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LEO BERSANI
devouring bitches, telepathic powers and omnipotent smells. The novel,
for all its apparently complacent acceptance of magic, is a continuous
attack against magic, that is, an attack against fantasies of the self as
both all powerful and totally vulnerable.
The strategy of resistance
is,
inevitably, literary, and the power of
An American Dream
is in its demonstration of verbal tactics which
finally make what I have called the psychological theme irrelevant.
The "courage" which is made so much of in the novel, and which the
reviewers have found lamentably banal as a moral philosophy, is much
more of a brilliant and difficult trick than a virtue in the ordinary
sense. While it is often merely the bravery born of a superstitious
compulsion, as when Rojack forces himself to walk along the parapet of
Kelly's terrace, it involves, more profoundly, a willingness to entertain
tire most extravagant fantasies and hallucinations in order
to
change
their affective coefficient. By taking the risk of abandoning himself
to the fantastic suggestiveness of every person, every object, every
smell encountered during the thirty-two hours he writes about, Rojack
discovers fantasy as a source of imaginative richness in himself instead
of fearing it as an ominous signal from mysterious, external powers.
He moves, in other words, from fantasy as a psychological illusion
about the world to the use of fantasy as a somewhat self-conscious but
exuberant display of his own inventive powers. Every menace becomes
the occasion for a verbal performance, and his fluttering nervousness
about being deprived of his "center" is rather humorously belied by the
incredibly dense and diversified self which his language reveals and
creates. Nothing in the book (not even Rojack's moving attempt to know
love as something sane and decent with Cherry) except the virtuosity of
the writing itself indicates a way out of the nightmare Rojack seems to
be telling. The nightmare would be nothing more than a nasty story
if
Mailer, like his critics, had allowed it to separate itself from the
virtuosity, from, especially, the metaphorical exuberance which is, I
think, a way of mocking and outdoing the dangerous inventiveness of a
magic-ridden world. This means, of course, that the
playfulness
of
the novel is by no means a frivolous attitude toward "dirty" or "ugly"
events, but rather the natural tone of a man for whom events have
be–
come strictly literary-novelistic situations to
be
freely exploited for the
sake of a certain style and the self-enjoyment it perhaps.' unexpectedly
provides.
It is, then, irrelevant to complain of improbable situations or
unreal dialogue in
An American Dream.
Rojack's playfulness, his
verbal exuberance, is the sign of a confident use of power, and it
