mailer inhis essays, he began to sense the danger and chaos caused by the rampantindividualism. When the inhibition on desire and instinct was revoked, when thesepeople were asking more individual rights which might endanger the socialframework as a whole and evolve into political revolution. That was what Mailerdidn’t expect. Mailer was aware of the extremes of the Hipsterism. The lessons that helearned from the anti-war demonstration in1967were two-folded:(1) whenHipsterism was followed by numerous young men, it turned into a collective ideology,and when these young people got involved in the collective anti-social causes, likeanti-war demonstration, it wreaked havoc upon the society as a whole.(2) WhenAmerica was endangered by the chaos and violence of counter-culture movement,civil right movement and anti-war demonstration, the rights and freedom of theindividuals could not be guaranteed. Mailer didn’t expect his existential hipsterism toevolve into a political revolution. After all, Mailer concluded “America represents hiswill”.In chapter two, Mailer experiences a new change of his mind. He turns awayfrom radical individualism to left conservatism and invokes Christian belief andAmerican traditional values and culture to make up for the damages caused by theextreme individualistic rebels. It seems that Mailer has transformed his faith. It isspiritual and cultural revolution rather than political revolution that attracts Mailer’sattention most. The Armies of the Night witnesses the whole process in which Mailerchanges his attitudes toward the anti-war demonstration and develops his politicalphilosophy towards left conservatism. The unifying theme in Gilmore’s story in TheExecutioner’s Song is what Mailer calls “family values” that many people aroundGilmore are upright and dedicate to helping him return to the right track of life.Mailer identifies with America in Ancient Evenings which blurs the distinctionsbetween Egypt’s ancient culture and concepts about the United States by depicting hismale characters as representative example of an “imperialist” and “pathologicalmasculinity”, of “rogue traits” such as “toughness, struggle and conquest”. Asoffspring of Jewish immigrants, Mailer borrows stories from countless Christian traditions in his The Gospel according to the Son, discarding their husks, or rewritesthem, revealing his attachment to traditional spirit and value of America.Chapter three is set in the contemporary mass society in which Mailer growsmore radical and is holding against the rational liberal values of individualism,freedom, democracy. With the end of Cold War in the later1980s, Americaestablished itself as the sole superpower in the world. Free market economy andmodern science brought America to a new round of prosperity. According to Mailer,rational liberalism brought repression from totalitarianism back while boostingAmerican economy. Americans lost their individuality and became new conformists.Politicians of both parties exercised all powers to launch attacks against “evil”countries in the name of “democracy” and “freedom”. In terms of these, Mailersensed that evil was around every corner of America. With the arrival of a mass andglobalized society, Mailer lost contact with it, however. He grew more puzzled,perplexed and pessimistic. He didn’t, even refused to adjust his cultural perspectivesand social concepts. The long cherished radical spirit is sole motivation for Mailer tobe a fighter in a changing society. In Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Mailer demonstrateshis most recent worries about pressure on the individual self from the totalitarianismand its ruinous consequence. According to Mailer, totalitarianism invariably intends towipe out individual perceptions entirely in favor of some interest group’s reality, thuscreating one mildly ignorant but conformist society, which requires massconsciousness, mass belief and mass action. In Why Are We at War?, Mailer launcheshis severe criticism on Bush Administration which he believed is pursuing a war in anundeclared yet fully realized ambition of World Empire and endangering the verylong cherished notion of freedom, rights and democracy. The vision of the late Mailergot dark in The Castle in the Forest where the evil reigns on the earth and wreaks thehavoc upon human society through its human agents.In short, Mailer’s mind of ideology has undergone three stages: hipsterism, leftconservatism and anti-liberalism, from which we can detect his changes fromradicalism to conservatism while never abandoning his radical personality. His everychange is closely associated with the social and political atmosphere in America. He is admired, hated, castigated, and honored, but he adheres to his own judgment aboutAmerican social reality and continuously conveys his messages to his readers. This isMailer, a literary fighter for saving American roots, a spirit defender of American corevalues. |
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