22
RICHARD POIRIER
the empty words, dead themes, and sentimental voids of that mass
media whose internal contradictions twist and quarter us between
the lust of the economy (which radiates a greed to consume into
us, with sex as the invisible salesman) and the guilt of the economy
which must chill us with authority, charities for cancer, and all
reminder that the mass consumer is only on drunken furlough
from the ordering disciplines of church, F.B.I., and war.
This passage proves particularly apt to
Why Are We in Viet–
nam?
The style of the novel is mimetic of the arts of the absurd he
finds so chilling in a prefatory note in
Cannibals and Christians,
"Our
Argument Fully Resumed." He there contrasts the
art
of self-expres–
sion (for which he offers the quite peculiarly inappropriate examples
of Joyce and Picasso) which came out of the nineteenth century of
iron frustration, with the arts which evolved after World War II,
when children "grew up not on frustration but interruption." This
later art is designed to shatter the nerves with "style, with wit, each ex–
plosion a guide to building a new nervous system." Dealing with
"categories and hierarchies of discontinuity and the style of their
breaks," it goes out to "hustle fifty themes in an hour." It is an art
which mass produces the wastes of art, though he doesn't quite get
around to being that explicit about it.
As
usual, he is not anxious to
appear a defender of high culture even when his own logic directs
him that way.
Why Are We in Vietnam?
is a medley of "empty words" and
"dead themes," and Mailer would appear to suggest that these are
really the inventions of the mass media. In fact, they represent what
the mass media has made out of high culture, of psychoanalysis, of
literary criticism, of myth and even of Mailer's own favorite theolog–
ical evocations, such as "dread." What lays waste to the human mind
is a central subject of this novel. But that is to put the matter rather
too simply. Still more important in understanding its rapid shifts of
style is Mailer's preoccupation with the processes by which the mind
is encouraged to turn its own contents, turn
itself
even, into waste.
This is a necessarily complicated process.
It
is dramatized in this novel
by a remarkable combination of quick changes and constant repeti–
tions. We find ourselves transported with almost maddening speed
from one context to another even while we are forced to absorb along
the wayan insistent recurrence of phrases, names, allusions, actions,
tones of voice. In other words, the constant interruptions which
