28
RICHARD POIRIER
mation is nonetheless treated with an at least
grim
elation. Lawrence
is able to elude the ironies of the situation much more directly than
Mailer can: he rather bluntly asserts that however ludicrous the form
of self-cleansing may
be
in this particular instance, it can
still
repre–
sent some more general and laudable possibilities of reawakening
and renewal. "Man has to rouse himself afresh," he editorializes, "to
cleanse the new accumulations of refuse. To win from the crude
wild nature the victory and the power to make another start, and to
cleanse behind him the century-deep deposits of layer upon layer of
refuse."
Lawrence is not at all reticent about using Lou Witt's naivete as
sufficient cause for a large exhortation about "man"; Mailer refuses
to arrange any comparable license for
himself.
D.J. has been allowed
effectively to claim that he is the spokesman (which
also
means
victim) of the electrified "mind" that takes us to Vietnam. He repre–
sents the oversoul as Univac. Since Mailer's whole purpose is to lend
authority to the claim that D.J. has incorporated the "mind" of an
historical moment, he can't for that very reason promote an alterna–
tive voice capable of redemptive flourishes. He has already sacrificed
to D.J.'s satirization the large rhetoric which Lawrence keeps as a
privilege. All he can do is
try
to locate in D.J. some faint, some sub–
merged minority life left behind, as it were, from the washed out
wastes of the humanistic tradition.
Mailer pushes his luck in this novel about as far as a writer
can. He creates a consciousness which is disarmingly bright, funny,
weirdly attractive, if one thinks of it in terms of "character," while
simultaneously making it a kind of computer bank
in
which is stored
the fragmented consciousness of everyone
else
in the novel. In
this
role D.J. is not so much a character as the medium through which
pass the hundreds of identifiable voices that circulate in the nation
(and in our literature) and whose final message, ending the book,
is "Vietnam, hot damn."
Except as we shall see for one crucial talent, Mailer surrenders
nearly everything to the consciousness identified as D.J. He allows
it
to desiccate his sense of continuity with the literature of the past.
He puts his own sincerities up for parody, as in D.J.'s reference to
"the Awe-Dread Bombardment from Mr. Sender" and
his
marvelous
contrast between "love" (which is "dialectic, man, back and forth,
