Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of Norman Mailer
Robert J. Begiebing's 1980 study, the first to read Mailer as an allegorist: a chapter on each of Barbary Shore, The Deer Park, An American Dream, and Why Are We in Vietnam?, one on the heroic consciousness that joins the fiction to the nonfiction, one on The Armies of the Night, and a conclusion on the nonfiction of the seventies, the feminist critique, and the promise of the work to come. Mailer's heroes seek regeneration through the archetypes Jung and Campbell describe. Reproduced in full, pending the author's permission.
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Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of Norman Mailer. By Robert J. Begiebing. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1980.
The fourth single-author study of Mailer, written at the University of New Hampshire in 1976 and 1977, and the first to take his allegory seriously. Begiebing starts from Mailer’s declared purpose, “a revolution in the consciousness of our time,” and names the consciousness his heroes seek heroic consciousness: a mind that joins conscious and unconscious life, awakens metaphorical vision, and regenerates what Mailer calls divine energy. The struggle of Life against Death is the principal theme, the allegorical mode the consistent means, and the quest for rebirth, in the patterns Jung, Neumann, and Joseph Campbell describe, its recurring shape. The introduction sets out four qualities of allegory, drawn from Angus Fletcher and Edwin Honig, and reads the early Mailer against the realism and the fabulism of his contemporaries.
The chapters take the novels after The Naked and the Dead in order: Barbary Shore, read as a pure allegory of “progress” and “battle,” with McLeod as the sacrificial guide and Lovett as the hero who inherits “the little object”; The Deer Park, where Eitel, Sergius, and Marion Faye try three ways of regeneration in a dead world; An American Dream, the fullest chapter, which follows Rojack through the Terrible Mother, the Night Sea Journey, and the parapet as a descent into the unconscious; and Why Are We in Vietnam?, where D.J.’s hunt is a purification ceremony that fails. A sixth chapter defines heroic consciousness and finds its origins in the Village Voice columns and Advertisements for Myself; the seventh reads The Armies of the Night as the convergence of the fiction and the journalism in a hero-fool; the conclusion surveys the nonfiction from Miami and the Siege of Chicago to The Executioner’s Song, answers Kate Millett on The Prisoner of Sex, and weighs the promise of the Egyptian novel then in progress.
The text is reproduced here complete from the University of Missouri Press scan in MOspace, for the Mailer Critical Library, pending the author’s permission; it may also be downloaded as an EPUB.
Related pages
- Robert J. Begiebing | 1980
- Barbary Shore | The Deer Park | An American Dream | Why Are We in Vietnam? | The Armies of the Night
- Miami and the Siege of Chicago | Of a Fire on the Moon | The Prisoner of Sex | The Fight | The Executioner’s Song
- The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer (Mailer Critical Library, No. 1)