PARTISAN REVIEW
27
it.
If
"the purification ceremony" exists as something one can get
"straight in his head," then this alone
is
symptomatic of how even
the effort to free oneself of waste is construed in
this
book as an
act that partakes of that waste, that belongs, like so much else, to
cultural and literary cliche.
Nor are these corrosive implications extemporized for this specific
occasion only. From nearly the beginning, the trek North by the boys
has been treated as something predigested. Included in the report of
the experience
is
the kind of literary interpretation usually left to the
ingenuity of academic close reading. The zest for the adventure
is
equalled, probably excelled, by D.J.'s zest for the literary analysis
of it, along with instructions on how, when and where to pay the
needed kind of attention:
... what they see is a range of mountains ahead with real peaks,
and they are going to go on up into them. (Ice needle peaks are
crystals to capture the messages of the world.)
There! You all posed y'll ready for the next adventure in the heart–
land of the North, well hold your piss, Sis, we're about to embark
with Tex Hyde who is, insist upon it, a most peculiar blendaroon
of humanity and evil, technological know-how, pure savagery,
sweet aching secret American youth, and sheer downright mean–
ness as well as genius instincts for occult power (he's just the type
to whip asses at the Black Masses) as well as being crack athlete.
Such consummate bundle of high contradictions talks, naturally
in
a flat mean ass little voice. Better hear it.
Some measure of the brilliance of Mailer's achievement
in
Why
Are We in Vietnam?
is
that he makes us almost regret that it
is
such a funny book, among the comic masterpieces, I think, of
American literature. It is a book that makes us yearn for what it
disposes of in its jokes. It induces the wish that it were possible still
to
restore sincerity to the noble effort of a line of heroes stretching
back from Faulkner to Emerson and Cooper: the trek to the "edge"
of civilization, there to be cleansed of its contaminations.
In its honesty, however, the novel is even more pessimistic about
such a gesture than is the interestingly related example of
St. M
aWT.
Lawrence's landscape in that work is as savage and nonhuman in its
beauty as is Mailer's. But while the literary pretension implicit in
trying to take some encouragement from this landscape
is
sufficiently
noted, the illusion that one can find there a clue to human transfor-
