18
RICHARD POIRIER
a writer in a way Rojack proposes to succeed as a man, which is
perhaps why Rojack cannot be allowed any palpable equivalence
to his language of love, to the nearly hippie simplicity with which
he would replace his Hip embattlement. Rojack's feeling of possible
mutation, as if "I had crossed a chasm of time and was some new
breed of man," which occurs fairly early in the book, has only a
grotesque realization at the end when, in Las Vegas to gamble for
his trip onward alone to Guatemala and Yucatan - striking out like
the classic American hero to the territory always beyond - he says
that "Nobody knew that the deserts of the West, the arid empty wild
blind deserts, were producing again a new breed of man." However
"new," this breed is, like the old one, suspended between two worlds:
the one a horror of nature, "the bellows of the desert," the other
of technology, the air-conditioned hotel where he spends twenty-three
of every twenty-four hours as if "in a pleasure chamber of an en–
campment on the moon." The movement from the desert of this
book to the icy North range of
Why Are We in Vietnam?
and then
to the magnificently described craters of the moon in
Of
a
Fire on
the Moon
may be Mailer's way of suggesting that because we have
denuded and corrupted nature in those parts of our world where
it might be hospitable, we are perforce engaging ourselves, by an
urgency of the will akin to Sgt. Croft's assault on Mt. Anaka, with
those sanctuaries of nature which are least hospitable. And there
we absorb the savagery and the urge to
kill
which is part of nature,
while at the same time we accept the protections afforded by a
wholly technological atmosphere unnatural to the environment in
which it has been placed. Mailer thus proposes an insoluble paradox:
that human savagery increases in direct proportion to our monu–
mental achievements in those realms of technology which now im–
perially reach into the very last recesses of nature.
Mailer has come to posit situations in which the imaginable
alternatives seem to be suicide or "a slow death by conformity, with
every creative and rebellious instinct stifled"
[Advertisements for
Myself].
The question being asked in all his books from
An American
Dream
to the present is, for him, steadfastly grim: Am I, Norman
Mailer, at last an expendable human type, and is the "ability to create
art" (which, again, ought not to be confused with the ability to absorb
