PARTISAN REVIEW
23
create such a variety of contexts and moods in the book make its
structure analogous to the structure, as Mailer has defined it, of con–
temporary daily life. Whether digested or not, one momentary ac–
cumulation of meaning has to be flushed out to make room for the
rapid infusion of the next. No word, no name, no allusion, no idea
can rest for even a moment in the mood which
it
is
supposed to
secure, and so the book proliferates in interruptions which involve
the splitting even of titles, like "Moby" and "Dick," and in puns
that mock the very authority which licenses them: "But rest for the
inst," D.J. tells the reader. The phrase creates a paradox by calling
for a rest in a contraction so hurried as to suggest there can be none,
and then continues - "Return to civ, which is to say syphilization
and fuck James Joyce."
There
is
no consciousness in the book wherein the reader
is
allowed to find any security, which
is
again a reminder of joyce's
Ulysses
and of the disturbance felt by critics whenever they are con–
fronted with this kind of phenomenon. Their tendency
is
then to
invent now one, now another schematization in which to garage
their minds. Efforts to locate some source of authority in Mailer's
novels reveal only that there
is
none. This is as it must be, since his
intent
is
to refer us to determinants in American life which are
mysterious and unlocatable, and the more powerful for being so. The
question addressed by the book
is
no longer the Marxist one of the
exploitation of working time or even of the human sense of time by
the profit motive. Rather, the question
is
the domination of pleasure
and of inner time. Remember that in "From Surplus Value to Mass
Media," Mailer takes the Marcusean view, without the Marcusean
heaviness, that we are "only on drunken furlough from the ordering
disciplines of church, F.B.I., and war." The appropriateness of these
terms to the novel is evident: the two boys are, in effect, on furlough
from the war, the book being a record of what presumably
is
passing
through the head of D.J. as he and Tex sit at their farewell dinner
in Dallas. More than that, no one in the novel is ever seen at work,
except possibly Hallie's psychoanalyst, Leonard Levin Ficthe Rothen–
berg, alternately called Linnit Live'n Foot Rottenbug or
Dr.
Fink
Lenin Rodzianko. It can be said that the book is given wholly to
interruptions and distractions, though there is no telling from what,
unless it be the urge to kill or hump. This
is
true even for that part
