196
RICHARD POIRIER
literally, for him, the body politic; it's therefore proper that he writes
so often about vomiting, urinating, bodily stench, feces and the
tensed closeness of the organs of creation to the organs of waste.
Mailer has become increasingly aware of the dangers to
him
of adopting, even for the sake of argument, the historical or political
logic which has brought the country to its present difficulties.
This
awareness is registered in his play with the narrative and syntactical
conventions which sustain that logic. A conveniently brief and
win–
ning instance occurs early in
The Armies of the Night
where he
be–
gins a paragraph "Next Mailer ran into Paul Goodman at the bar"
and immediately adds that this
is
a "short sentence which contains
two errors and a misrepresentation." At that discovery Bellow would
have gone back and erased the sentence, but for Mailer, the ex–
perience being recorded in the sentence is no more significant than
is the experience of writing the sentence. In the act of writing he
catches himself slipping into reportorial conventions, with all the
distortions they entail, which he sets out to berate on the first pages
by quoting
The New York Times
report of his conduct in Washing–
ton. He inadvertently commits the crimes he's been exposing.
The self whose history
is
being reported in
The Armies of the
Night
acted in the past within limiting circumstances peculiar to that
moment in the past; the self who is making the report, doing the
writing,
is
acting in the present under quite different historical
and, above all, literary pressures. The Mailer of the march to the
Pentagon is not the Mailer writing about the march, which means
that there has to be yet another, a third Mailer, the one who
is
anxious to make this distinction. The highly involuted narrative or–
ganization of
Why Are We In Vietnam?
reveals even more fully
Mailer's wariness about the potential traps of reportorial or narrative
or interpretive acts.
As
a result, the hero D.]. (Disc Jockey to the
World) from whose mind the novel is taken, as from a tape, is al–
lowed to exhaust all the possible implications of what has happened
to him and what he is freely allowed to imagine happening to every–
one else. Like Vidal's Myra Breckinridge, D.J. is a superb interpre–
tive critic, among his many talents, and he gives several spiritedly
obscene throw-away interpretations to the readers, especially pro–
fessorial ones - "Yes, professor, you may keep the change, for
