NORMAN
MAILER
Although I haven't read
everything of Norman Mailer's, I have certainly enjoyed most of what I read,
and that included Barbary
Shore, The Prisoner of Sex, and, more recently, Pieces and Pontifications, which was by far the most interesting,
if not always the most convincing. I
have always felt sceptical about Mailer, particularly in view of his worldly
success as one of
The worldly and the spiritual don't go together to any
appreciable extent, and it is no surprise for me to learn that Mailer is a
staunch democrat - that worldly ideology par excellence - and has been married
several times. Neither was I surprised
to learn, again from Pieces and Pontifications, that he disapproves of plastic, indeed, equates
it with the Devil! For how could such a
naturalistic down-to-earth man possibly understand plastic, or things made of
plastic, and see them in their true supernatural light? It is as though the Jew in him is too strong,
too deeply ingrained, obliging allegiance to the Creator in some quasi-Judaic
holy paganism.
No, I was not bound to rave about Norman Mailer, though I will
admit he possesses a lively facility with words and an admirable ability to
quickly spin ideas from them, which connotes with his fellow-worldly
intellectual, Arthur Koestler. Probably his best idea, from my evolutionary
point-of-view, concerns the metaphorical correlates or manifestations of the
Devil and God in the world at any given time, battling for hegemony over it. Although he sees the Devil, so to speak, in
the antinatural, particularly of all things in
plastic products, he is none too sure about the metaphorical status of God,
since his notions of the supernatural are hazy and constrained by worldly
criteria, making him more partial to the natural, which is precisely the world,
and hence the real.
Like most Jews, American or otherwise, he suffers from a blind
spot concerning the supernatural; for were he to distinguish more objectively
between the Devil and God, as between materialism and idealism, he would sooner
or later find himself in the unhappy position of discovering that the last
ideological manifestation of God in the world, appertaining to a crude
approximation to the Second Coming, was Hitlerian
fascism, and that this supernatural idealism was defeated not simply by the
Devil ... in the guise of communist materialism, but by a combination of the
Devil and the World (meaning the allied West), over whose democratic realism
Nazism had for a time seemed so triumphant.
Needless to say, Mailer is not going to abandon his worldliness
for the sake of a fascist supernaturalism.
Whether he would be prepared, in due course, to abandon it for a
Centrist transcendentalism ... must remain open to doubt. I, for one, would be sceptical!
