Norman Mailer and the Cutting Edge of Style
Frank D. McConnell's chapter on Mailer in Four Postwar American Novelists (1977): the five novels and The Armies of the Night read as one continued experiment with style, the existential orphan's last sacrament, each book a new first novel that repudiates the last. The Naked and the Dead is the work of a master never since equaled; the later fiction is a deliberately unfinished neat terrorism against his own success. Reprinted in full by permission.
McConnell, Frank D. “Norman Mailer and the Cutting Edge of Style.” Four Postwar American Novelists: Bellow, Mailer, Barth, and Pynchon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. 58–107.
The Mailer chapter of Frank D. McConnell‘s study of four postwar novelists, placed between Bellow and Barth. It opens on Gore Vidal’s 1974 jibe about “a New York Jewish boy from Harvard who had written a war novel” and takes the problem of being Norman Mailer as its subject: a writer who thinks of himself first as a novelist and has written, in twenty books, only five novels, six if The Armies of the Night is stretched to count. The key word is style, drawn from the “Bitch Goddess” passage of Advertisements for Myself and from Sergius O’Shaugnessy’s public-library education in The Deer Park: for Mailer style is not a verbal habit but “a political, existential act,” the “diminished, crisis sacrament” of the existential orphan, and the sequence of the novels is “a continued experiment with the concept and the cutting edge of style.”
The Naked and the Dead gets the fullest reading, as “the work of a master”: a Homeric simile turned inside out, in which war is not the cancellation of peacetime life but its clarified extension, and the title names an opposition between those who reach a moment of existential nakedness and the visionary dead, Cummings and Croft, who refuse it. Each later book is a new “first novel” that repudiates the last. Barbary Shore is “a ruin but a brilliant ruin,” a Kafka-as-filmed-by-Hitchcock thriller whose amnesiac narrator must reinvent the real history of his era. The Deer Park makes style a mode of salvation and shows Hip, two years before “The White Negro,” to be the nineteenth-century Dandy reborn. An American Dream is the mirror image of the Kennedy assassination and, for McConnell, “perhaps the weakest of Mailer’s novels.” Why Are We in Vietnam? turns parody, “the classical version of Hip,” into his most effective fiction since the first; The Armies of the Night ranks with Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and completes the career’s two movements, inward from public argument and back out to a redefined public stance. The chapter closes on Mailer as Kilroy: wherever a self-conscious, dangerous American fiction appears, “Mailer was here.”
Written before The Executioner’s Song, the chapter records the view from 1977 that there had been no novel since Why Are We in Vietnam? and that the million-dollar contract for the next was still unfulfilled. The text is reproduced here complete, by permission of Celeste (McConnell) Barber, from the digital edition prepared for Project Mailer.
Related pages
- Frank D. McConnell | 1977
- The Naked and the Dead | Barbary Shore | The Deer Park | An American Dream | Why Are We in Vietnam? | The Armies of the Night
- The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer (1969), the earlier book-length reading of the same novels