ARGUMENTS
605
from the excitement of exercising it. Barney Kelly, like Vautrin, is a
spooky physical presence who overwhelms Rojack with a wild assort–
ment of suffocating smells, just as Vautrin paralyzes Rastignac and
Lucien de Rubempre by shooting bullet-like particles of his fantastic
will through the air and into the soft soil of their more passive minds.
Mailer, like Balzac, is better at suggesting some of the sexual impulses
that perhaps account for the enjoyment of power than at detailing the
more prosaic and conscious calculations that pave the way to it. Kelly's
success story is brashly improbable (he possessed the stock market by
telepathy); what he really wants
to
talk about with Rojack is the
frightening thrill of incest with Bess and her daughter, and la.ter with
Deborah, and the most impressive demonstration of his power is in the
extraordinary passage where he invites Rojack to "get shitty" with him
and Ruta. In his wish to have the three of them "pitch and tear and
squat and kick, swill and grovel on the Lucchese bed, fuck until our
eyes were out, bury the ghost of Deborah by gorging on her corpse,"
in his brutal, simultaneous appeal
to
impulses of anality, homosexuality,
necrophilia and cannibalism, the magic of
his
power is made marvelously
concrete by the energy of his indulgence
in
bodily fantasies, an energy
so great that Rojack begins
to
share the fantasies, to feel "unfamiliar
desires."
It is power of this sort that both fascinates and terrifies Rojack ;
the murder of Deborah and, perhaps more significantly, the story of
that murder are his attempts to free himself from it.
If
Rojack responds
like an electric coil to multitudinous "invasions" from the outside world,
it is because he is pathologically convinced that what he calls his
"center" may be stolen from him at any moment, at the same time
that he feeds on this sense of constant threat as a kind of substitute for
a sense of self. This fantasy provides what could be called the psycho–
logical theme, or obsession, of the novel, and it mayor may not,
incidentally, throw some light on what has often seemed to be Mailer's
facile talent for making himself obnoxious in public. When, for example,
we read that Rojack, instead of feeling relief at being left alone for a
few moments in the police station, yearns for Roberts' return, "much
as if that merciless lack of charity which I had come to depend on in
Deborah (as a keel to ballast the empty dread of my stomach) was now
provided by the detective," we may at least wonder to what extent
Mailer's own sense of himself has depended on his ability to provoke
attack.
An American Dream,
at any rate, records a dramatic and ex–
hilarating struggle with that "empty dread," an attempt to fight the
vampire complex that makes Rojack both fear and need a world of
