NORMAN MAILER
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tant consequence, perhaps, is that Hip, with its "burning conscious–
ness of the present" and the "terribly charged" quality of experience
it involves, has allowed Mailer to make a more intensive use of his
great powers of observation than he has done since
The Naked and
the Dead.
Whereas
Barbary Shore
seems to have been produced by
a mind shut in upon itself and glowing with the febrile intensity of
a lonely intellectual passion (it is a book such as might have been
written by one of those brooding, distracted students who haunt the
pages of Russian literature),
The Deer Park
exhibits a newly liberated
capacity for sheer relish in the look and feel and sound of things.
Mailer is now back in the world that he deserted in
Barbary Shore,
though it is by no means the same world that he evoked in
The
Naked and the Dead.
What he sees in Hollywood is the image of
a society that has reached the end of its historical term, a society
caught between the values of an age not quite dead and those of
a new era that may never crawl its way out of the womb. The de–
fining characteristic of such a society is a blatant discrepancy between
the realities of experience and the categories by which experience is
still being interpreted- a discrepancy that can make simultaneously
for comedy and horror. The reality is that the scruples, inhibitions,
and conventions which were once effective in restraining the natural
egoism of the individual no longer work very well because the values
from which they drew their strength no longer command much re–
spect. No one, however, is willing to admit this, and they all go on
talking and sometimes acting as though what they "really" wanted
were the things that people used to want when their basic psycho–
logical drives were still roughly in harmony with their professed
values-when, that is, these values were powerful enough to create
internal needs that became almost as pressing as the primary needs
themselves. This situation reveals itself in every department of life,
but it is in sex that its contours are most clearly defined, and there–
fore it is on the sexual affairs of his characters that Mailer concen–
trates in
The Deer Park.
What he gives us is a remarkable picture
of people saddled with all the rhetoric of the monogamous while act–
ing like some primitive tribe that has never heard of monogamy and
is utterly bewildered by the moral structure on which this strange in–
stitution rests.
It
is a world of people who talk incessantly about
being in love and craving "decent, mature relationships" but who
are in fact tightly imprisoned in their own egos and who have no
