I love the idea of a novel; to me a novel is better than reality. (Norman Mailer, quoted in Lennon)

Norman Mailer saw the responsibility of the novelist is a double-edged sword: he must posit an authoritative vision of structure in form and content, yet always be aware that “no authorities exist that have certain knowledge” (Empty 218). This places the novelist in an ethical and existential position of great responsibility. One of Mailer’s chief concerns seems to be with the notion of individual truth and how that truth can lead to creativity, order, and action.

Mailer equates God with the novelist, or vise versa. Like the novelist, Mailer’s conception of the creator is an existential one: God is not all-powerful or all-good in Mailer’s conception, but make mistakes and tries again (God 7, 11, 13, 33, etc.). God as artist, it seems to Mailer, remains true to his vision and his own creativity, even though occasionally messing up. Like an artist, God evolves with us and “still has an unfulfilled vision and wishes to do more” (God 35, 22).

Mailer’s Christ in The Gospel According to the Son is also a metaphor for the novelist: one, Mailer suggests, who does the best that he can under difficult, if not impossible, circumstances (Empty 214). Christ’s voice is that of narrator and novelist, seeking through the “small miracle” of the text to “remain closer to the truth” in his account (Gospel 4). He explicitly distances himself from the gospels and the intention of the scribes who seem to have their own agendas. The truth, therefore, is in his vision — one that is subjective and existential, though authoritative. He, like the novelist, seeks to uncover the truth, unlike others who would bury it for their own purposes.

The authority here is not necessarily with an account of factual occurrences, but with the narrative, the struggle for order and identity. These are battles Mailer seemed to fight his whole life, and which kept him close to his vision of God, the ultimate creator and authority. Yet, for Mailer, God was not properly “God,” but a god among many that, like his narrators Christ in Gospel and Mailer in Armies of the Night, sought “to develop their vision of existence rather than accept visions from other gods opposed to them” (Empty 215). God is not all-power, but trying to do the best he or she can against great odds.

Creation seems to come, then, from narrative, or to paraphrase Mailer’s subtitle for Armies: the novel is history and history is the novel. Less a true “novel” and more of a journalistic-novel hybrid, J. Michael Lennon, in “Norman Mailer: Novelist, Journalist, or Historian?” reminds us that Armies was written during the period of Mailer’s career where he seemed to push the novel beyond its traditional limits — as if to be true to his own growth, the novel could no longer contain the truth that Mailer sought (94). He seemed to suggest that the narrative order of the novel and the waves of history were connected in extricably and dynamically, that even “facts” become like a fiction, as they seemed to do in Mailer’s work during this period, perhaps most successfully in The Executioner’s Song. Historical facts charged by the authoritative narrative of the novelist become, perhaps, closer to the truth than reality. There is a give and take: life is never as orderly as fiction, though everyday we attempt to impose our fictions upon it. Mailer states:

Similarly, Mailer states elsewhere that when the great historian writes, she is also a writer of great fiction (Lennon 96). Lennon goes on to conclude that Mailer elevated the novel and the novelist as the true creative spirits, ones that pose difficult questions in order to provoke, to incite, and to contend. Whereas the historian and journalist work with pre-digested facts, intended to answer, to clarify, and to end (97). Mailer is not writing in an easily understandable prose for the masses, he is challenging readers to rise up to his level; this is not journalism or television — it is literature (Bufithis 90).

Yet, while the novelist is not limited by the facts of history, perhaps the novel is for a Mailer — or at least the realities of identifiable historicity that remain the touchstones for communication and meaning. Mailer seems to be calling out the fictional nature of all narrative, whether based on fact or imagination, and as Lennon avers, Mailer uses whatever form he needs to “carry the tale forward to the century’s end” (101). In a way, it’s as if Mailer suspects that the novel is no longer capable of influencing people’s consciousness as it did before World War II (Adams 100-101). It’s as if the authority of the narrative is linked to history, culture, and the artist’s place in it: the narrative grows with the author and creator. The best novel, then, remains true to the novelist’s vision at the moment of creation. This seems to be a moral imperative with Mailer — an imperative that forced him to push the boundaries of genre.

Another link between history and the novelist is the idea of the novelist as savior. Alfred Kazin sees Mailer as primarily a “moralist” — one who has an “acute sense of national crisis” and a responsibility not to leave this crisis in the hands of the journalists (2). Mailer’s authority as a novelist attacks what he sees as an American authority that is misplaced and. Mailer plays the social miscreant and his role as the artist, asking questions, getting in the way, and putting himself in the middle of the conflict, both metaphorically and literally.

Armies is a novel of opposition: political, aesthetic, and moral. Mailer’s opposition in Armies holds contempt for the American military-industrial complex and is monolithic symbol in the Pentagon, but at the same time he it also sees as it’s opponent the mediocrity of the America’s insipid middle class. His revolution in Armies is not just against American leadership, but also those forms that have become too tarnished by quotidian reality. “Opposition” might best describe Mailer’s own aesthetic approach to literature which informed the narrative of his public persona. The best oppositional tool of the time was Mailer’s hybrid “novel,” a genre that might have been pushed and stretched as far as it will go.

Finally, Mailer might have been opposing the novel. After all, it’s older than the Pentagon, and perhaps more ossified. The civil unrest of the sixties demanded policial and social change, and maybe Armies of the Night itself demanded a new literary medium.

There was probably no impotence in all the world like knowing you were right and the wave of the world was wrong, and yet the wave came on. (Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night 197)

Arguably, the dominant form of literature in the twentieth century was prose fiction, of which the novel was a titan, if not a god. Indeed, there is something god-like about the novel and its relation to western civilization’s sense of identity and order. While the novel has its genesis in ancient prose texts, it didn’t develop fully until certain intellectual and technological foundations were laid. Since the Enlightenment, the novel has become an art form of — in Lukács’ words — the “new world,” a chief guide for the modern human seeking meaning in a cold universe (20). The novel, therefore, seems to be the medium of expression for a 20th-century zeitgeist, fully developed during the modernist days of recovery from the intellectual revolutions of the turn of the century and the literal rubble of the first World War. And while the work of the modernist novel was serious and sober, the postmodern novel’s authority is, perhaps, ironic and blasphemous.

While the world enters the digital age, the novel stands defiant. While many seek a new art form for the digital age — a cyberbard or a collectively authored cybertext — the novel appears to still provide something we need. After all, the novel has been developed since the invention of written language; it’s related to the epic, the romance, the novella, the picaresque and various modes of expression, the tragic, the comic, the moral, the licentious, the ideal, and the real. The novel’s emphasis on the character’s relationship to her society and her universe is traditionally told in a comfortable prose — in a language of verisimilitude that is comforting enough to allow the reader to engage new ideas. The novel, arguably, has become the medium of authority in the contemporary world, even despite the digital wave.

Perhaps the novel gives an order to life, particularly in the days following September 11, 2001 when America, as Norman Mailer noted in Why Are We at War?, was going through an identity crisis (10). The fact of terrorism shatters the meaning of life and death, robbing our lives’ order and replacing it with absurdity (War 18-19). The rest of Mailer’s essay examines the aftermath of 9/11: in an attempt to rebuild the national ego, many Americans became flag-waving neo-cons, drunk with a mindless patriotism that sought to reassert itself through a jingoistic wave of moral cleansing. A literal American supremacy in the form of empire must be asserted no matter the cost.

I would argue, too, that this struggle is expressed in the flow of the word. The digital word resembles the political anxiety of disorder and insecurity. With books, the word was solid, permanent, authoritative. With the Internet, words become tenuous, temporary, fleeting. Printing on dead trees provided a way to measure and judge the validity of the word because it could be held in the hand, put on a shelf, reliably referenced. The World Wide Web, too, opened up the flood gates of opinion, obfuscating the voices of authority by those of the masses: yes, the word gained more of an equality, but at the loss of the authoritative voice. In an age of print, achieving admittance into the world of publication was a Herculean task, but blogs now allow anyone with a computer to have a voice. These disparate voices represent for many the planes demolishing the towers of authority. While many revel in their newly found voices, many in America are left reeling and longing for the days of the few, sanctioned voices that could give them direction and order.

The problem with digital forms of art, especially literature, is that they seem to lack the necessary force of authority to provide them the structure they need to fulfill the audience’s aesthetic expectations. As Janet Murray points out in Hamlet on the Holodeck, audiences expect the guiding presence of the author to deliver a unified experience replete with all the accouterments of narrative (204). Without the authority, the narrative ceases to be engaging because it lacks the singular focus or unifying vision that we expect from literary expressions. The digital challenges the established conventions of the literary, and while we have traditionally turned to stories for a reflection of ourselves and for meaning, the digital explodes meaning into multiplicity (Murray 274).

It seems, then, that we are still in need of the author. Perhaps this will be the cyberbard that Murray suggests might become the voice of the digital age, or maybe we aren’t ready yet to dispense with the novel just yet.

I’m in the process of composing my paper for the Norman Mailer Society’s annual conference. Here’s the proposal:

I moved to the American South almost six years ago. About that time, I was introduced to Norman Mailer’s work. Both gave me an interesting perspective on America, its values and its problems (sometimes stemming from said values). This presentation will examine Southern religious values (mostly conservative Baptist) vis-a-vis those of Norman Mailer, particularly in his later work, including The Gospel According to the Son and On God. I will include a short multimedia presentation that documents some of my experiences, interviews members of the Baptist church, and attempts to come to terms with seemingly disparate perceptions on the place of religion in America.

The images I’m collecting are part of the multimedia presentation. I think I’m going to focus more on digital technology as a metaphor for the devil. Still thinking about it. But, if you have some images of church marquis, especially those that link religion with consumerism, I’d love to borrow them.

He played the writer’s part,

Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

[Sent by PS. We'll miss you, Norman.]

Mailer’s new book, “On God: An Uncommon Conversation,” may best be read in such a context — although, in truth, it’s probably best not read at all. Framed as a series of Socratic dialogues between Mailer and his friend and literary executor Michael Lennon, it’s an empty effort, full of sophistry.

I think they liked it. My copy’s on-order, and I’m looking forward to it. This bit from the review seems very Mailer to me:

Throughout the book, he confuses God with religion and views both exclusively through a Christian/Catholic filter, as if this were the only available lens. Rather than discuss the spirit, he ruminates on the saints and purgatory, blaming Satan for technology and espousing a half-hearted belief in reincarnation because “God hates to give up on an interesting artistic possibility.”

Satan and technology, together again. Like I said: I can’t wait to read it.

At 84, prolific author Norman Mailer shows no quit. The Mailer Review, a new literary journal edited by a USF professor, takes a closer look at the man and his work.

They were supposed to use my photo, but didn’t. The AP one is good, too.

The Mailer Review, Issue 1, Volume 1, is out! Please subscribe, if you haven’t already; $30 will make you a member of the Society and give you a subscription to the journal. Congratulations to our Editor Phil Sipiora, our Assistant Editors Constance Holmes and Raymond Vince, and me as Associate Editor. We’re all very proud of what we helped create.

I’ll also have pictures from Provincetown posted soon. I’m busy at work on the web sites: both The Mailer Review and the society’s.

Finally, I was officially elected to the Executive Board of the Society. Thanks to Mike Lennon for the nomination. I’m excited about this new development. More soon…

If you’d like to see the original photo, or even purchase a print, check out my gallery.

The Paris Review published my photo of Norman Mailer. It was taken during the Society‘s annual conference in October 2006. The journal actually credits me, not under the photo, but on the contributors page in the back (180). It would have been ultra cool to have had my name under his photo. Still, pretty darn cool.