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D.J.
is,
mean to say,
has
got more than a finger into the cunt of
genius, Madame Muse."
Indeed, there is hardly anywhere beyond his interpretations for
the interpreter to reach. D.J.'s sputtering excess of analysis,
his
criti–
cisms
of the stagnations of narrative recapitulation, his slangy resur–
rection of theories that Mailer in essays of earlier years had ex–
pounded with a seriousness nearly professorial- all these are pre–
sented as if none had any special status. Like the catalogue of hunting
guns
which takes up maybe an undue portion of the book, D.J.'s
ideas, theories and interpretations have the programmed, inhumanly
accelerated speed of a disc jockey whose mind has been electrified.
The material pours forth as part of the flow of "numbers, details,
and all sorts of overspecific data as if it were scum, slime, pollen
slick,
floating twigs and wet rotting leaves all meandering a dead-ass
stream." At last everything is "shit." D.J. and
his
friend Tex Hyde
make a lyrically described effort during an Alaskan safari to separ–
ate themselves from it by leaving the other hunters - D.J.'s father
("the highest grade of asshole made in America") and his flunkies,
the M.A. or Medium Assholes (an apt McLuhanite pun). Leaving
their rifles behind, they go into the Alaskan wilderness, beyond the
Arctic Circle in search of bear.
Analogies are abundantly obvious to a similar though more
exacting relinquishment of power by Faulkner's Isaac McCaslin, who
leaves behind
him
his watch, stick and compass in addition to
his
gun as the precondition of
his
seeing the legendary bear. While
Isaac's act of "relinquishment" succeeds in placing him ultimately in
a new relation to his inheritance, the effort by D.J. and Tex fails,
and it is possible to make a pseudo-Marxist paradigm of the differ–
ence: in the progress from agricultural to capitalistic to industrial and
thence to the technological levels of society it becomes increasingly
difficult and finally impossible to get, as the boys hope, "the fear,
shit,
disgust, and mixed shit tapeworm out of fucked up guts and
overcharged nerves." Faulkner's Isaac can put aside his inheritance in
The Bear,
but Mailer's boys cannot divest themselves of the techno–
logical world of their inheritance: it is literally tuned into their
heads, and while in the wilderness their electrically charged minds
are joined to one another and to the magnetic fields of the wild
North; they return to camp and find "the older men's voices were
