PARTISAN REVIEW
29
hate
and sweet, leer-love, spit-tickle, bite-lick") and "corporation"
(which
is
"DC, direct current, diehard charge, no dialectic man,
just
one-way street, they don't
call
it Washington, D.C. for nothing").
And he allows parody of himself, familiar enough in
his
self-inter–
views, to be joined to the parody of older literature, as when he refers
to
"shit," "Awe" and "Dread" as "that troika - that Cannibal
Emperor of Nature's Psyche
(this
is D.]. being pontiferous, for we
are contemplating emotion recollected in tranquillity back at the
Dallas ass manse, RTPY - Remembrance Things Past, Yeah, you
remember?"
This
passage points to perhaps the most significant way in which
D.J. usurps the placeMailerusuallyreservesforhimself.D.J.is
allowed to operate narratively in Mailer's own most effective mode,
the one which tells us most about
his
peculiar relationship to the
passage of time. Everything in the Chaps
is
reported from memory,
no matter how much it seems of the present, except for the occa–
sional notice given to the dinner party at which all the material
is.'Iues from the mind of D.J. The Intro Beeps continually alert us to
this:
"Repeat, all you deficient heads out there and nascent electronic
gropers, memory
is
the seed of narrative, yeah, and D.J. grassed out
at a formal dinner in
his
momma daddy's Dallas house with Tex in
white smoking jacket across the table has brought back gobs of Alaska
hunt memory two years before," or, in another example (which in–
cludes an allusion, then comically misannotated, to the very perti–
nent
"Le
bateau ivre" of Rimbaud) he tells us that "form is more
narrative, memory being always more narrative than the tohu-bohu
of the present, which
is
Old Testament Hebrew, cock-sucker, for
chaos and void." Memory, it might be recalled from "The Political
Economy of Time,"
is
the "mind's embodiment of form; therefore,
memory, like the mind,
is
invariably more pure than the event.
An
event consists not only of forces which are opposed to one another
but
also
forces which have no relation to the event. Whereas memory
has
a tendency to retain only the oppositions and the context"
[Can–
nibals and Christians].
D.J.'s account, then, should not
be
taken as either full or ac–
curate - assuming that an account possibly could
be -
any more
than
are the writings after the event in
The Armies of the Night
or
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
or Mailer's various collections of
