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NORMAN MAILER
same manner others responded to it. By this logic, autobiography is
obviously biography done by oneself, auto-biography - someone else
could presumably have been as intimate with the material. But when a
man writes a book about himself in the beginning or middle of his
career, then his work if at all penetrating is not a biography so much as
a special category of fiction, precisely because his choices for future
career are still open, his possibilities remain numerous, his conflicts are
as alive as his enemies, his feelings as tender as his friends, and his
sense of himself is a.s confused, complex, even bewildered as his sense
of others. So he must make that same creative abstraction from life
that a novelist makes when he cooks up or conceives a character out of
one or more people he partially comprehends. The character if success–
ful comes to life, the character engages a series of events which he
shapes, and fails to affect, and from his strivings the reader may draw
some comprehension, even an hypothesis.
If
the reader is a critic he
will measure the character by this hypothesis, and we as other readers
will be aided in comprehending the character (let us say it is Leopold
Bloom) by the critic's hypothesis, that is until a better or more fashion–
able hypothesis comes along.
Yet the character must first be created.
If
a man is writing an
accurate narrative about himself with real people and their real names,
and this narrative arises because some imbalance or pressure or obsession
or theme persists in dogging the man through all his aesthetic or moral
nature until he sets to work, then he is willy-nilly caught in the act of
writing into the unexplored depths of himself, into those regions which
are as mysterious to him as other people. So he can comprehend, no,
rather he can deal with himself as a literary object, as the name of that
man who goes through his pages, only by creating himself as a
literary
character, fully so much as any literary character in a work of undisputed
fiction. That is the only way a man in mid-career can begin to ap–
proach the mysterious forces which push him to write about these mat–
ters in the first pla.ce. He is off on a search. Like Theseus he will
encounter his experience on the point of his walking stick; here, his
pencil. To the extent that he succeeds in making a viable character
who will attract literary experience metaphorically equal to the am–
biguous experience in his life which impelled him to write in the
first place, so he will set out on that reconnaissance into the potentialities
of an overpowering work.
But it is no easy job! To the complications and hazards of creating
an interesting imaginary character are now added all the real dangers
of mentioning real names and real events, with all the uncharted-
