354
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
therefore, Mailer cannot basically alter the shape of the myth he has
inherited. How desperately he yearns to permit
his
Joseph (unlike
the earlier Josephs from whom he descends) to have
all
that glory
and Potiphar's Wife, too-in fact, all three of the Gentile women,
into whom Mailer has split the single figure of the original legend.
But, in the end, Rojack has to reject them like the Josephs before
him, so that his soul may live. Deborah Coughlin Mangravede Kelly
he marries and kills, though-or maybe because-she is Pharaoh's
Wife rather than Potiphar's. Mailer nowhere says outright, of course,
that she is intended to be a portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy; but she
reminds us of the mythological Jackie at least. And Rojack, intro–
ducing her, explains, "Forgive me, I thought the road to the Presi–
dent might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart."
And the mistress once dead, he must destroy the maid who
is
her extension, too: pentrating all three of her entrances, one by one,
but reaching his climax-and cheating her of her own-in the
Anus
Mirabilis
(we are back to Balsa Snell once more, and this time the
identification is explicitly made between asshole and Acheron: "I
had come to the Devil a fraction too late, and nothing had been there
to receive me..."). Buggery
is
the essential aspect of a sexual con–
nection whose
aim
is annihilation, not fulfillment; and buggery extorts
from the redheaded German Ruta the confession that she had been
a Nazi:
"'Ia.'
She shook her head. 'No, no,' she went on.
'la,
don't
stop,
ja.' "
After which Rojack is able to declare, "There was a high
private pleasure in plugging a Nazi, there was something clean
despite all. . . ."
But another third of Potiphar's wife remains to be dealt with;
after the Irish aristocrat and the kraut servant, the ultimately blonde,
all-American Wasplet: the Happy Ending Girl, whose name, Cherry,
declares, I suppose, that whatever befalls her flesh, mythologically she
remains eternally virgin. Cherry Rojack truly loves, but her, too, he
leads to her death-involuntarily, but inevitably
all
the same; not,
however, until he has won her in an archetypal battle with a
really
Bad Brother-a Negro junkie who comes at him with a knife. It is
as if Mailer were trying to declare, or his fable in
his
despite:
"Things haven't changed all that much, my colored brothers; a Jew–
ish boy in good condition can still beat out you spade hipsters in the
struggle for that archetypal blonde
shiksah
who embodies the Alneri-
