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Pynchon, to mention only the American contingent, may be thought
even tiresomely repetitious. They are in any case more flamboyant
and a good deal more politically assertive than are most of their
contemporaries in fiction, more political even than the earlier writers
they resemble. It's as if they have been forced to see that the issues
raised
by the works of Melville and Joyce are now inseparable
from the issues raised by forms of political repression as described,
say, by a radical agrarian like Marcuse, in the chapter of
One-Dimen–
sional Man
entitled "The Closing of the Universe of Discourse."
More than anyone else of his time, Mailer
is
implicated, in
every
sense of that word,
in
the way we live now. He
is
the great
literary contender for the English language
in
competition not simply
with others (he's nearly beyond that) but with anything - transis–
tors, newspapers, tapes, the sound of helicopters, all the media–
that presumes to represent reality. It's no holds or obscenities ba.rred,
except
in
his latest and weakest book,
Miami and the Siege of Chi–
cago
where he creates false extremities
in
order to rest, stylistically
and politically, at some spectatorial middle ground. At his best he
seeks
contamination, and does so by adopting the roles, the styles, the
sounds that will give him the measure of what it's like to be alive in
this
country. He takes on the literary responsibility for the condition
of our civilization, and of course he's despised by those who simply
think
the condition
will
pass if we attend to our classes in literary
knitting. He does all this not to wallow but to push through with
some renewed sense of
his
own human shape, with
his
own unique
and liberating sounds. Alien forces can be dealt with, he would seem
to say, only by allowing them to become internal, by inducing their
internalization - though he finds it increasingly hard to internalize
the young - in order that they may be transformed or routed with–
in the battleground of his own organism. In what is still the most
penetrating essay about Mailer, even though it appeared
in
1962,
Diana Trilling points out that "despite Hipsterism's emphasis upon
the self, it places on the self the largest possible responsibility for
'the colI ctive creation' (as Mailer calls it) in our culture.
'If
society
is
so murderous,' he asks us, 'then who could ignore the most hideous
of questions about his own nature?' There
is
of course menace
in
so
primary an inquiry, and Mailer has
himself
been badly scarred
in
its pursuit." The body that Mailer imagines as his own is quite
