The Existential Situation: The Making of Mailer’s Early Protagonists
The Existential Situation: The Making of Mailer’s Early Protagonists[a]
| “ | D.J. is like Mailer's other narrators who have identity problems, doubt their maleness, fear the feminine in themselves, and try to strike out on their own. Mailer's narrators, when they succeed, do so by finding an identity in the roles they play. | ” |
| — Carl Rollyson, The Lives of Norman Mailer, p. 193 | ||
Identity in Mailer’s early fiction is usually defined through how a character asserts (or fails to assert) masculinity by living dangerously and confronting existential situations.
In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer writes: “Masculinity is not something given to you, something you’re born with, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honour.”[1] These small battles are the crucial moments in life that define the experience of Mailer’s characters. They are risky and dangerous and necessary for continued growth.
In Norman Mailer: A Double Life, Mike Lennon cites Nietzsche’s work as an influence on Mailer’s ideas, particularly a section called “Live Dangerously” in Walter Kaufmann’s Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre: “For, believe me, the secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities under Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors, as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you lovers of knowledge!”[2] So, Mailer’s “honor,” here, could be read as a courage to accept the challenge, to look danger in the face, and try to be ready for whatever comes next. It’s a part of Mailer’s concept of American existentialism where the outcome is both serious and uncertain.[3]
Mailer explicitly develops this idea in The White Negro: the American existentialist learns “to live with death as an immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.”[4] Later in his essay “Some Dirt in the Talk,” Mailer writes “you are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place, and you do not know how it is going to turn out.”[5] Living dangerously, then, defines the protagonist on his own terms — not as other external forces might compel him too be. The existential situation pits the protagonist against external forces, and the outcome of these small battles shapes the protagonist’s identity in subtle and profound ways.
Two unsuccessful Mailer protagonists: Sanford Carter in “The Language of Men” (1953) and Sam Slovoda in “The Man Who Studied Yoga” (1956). Two successful protagonists: Al Groot in “The Greatest Thing in the World” (1941) and Sergius O'Shaugnessy in “The Time of Her Time” (1959).
References
Note
- ↑ Delivered at the conference of the Norman Mailer Society, 2018.
Citations
- ↑ Mailer 1966, p. 242.
- ↑ Lennon 2013, p. 318.
- ↑ Merrill 1978, p. 71.
- ↑ Mailer 1992, p. 339.
- ↑ Mailer 1972, p. 104.
Bibliography
- Lennon, J. Michael (2013). Norman Mailer: A Double Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
- Mailer, Norman (1966). Cannibals and Christians. New York: Pinnacle.
- — (1972). Existential Errands. New York: Little, Brown.
- — (1992) [1959]. "The White Negro". Advertisements for Myself. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. pp. 337–358.
- Merrill, Robert (1978). Norman Mailer. Boston: Twayne Publishers.
- Rollyson, Carl (1991). The Lives of Norman Mailer. New York: Paragon House.
