PARTISAN REVIEW
double sense of identity and so at the mercy of a self which de–
mands action and more action to define the most rudimentary
borders of identity.
Such a passage, and the preceding one in which he
claims
that
minorities "are both themselves and the mirror of their culture" in–
dicate why Mailer
is
a more difficult writer in a book like
An Amer–
ican Dream
or in
Why Are We in Vietnam?
than most critics or re–
viewe~
are prepared to recognize. Not everyone is qualified for the
kind of reading, the reading as much with the ear as with the eye,
that his writing calls for; not everyone is capable of caring for the
drama of
his
argument and of
his
language, as it plays across the
page; and very few are prepared for his unique mixtures of the
world of daily news, the world we take for granted, with the world
of nightmare and psychotic imagining. He is quite unlike any other
writer of
his
generation. He is more like Pynchon than, say, like
Burroughs or Borges with whom he has similarities enough to make
the differences instructive. Burroughs is interested in showing how
the world of the underground
is
a metaphor for the world we
all
live in, while Mailer insists on the fact that the world we live in
is
the underground. And Borges, for
all
his
marvelous facility and wit,
becomes, after any extended reading, tedious and emasculating. He
is
forever demonstrating the fictive nature of reality, forever calling
us
away from the dangers of contemporary facts, Argentinian or
otherwise, to the refuge of fabling and the titillation of literary
bewilderment. Burroughs
is
a writer of genius equivalent to Mailer's
and essential to the latter's development, especially in
Why Are We
in Vietnam?,
but the currently touted Borges
is
the kind of writer
whose relation to the possibilities of literature is like the relation of
a
good
cookbook to food.
Mailer insists on living
at
the divide, living
on
the divide,
be–
tween the world of recorded reality and a world of omens, spirits and
powe~,
only that his presence there may blur the distinction. He
seals
and obliterates the gap he finds, like a sacrificial warrior.
This
fusion in the self of conflicting realms makes him a disturbing, a
dif–
ficult and an important writer. I use these terms deliberately, to
suggest that his willingness to remain locked into "the chains of am–
bivalence"
is
a measure of the dimension and immediacy of his
concerns, of his willingness not to foreclose on his material in the
