DREAMERS
353
makes him only one quarter Jewish, which is to say, minimally
though essentially so) called Sam Slavoda, who in his nighttime
fantasy sees himself as a kind of Super.!Goy called Sergius O'Shaugh–
nessy. In the dream of Slavoda, O 'Shaughnessy, his heroic
alter ego,
is
portrayed as eternally struggling with a Jewish Father-Figure (in the
recent dramatic version, we learn that he
is
"half-Jewish-on both
sides" ), named Eitel, for the possession of a Gentile girl, daughter or
mistress or wife (essentially, I suppose, somebody else's wife, i.e.,
Potiphar's Wife), called Elena. It is all-thanks, alas, to Freud–
distressingly explicit; and I for one was not, am not sorry that the
project ended
in
shipwreck and a ten year's silence; since out of
that silence Mailer emerged to write a book less like Kafka and more
like Pop Art- more indebted, that is, to the immediate Jewish past
(those post-World War II Masters of Dreams, Shuster and Siegal,
who inventing Superman for the comics, invented a possible future
for the dying novel) than to a remoter one no longer viable.
That book is, of course,
An American Dream,
in which dreamer
and dream-actor have become one, Sam Slavoda plus Sergius
O'Shaughnessy turning into Stephen Rojack-who is half-Jewish, since
in the world of myth a quarter Jew plus a full Gentile equals a
half-Jew. But he is precisely the half-Jew, the half of Joseph that
neither Kafka nor the great writers of the thirties could envision:
Joseph
after
his recognition, the very archetype of the Man Who Has
Made It. No protagonist has entered our recent fiction with so im–
pressive a list of distinctions, for he is a Congressman, a decorated
War Hero, the friend of a future President of the United States, the
M.C. of a successful 1V Program; as well as a tireless cocksman,
who can get away with murdering his own wife, then walk the
parapet of a penthouse under the eye of his evil fascist father-in-law,
turn down that Bad Father's homosexual advances and triumph
finally over a Total Conspiracy- in which all of his Bad Brothers
(transformed fashionably into members of the Mafia and the CIA)
have joined with that Father to destroy him.
Mailer's latest novel is, indeed, in
its
very banality and vulgarity
just such an American Dream as
its
title advertises
it
to be; but it is
also a Jewish Dream: if not Joseph's own dream, at least our dream
of Joseph, as well as a Jewish interpretation of the dreams of
Pharaoh's (read "John F. Kennedy's") servants. Try as he will,
