Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth

Abstract

<p>Norman Mailer announced in Advertisements For Myself (1959) that he wished to revolutionize the consciousness of our time. With this as his goal he developed an aesthetics which views both life and art as a process of growth toward a full humanity and away from post-World War II American (and universal) tendencies to stifle human r,rowth through a technological totalitarianism.</p> <p>Mailer envisions the creation of life as a function of a divine power and the destruction of life as that of a satanic power who war with each other for possession of the universe. We do not know for whom we do battle, but our intuitions of good and evil are to be trusted.</p> <p>Growth for Mailer takes the form of a line of movement made by confronting and defeating opponents of a full humanity; he terms such engagements whose outcome is unknown and therefore dangerous to the self "existential". His life and his art make up a dramatic and progressive dialectic. There are three books which I believe contain Mailer's most effective expressions of his aesthetics and which have the greatest potential for revolutionizing the consciousness of our time. Each is the culmination of a phase in Mailer's growth which contains in itself the unified strands of that growth.</p> <p>The first phase includes the early success of The Naked and the Dead, the subsequent popular and critical failures of Barbary Shore and The Deer Park, the slou~hln[. off of old models, political and artistic, the creation of a radical creed in "The \'lhi te Negro" and a radical form in Advertisements For Myself. The latter is the culmination of this phase and is analyzed in detail. By the time of Advertisements Mailer has made himself the chief metaphor for his concept of erowth, thus synthesizing theme and method. The second phase enlarges the meaning of Mailer's existentialism, most particularly by his venturing deeply into the current political and social realm, and culminates in a new synthesis of growth in fictional theme and form in An American Dream (1965). The novel's protagonist, Stephen Rojack, defeated by a powerful satanic agent and by his own weakness, proves unequal to the task Mailer sets for the American hero: to unite the real- and the dream-life of the nation in himself and to lead a united nation to human wholeness which embraces all contradictions.</p> <p>The central occupation of the third phase of Mailer's work, therefore, is to develop himself--in the absence of other suitable candidates--into a representative American hero. His experimentation with various media for communication--drama, film, television, and others--ls a search for effective vehicles for his vision and is preparation for his assumption of the heroic role. Mailer's involvement with the central issues confronting the United States is rendered in a considerable experiment in novelistic form, Why Are We in Vietnam? The culmination of his efforts in this phase is the culmination of his work to date as well: The Armies of the Night (1968). Relating the experiences of a character called "Mailer", Mailer as narrator and novelist-historian not only creates himself as a representative comic American hero but invents a form which carries a total vision of the events of the 1967 March on the Pentagon, uniting traditional methods and aims of history, the novel, and journalism. With this boolc Mailer assumes the role of interpretor for our time, immersin~ himself in important contemnorary events in order to present us with his views of their meaning and significance.</p> <p>Mailer's three books following The Armies of the Night are discussed in a final chapter as similar to but lesser efforts than Armies.</p> <p>In this thesis Mailer's work is placed in two specific contexts which provide a basis for suggesting his significance: that of American literature, with emphasis upon his contribution to the literature of the American Dream and upon his indebtedness to Hemingway in particular and twentieth-century novelists in f,eneral; and that of contemporary thought which also seeks to influence the direction of future human life.</p> <p>Because his aesthetics of growth sees human progress as its art, Mailer's nonlitrerary roles are considered a vital part of his total work and consequently the critical standards applied in this thesis are Mailer's own: how well does each work register growth on Mailer's part and how potentially effective is the work in revolutionizing the consciousness of our time?</p> <p>Mailer scholarship is still in infancy. The contribution of this thesis to that scholarship lies in its approacth to Mailer's work as a progressive whole and its delineation of that progress; its critical approach whlch confronts Mailer on his own terms; its extensive treatment of works other than novels; the broad contexts which suggest the significance of Mailer's work; and the comprehensive bibliography, the most complete yet assembled on Mailer.</p>