RICHARD POIRIER
ebbing"). These habits, again as in Faulkner, are consistent with a
tendency to collapse the rational insistence on distinctions between
time and place, so that most get measured by the seasons, and
be–
tween the presumably assigned functions of the senses, so that by a
synesthesia of light and sound it can
be
suggested that the landscape
sends out and receives signals. Nature, that
is,
has its own com–
munications system without any need for technological assistance: it
also has a memory that seems to work as well as a computer, made
visible in the setting sun and audible in an animal grunt of the moose;
it even expresses itself dialectically, as in the contending lights of
the sun and moon on the two sides of the moose.
And yet
if
this landscape carries a message that the boys might
possibly read, if its self-sufficiency frees it from human "shit" or
from any kind of human genius in the form of technology, its beauty
is wholly inhospitable to human love or tenderness or trust. No one
could "relinquish" to it, as in Faulkner, and though the boys left
their weapons behind, they wisely corrected a first impulse to leave
everything and took along their bedroll, pup tent, food, matches and
binoculars. They are going into a landscape antithetical to human
life, and Mailer chose to imagine it that way, rather than as any–
thing even momentarily hospitable, like the forest in which Isaac
McCaslin learned to give up his more easily disposable inheritance
of "shit." In the scene that follows, the landscape induces in them
a need for love, for joining together. But this need cannot ever
be
separated from the accompanying and equally induced desire for
power and domination. Each wants to enter the other; each knows
he would be killed somehow
if
he ever succeeded. So as they lie to–
gether, tensed in desire and fear, there was
. . . murder between them under all friendship, for God was a
beast, not a man, and God said, "Go out and kill- fulfill my
will, go and kill," and they hung there each of them on the knife
of the divide in all conflict of lust to own the other yet in fear
of being killed by the other and as the hour went by and the lights
shifted, something in the radiance of the North went into them,
and owned their fear, some communion of telepathies and new
powers, and they were twins, never to be near as lovers again,
but killer brothers, owned by something, prince of darkness, lord
of light, they did not know.
Their love for each other is a minority element already sickened
by a homoerotic lust for masculine power. Such, in general,
is
Mailer's
