PARTISAN REVIEW
13
up reasoned arguments - as in his claim for the possible heroism
of three young hoodlums who have killed an old grocery store keep–
er - where
if
the notion
is
to be promoted at all it would have to be
by the power of style working to overturn rational conventions of
cause and effect. And his discussion of context in the same essay,
however confused, offers direct testimony that he wished consciously
to
blur the usual separations between an event, a participant in the
event and the context.
In effect, each is a creation of the other. The context in which
a man finds himself at any given moment derives in part from the
failure or success he experienced in a previous and somehow re–
lated moment. So that the context for Mailer as writer of
The
Armies of the Night
was importantly affected by the context of
Mailer as actor,
his
inability as a participant in the Washington
march to speak as often or as well as he would have liked. He writes
as he does because he could not speak as he wanted to. Sentences of
the kind being considered indicate in their very structure, that
is,
a
writer who might have been predicted to choose, after
Why Are We
in Vietnam?,
to write extraordinary spectacles. That is perhaps as
good
a term as any to describe
The Armies of the Night, Miami
and the Siege of Chicago
and
Of a Fire on the Moon.
We are
invited to see him in these
books
within intricately related fields of
force, and then to watch him act simultaneously as a participant,
witness and writer who evokes in the clashes of
his
style a "war"
among the various elements that constitute the life of the country
and of the self. Interestingly enough, the situation of D.]. and Tex
when they camp down for the night is very similar to Mailer's: they
are at a place where messages are gathered from the whole con–
tinent, we are told, and where there is, at the same time, "no peace."
In these instances Mailer's style, very much in a Faulknerian
mode,
keeps everything in motion; everything contends with, joins,
is
infused with everything else. Looking back at the passage just
quoted, it might be said that Mailer's fondness for participles–
"going," "fading," "settling," "silvering" - expresses
his
taste for
actions that go on simultaneously, for a kind of bombardment of
im–
pressions, registered
also
in
his
repetitions of phrase, the echoings
of
sound, and the use of negatives which caution against fixing the
picture in any familiar frame ("September light not fading, no,
