| This PhD thesis, participating in the burgeoning interest in Mailer's prolific achievement in his mature years, examines three ironies attending his career: that his leftist, antiwar writer has recently been described as a literary imperialist and as a proponent of a fascistic aesthetic, that he has been the target of feminists and gender theorists despite the fact that his writings reveal his longstanding engagement with the psychology of gender, and that he is commonly regarded as a Manichean writer, even though some defining components of this near-ancient recasting of Zoroastrianism hardly apply to his religious/existential ideas. Chapter One, a study of Mailer's neglected Egypt novel, offers a Jungian-archetypal reading of Ancient Evenings (1983) while examining allegations that Mailer's brand of masculinity, labeled "rogue" (Faludi, 1999) and "imperialist (Savran 1998), evinces the "frontier psychology" (Olster 1989) that is synonymous with the fascistic attitudes attributed to him by feminists in the 1970s (Millet, 1971; Fetterley, 1978). Chapter Two, arguing that Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984) represents Mailer's subtle response to these allegations, claims that the novel gestures exoterically to the hard-boiled tradition---its title and main characters invoke David Madden's Tough Guys Writers of the Thirties (1968)---and esoterically to Reich's and Adorno's ideas about socio-biological constructions of gender. Mailer's achievement in Tough Guys resides in the ways in which he restores to the genre of mystery fiction the psychological elements that are usually lacking in its subgenre, the hard-boiled tradition of detective writing. Chapter Three treats The Gospel According to the Son (1997) as a "gnostic" narrative in which the narrator, in reconciling his Judaic and pagan inheritances, achieves a synthesis between Platonic and Aristotelian principles, embodies the reasons that Mailer referred to himself as a "left-medievalist." This synthesis, implicit in the novel's many dualisms, in Satan's dramatic role and in the fact that Mailer incorporates an esoteric passage deriving from The Gospel of Mary, qualifies the critic's tendency to label the prodigal and iconoclastic Mailer as Manichean---a commonplace in Mailer studies since the 1950s. As I argue in this chapter, Mailer's Gospel , if only because it participates in current debates about the meaning of the term "Gnosticism," warrants greater critical attention. |
