NORMAN MAILER
381
I was young then, and no dedication could match mine. The revolution
was tomorrow, and the inevitable crises of capitalism ticked away in
my mind with the certainty of a time bomb, and even then could never
begin to match the ticking of my pulse.... For a winter and a spring
I lived more intensely in the past than I could ever in the present, until
the sight of a policeman on his mount became the Petrograd proletariat
crawling to fame between the legs of a Cossack's horse.... There was
never a revolution to equal it, and never a city more glorious than
Petrograd.
Lovett's amnesia
is
the consequence of the death of this passion, and
its effect has been to cut him off from everything, including
his
own
experience. He represents the modern consciousness, and the weird
unfamiliar world that we see through his eyes is in fact intended as
a picture of the world we all inhabit. In Lannie, we get an image
of the modern consciousness in its most violently pathological aspect.
The loss of hope in her case has taken the form of guilt for having
presumed to think "that there was a world we could make," and
her insanity consists in a total surrender to the given-submitting
herself with grim enthusiasm to the brutal handling of Hollingsworth
and to the bewildered narcissism of Guinevere. This surrender con–
stitutes insanity because the given (as Lannie herself says in an ex–
traordinary outburst to Lovett)
is
a world whose nature has been
most sharply revealed in the Nazi death camps. What follows from
the surrender, moreover, is a frantic attempt to reinterpret the moral
meaning of things: "There is neither guilt nor innocence," she tells
Lovett, "but there is vigor in what we do or the lack of it," and it
is in Hollingsworth and Guinevere that she imagines she sees vigor.
Hollingsworth she believes to be strong and purposeful, for to her
he is the embodiment of those who now rule the earth, while to the
raucous, grotesque, and vulgar Guinevere she makes her sick love,
calling what Guinevere symbolizes good and beautiful and begging
it to discover its goodness and beauty in her eyes, just as she wants
only for the powerful to discover their strength in exercising it
upon her.
H Lannie and Lovett together make up a picture of the modern
consciousness, Guinevere and Hollingsworth must be regarded as
different aspects of the disease engendered by the failure of the revo–
lution. Nothing could be more fantastic than the way everyone takes
Guinevere to be the fulfillment of
his
own special desires. Her
vi-
