608
LEO BERSANI
nature, but lies rather in the dramatic burden they carry of transforming
oppressive experience into tokens of stylistic play. The plausibility
of Rojack's similes is irrelevant; what matters is that he makes us
feel his associations as spontaneous, irresistible fantasies, and that we
accept his most elaborate verbal constructions as illustrating the elabo–
rateneSs of immediacy rather than of development toward an idea. For
no intellectual strategy could explain the humor or justify the casual
difficulty of Rojack's style.
It
is, in a sense, his very absence of thought
(an absence deplored by Mr. Epstein and by Granville Hicks) which
creates Rojack's "system" of defense, his refusal to conceptualize sensa–
tion and to be reasonable about the accumulation of metaphor which
makes of his writing an act of total responsiveness.
An American Dream
is an impressively original work, but it shouldn't
be necessary to point out that Mailer is not the first novelist to prefer
to the conventions of social probability in fiction a more direct form
of self-display. The illusion of distinctness between the narrator and
the social world he is presumably observing and reporting on is only
weakly maintained in Proust and
in
James's later novels, where we already
sense a certain impatience with the
m~diation
of fantasy into "objective"
characters and events. In both James and Proust, what seems to be a
fascination with the suggestiveness and
self-in~ntive
possibilities of
language leads to some carelessness about novelistic situations, a tendency
to allegorize the world as a rather transparent (rather than hidden)
projection of the self. But most of Mailer's critics surely know about
all this, and if we are to dismiss the possibility of a deliberate ganging-up
on him for past offenses, the irrelevance of what has been said about
An American Dream
must perhaps be explained by the shock and
resentment
produc~d
by a work that would force us to admit the self–
indulgence, the particularity and even, in a certain sense, the irrespon–
sibility of interesting art. Mailer's admirers are already hard at work
making him responsible and relevant to all sorts of things, but to read
An American Dream
is, happily, to see the hopelessness of their good
intentions. Nothing, after all, could be more typical of the marvelous
lightness of imagination than to test, in the most scrupulous detail,
th~
possibility of a grown-up love, built on tenderness and respect, with
Cherry, and then to end the whole thing on the frivolous note of that
charmingly nonsensical phone call to heaven.
Leo Bersani
