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far from the conventions of sex, even though there were occasiorial
perverse implications. The most daring of the earlier novels rarely
strayed beyond the heterosexual mold; when they went in for sexual
detail it was mostly to describe intense passion or extramarital esca–
pades. One might say they sublimated the more erotic and perverse
drives into ambiguities of motive and feeling. Henry James is, of
course, a classic instance.
An
example of how far the traditional
novelist permitted himself to go is the story told in Stavrogin's con–
fession in
The Possessed.
But this is an isolated episode, and the
psychological underground revealed in it is dispersed in Stavrogin's
character and politics, as it probably is in many other of Dostoevsky's
obsessive figures and situations.
(
Of
all the writers who have gone in for perversity, Mailer is
probably the least perverse. Though his last novel,
An American
Dream,
has come in for a good deal of scolding, it seems to me most
of the critics have been shocked by only two things, the
unconven~
tional sexuality and the attitude toward the murder.
If
we ask what
actually goes on sexually in the novel that might be considered off–
limits, I suppose the one thing that stands out is the anal preoccupa-:–
tion. But it is hard to see on what ground this fixation - which
Swift and Lawrence also had - could be banned in literature, any
more than any other obsessive idea. What is more questionable is
the liberating force with which it is endowed by Mailer, as it ap–
parently was, too, by Lawrence, though less explicitly.
It
is thus the
sexual philosophy and not the fantasy or the act that one might be
critical of in literary terms. As for other sexual eccentricities
in
An
American Dream,
the only ones worth noting are the sharing of
women in a semiincestuous way - as Rojack does with his father–
in-law - and the heightened sexuality after the murder. But these,
too, are obviously matters for literary - or psychological - analysis,
not for approval or disapproval.
Some established critics have also charged Mailer with immoral–
ity on the grounds that Rojack is neither punished enough nor made
to feel guilty enough for the murder of his wife. Now, aside from
the primitive notion of the morality of modern literature inherent in
such an accusation, whose source is to be found in popular culture,
it represents a misreading of the novel. Mailer's novel is obviously a
fantasy in which certain sexual obsessions are merged with visions
