'ARTISAN REVIEW
21
Dream
and still more in
Why Are We
in
Vietnam?
is
the acknowl–
edgment that perhaps it
is
impossible to fashion any self which one
can
call one's own. Perhaps - and here the increasing influence of
Burroughs on the later Mailer
is
apparent - we are no more than
interchangeable, tooled parts of one another. D.J.
is
all he says he
is
and more, while American literature in the person of Herman Mel–
ville offers, at one point, a convenient scenario for the hunt in Alaska
and, at another, the occasion only for a smartass joke.
D.].
is
a character some of the time - a wild, brilliant, witty,
savage, eager and not unappealing boy; but he
is
much more than
a character. He
is
the place, the context, the locus for an American
mixture which
is
finally committed to the
kill,
and Melville
is
but
one ingredient in the whipped-up, heated and soured mixture. The
war
already existed in that complex of pressures which shaped the
character of the nation and thus its fate, the "subtle oppression," as
he describes it in
The Armies of the Night,
"which had come to
America out of the very air of the century (this evil twentieth cen–
tury
with its curse on the species, its oppressive Faustian lusts, its
technological excrement allover the conduits of nature, its entrap–
ment of the innocence of the best)." Vietnam, that
is,
did not induce
this
novel, but was itself induced by what the novel manages to
gather up and redefine from everything Mailer had been saying
for fifteen years or more about his country. And what he has to say
about America
is
more than usually dependent upon what American
literature has been saying for some 150 years. At a pace that
is
likely
to overwhelm many readers, Mailer demonstrates
his
stylistic capacity
to
match the tempo of historical accelerations toward disaster. But
he
had already described that movement in the quieter tones of
earlier work. It
is
consistent with what the novel
is
saying that he
should have said much of
it
before - that it was there to be noted -
in other less compelling forms.
As
early as 1959 he offered a kind of
prediction of the novel in "From Surplus Value to Mass Media,"
an essay which he calls "one of the most important short pieces" in
Advertisements for Myself.
He proposed that if any new revolution–
ary
vision of society is to be "captured by any of us in work or works,"
the necessary exploration
will
go
not nearly so far into that jungle of political economy which Marx
charted and so opened to rapid development, but rather will engage
