26
RICHARD POIRIER
emphatically, a literary one, with admixtures of film idols, fashion–
able intellectual guides like Marshall McLuhan, crossings of Shake–
speare with Batman, of Katherine Anne Porter with Clare Booth
Luce. I don't mean that such a cheery and utilitarian treatment of
literature is designed merely to characterize the boys and elicit our
sad and amused contempt. Actually, the boys are made as bright as
any potential reader, certainly as bright as most literary-academic
ones. (Mter
all,
D.]. has ready access to his "Literary Handbook
Metaphor ManuaL") Their literary self-consciousness, combined with
their intellectual
savvy,
is
what enriches the episode of their excursion
beyond anything like it in American literature since
The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn,
an earlier book "written" by an adolescent
who, though he tried to avoid the "style" of his times as energetically
as D.]. tries to imitate
his,
was nonetheless also its victim.
While D.]. and Tex can be compared respectively to Huck and
Tom, they are both more like Tom to the degree that they eagerly
subscribe to system, to doing things "by the book," though now "the
book" encompasses film,
'IV
and disc jockeys. So much so that in
important respects they do not exist as characters at
all
but as ex–
pressive filaments of some computerized mind. This is made
espe–
cially important, for any understanding of what Mailer is up to, by
the sudden attention given in Chap 10 to the phrase "purification
ceremony."
They have not cleaned the pipes, not yet. They are still full of
toilet plunger holes seen
in
caribou, and shattered guts and strewn–
out souls of slaughtered game meats all over the Alaska
air
and
Tex feels like he's never going to hunt again which is not un–
horrendous for him since he's natural hunter, but then
with
one
lightning leap from the button on his genius belt to the base of his
brain-pan he gets the purification ceremony straight in his head,
and announces to D.]. that they gonna wrap their weapons and
lash them in a tree. . . .
Clearly the "ceremony"
is
something out of the "Literary Hand–
book Metaphor Manual," electronically banked and awaiting the
proper signal. Just as obviously the phrase is meant to trigger in the
reader's mind some recollection of the "relinquishment" scene of
Isaac McCaslin in Faulkner's
The Bear.
The difference is that in
Mailer's book the "ceremony"
is
as much a literary-critical exercise
as it
is
an existential act, at least insofar as D.J. chooses to recollect
