16
RICHARD POIRIER
trademark of a special, usually large thematic ambition. What
is
re–
markable in
An American Dream
is the extravagance of Mailer's ren–
dition of each of these modes; there is the clear indication that
if
he
so chose he ·could write any kind of novel that literature has made
available to us.
What he wants to do, however, is something more daring. He
wants to show that the world of the demonic, the supernatural, the
mad is not simply the reverse side of the world that sets the normal
standards by which these other conditions are defined as abnormal.
Instead he wants to suggest that these worlds are simultaneous, co–
extensive. Perhaps he would have escaped the strictures visited upon
him had he set the novel in Los Angeles, which most literary critics
have long since agreed is a city where anything they know about can
become anything they don't know about and certainly everything
they disapprove of. He chose istead the difficult locale of New York
which, as late as 1965, passed for sane, even for fun city.
Rojack resembles Mailer but is not to be confused with
him.
The difference essentially is that he is only in the process of achiev–
ing that level of integration between madness and sanity at which
Mailer had to arrive as the precondition of
his
writing the book at
all. In wanting to escape madness Rojack decides he must position
himself at some false divide between the world of merely seeming
sanity - the party he attends at the beginning, his encounters with
the police,
his
recollected involvements with historical issues,
his
talk
with various recognizable types in the bars and at the apartment of
his father-in-law, Kelly - and the world of nightmare and death
with which he
flirts.
He lives at the divide of two kinds of equally
unacceptable power: of demonic social and economic systems and
of demonic imaginations of himself as a kind of
Ubermensch.
He
thus exists on the borders of identity, suicidally placed at different
times in the book on the parapet of a balcony high above Manhat–
tan with the moon and the abyss on one side and, on the other,
the realities and blandishments of a deadening academic-literary–
intellectual-social commitment. In his verbal as well as in his physical
excursions between these two worlds, Rojack moves in obedience to
a map already charted in Mailer's earlier works, a diagram of the
formative working of Mailer's imagination.
Rojack raises a most interesting question about Mailer. Even
to arrive at that question, consider, first of all, that Rojack's ef-
