PARTISAN REVIEW
25
which that culture has not yet been able to assimilate, both are at
once charismatic and repellent, both share a peculiar, manic
belief
in their powers to exhale influences on others - Rojack by shooting
his
psychic pellets at obnoxious people in a New York bar, and Ahab
in
his
claims, at one point, that "something shot from my dilated
nostrils has inhaled it in his lungs, Starbuck now is mine" - and
both have a longing for the ordinary life which is denied them by
the very nature of their heroic exertions.
~bove
all, neither imagines
that if nature is some alternative to society it
is
necessarily a benign
one. Rojack does not assume that the craters of the moon are hos–
pitable, and Mailer, gazing at moon rock, feels an affection that is
also
spooky. In Mailer's work, as far back as
his
first novel, man in
nature is what Lawrence said Deerslayer truly proved to
be:
"isolate
and a killer." In
Why ATe We in Vietnam?
what is finally bequeathed
by the presiding spirit of the North
is
the order to go forth and
kill.
The important issue is not the identification, not even the uses
made of other writers in a book like this, be they Melville or Faulk–
ner or Lawrence. What should concern us, rather, is the necessity to
bother with literature at all, within a complex of competing, equally
urgent or equally innocuous references. This novel tends to remind
us
of literature, to remind us that it is literature we are reading. But
the literature which gets to us in this book has passed through other
media which rend and shred it. Appropriately we are made to think
of the diminishing claims of literature, its problematic existence in a
book
where all forms of expression and of consciousness are made
problematic. The references to Melville and the "Dick" of "Moby"
are on the same page as are other equally possible and proposed
models for the narrative voice : movie-cutie George Hamilton, or a
choice proposed in saying that "I'm coming on like Holden Caulfield
when I'm really
Dr.
Jekyll with balls."
What I mean to suggest is that the trip by the boys alone into
the wilderness, their trip to the "edge,"
is
not quite in the same
category as Rojack's imaginary and real extensions of his own power
into equally perilous circumstances. Mailer's account of the trip
reveals, more than does anything in
his
other books, a willingness to
gamble imaginatively up to the limits of
his
own resources. The trip
by the boys is made into an existential experience. But who could
doubt that it would be? What's more interesting is that it is also, and
