30
RICHARD POIRIER
pieces. The importance of this fact to the book is that we are to
mis–
trust the interpretation as much as the reporting of events. The
parodistic phrase "purification ceremony" - a product of Tex's mind,
if
we are to believe D.J., after they have spontaneously set out on
the trip - should not limit or even direct our reading of their motives
for the trip or their activities on it. Since we cannot even
be
sure
that the phrase occurred to Tex, we can't be sure that the boys were,
at the time, actually aware of the literary analogues to their conduct.
In other words, Mailer has so contrived things, notably by. the spec–
ulations in nearly all of the Intro Beeps about the falsification implicit
in all narrative form, that the mocking lit-crit media-packaged fonn
given to everything in D.J.'s accelerated recollections is itself being
mocked. The very status of the parody is brought into question.
For Mailer, and probably for any writer of the first rank, ques–
tions about literary form are simultaneously questions about the shape
of human consciousness. That is why D.J.'s teasing and the joking
about the authenticity of the form of
his
narrative also implies that
he is lying about the past or, at the very least, that he is unable to
tell the truth, especially about his own feelings at certain moments.
At one point it even seems as if D.J. is temporarily dismissed as the
narrator:
Fuck this voice, why is D.J. hovering on the edge of a stall? Make
your point! But D.J. is hung because the events now to
be
re–
counted in his private tape being made for the private ear of the
Lord (such is the hypothesis now forging ahead) are hung up on
a moment of the profoundest personal disclosure, in fact, dig, little
punsters out in fun land, D.J. cannot go on because he has to talk
about what Tex and him were presented with there all alone up
above the Arctic Circle.
Even here we can't really believe what we're being told: the
style in which we're informed that D.J. "cannot go on," like the style
thereafter, is identifiably D.J.'s. The one exception, a long passage
at the end of Chap 10, occurs over twenty pages later: the magni–
ficent description of the scene around the pup tent just before the
two boys go to sleep, alone in the Arctic wilderness. The feelings
summoned to life in this passage might well have belonged to D.].,
and might in some diluted form still circulate in him, but the im-
