PARTISAN REVIEW
17
forts at self-creation in language are analagous to
his
efforts in action
in that both are an attempt to discover the shape of
his
true self
by daring each side of the divide on which he chooses
to
live. Con–
sider further that his verbal transits between worlds are equivalent
to
Mailer's own movements up and down between the linked op–
positions which hold so much of
his
work and of
his
world together.
The question, then, is this: what does Rojack's condition, once he
has
escaped from this "perpetual transit," tell us about the kinds of
fulfillment that Mailer wishes to arrive at as a writer? In order to
be
a writer at all, in order quite literally to write, it is perhaps nec–
~
that he remain the embattled embodiment of the two worlds
from which, in the hope of becoming a new man, in the hope of
having a second birth, Rojack wants desperately to escape. Rojack
wants
to escape from the world as it is contrived and structured by
conspiracies of power.
What is not sufficiently clarified even by admirers of
An Amer–
ican Dream
-
and I am thinking of two astute critics, Leo
Bersani
and Tony Tanner - is that Rojack really hopes
to
do more
than
that. He would also like to escape from his own, which is to say from
Mailer's counterconspiracies, his alternative but often insane inven–
tions. Above all, he would be "free of magic," not only the "magic
at the top," that cluster of the incorporated social-economic-political
power which Kelly seems to offer
him
as a bribe, but
also
the magic
he evokes in order not to be tempted by the bribe. He wants to
be
free of the enslavement to system which is implicit in the total ab–
sorption of
his
opposition to system. Stepping out of the dialectical
frame so nearly compulsive in Mailer, Rojack is allowed to say that
he would like to escape "the tongue of the Devil, the dread of the
Lord, I wanted to be some sort of rational man again, nailed tight
to details, promiscuous, reasonable, blind to the reach of the seas."
His prayer simply
is
that he be allowed to "love that girl, and be–
come a father, and try to be a good man, and do some decent work."
At last, with admiration, almost with relief, the reader can welcome
back that modest, nice, young Jewish boy in Mailer who won't ever,
quite, let himself be forgotten.
So
that if Rojack passes over a
terrain
already thoroughly explored by
his
creator, he reveals the
otherwise scarcely articulated
wish
of
his
creator
to
arrive back
home where it all begins.
Mailer's articulate brilliance depends on
his
not succeeding as
