20
RICHARD POIRIER
Intro Beeps and Chaps into which it is divided, a matter of serious
but comic bewildennent. Perhaps, as it mostly seems, what we get
are emissions from the hopped-up mind of D.J., a Dallas late adoles.–
cent son of corporation millionaire Rusty and of his wife Hallie Lee
Jethroe. We can't be sure. In this work D.J. functions as Mailer
has
done in others: as the theorist of multiple identity. He cautions us
that
we have no material physical site or locus for this record, because
I can be in the act of writing it, recording it, slipping it
(all
unwitting to myself) into the transistorized electronic aisles and
microfilm of the electronic Lord (who,
if
he
is
located in the
asshole, must be Satan) or I can be an expiring consciousness, I
can be the unwinding and unravelings of a nervous constellation
just now executed, killed, severed or stopped, maybe even stunned,
you thunders, Herman Melville go hump Moby and wash his Dick.
Or maybe I am like a Spade and writing like a Shade.
The "voice" here is a composite of styles, tones and allusions
transposed to the pace of a
disc
jockey's t2.ped talk. Throughout
the book
this
voice manages to incorporate netrly every kind of cant
one can hear on the airways of America. To a lesser degree Rojack
was also an assemblage of parts, some of them disjunctive with
others. The often abrupt but deftly managed S:llfts of
his
style are one
indication of this. (So, too, with Cherry. W2.tching her sing under
the spotlight in a nightclub, Rojack imagines that "she could have
been a nest of separate personalities," a nice fonnula for
his
own
and for Mailer's willing
if
more warlike gathering of disparate selves.)
Mailer's healthy and at last dogged refu;al to put together a
self at the cost of stifling any fragment of his personality enters into
what can be called
his
willingness to dechara:terize the people he
likes. While giving full expression to the socill and psychological
identities which could be conventionally assignd to such characters,
he proposes at the same time that they are impenonal units of energy,
connected to powers quite unlike those which :an account for the
character in
his
other, more normal existence.
':'his
is why Mailer's
heroes and heroines, especially
in
An American Dream,
are a kind
of battleground where external forces which inhLbit the soul or the
psyche war for possession. While Mailer admire the strength
in
a
person like Rojack or Cherry that allows such a war even to go on,
he also shares the terror they necessarily feel. In
An American
