February 16, 2021

AAD: A Contemporary Allegory covid-19: day 330 | US: GA | info | act

Finishing up Norman Mailer’s An American Dream again to continue teaching today, and I couldn’t help but see Barney Oswald Kelly as some sort of ’Rumpian figure in his nightmarish penthouse. He is not Satan, no, but a bastardization of the Prince of Darkness. In AAD, evil lives at the top, a modern take on a Dantean allegory. Rojack has done some pretty questionable things, but nothing like Kelly. For Kelly, there’s no redemption, but for Rojack, there’s still time. He will have a costly price to pay, but ultimately he finds the courage to face his fear—fear personified in the all of what Kelly represents.

I see Mailer’s project more clearly this time: it’s really a product of a sixties zeitgeist. It eschews what Mailer saw as the deadening of America, represented by the assassination of Kennedy. It was all downhill form there.

. . .

I had another thought while running: what if Rojack actually died in his confrontation with Kelly? What if he fell from the parapet? The last chapter is a sort of surreal dream—a desert limbo of air conditioning and corpses.

. . .