N O RMAN MAILER
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of that embattled vision; maybe we are engaged in a heroic activity,
and not a mean one. . . .
The attraction of this astonishing collection of ancient Christian
heresies for Mailer comes out explicitly a little later in the interview:
This involves new moral complexities which I feel are far more inter–
esting than anything the novel has gotten into yet.
It
opens the possi–
bility that the novel, along with many other art forms, may be growing
into something larger rather than something smaller, and the sickness
of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has
been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important, that the
romantic spirit has dried up.... We're all getting so mean and small
and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermina–
tion....
We get some notion of what Mailer means by these "new moral com–
plexities" from the prologue to his novel-in-progress which was pub–
lished in the Fall 1958 issue of
Partisan Review
under the title "Ad–
vertisements for Myself on the Way Out." The reader, he announces,
must be prepared "for a dissection of the extreme, the obscene and
the unsayable" in this "tale of heroes and villains, murderers and
suicide, orgy-masters, perverts, and passionate lovers," and it is
abundantly clear that the exploration of these "mysteries" is to be
made without the help of any traditional moral assumptions. Murder
is not necessarily to be regarded as evil, perversion is not necessarily
to be considered perverse, suicide is not necessarily to be looked upon
as an act of simple self-destruction, and so on. We can now only
wait to see what comes of all this, and Mailer being so unpredictable
a writer, the one safe guess we can make is that it will turn out to
be very different from what many readers of "Advertisements" have
assumed-very different and very much more exciting than most of
the fiction that is being produced by most of the other novelists of
his sorely beleaguered generation.
