PARTISAN REVIEW
35
view of the possibilities of homosexual love, as in
his
writing about
Genet in
The Prisoner of Sex,
where he proposes that the irony of
homosexual practices is that the seemingly passive partner is really
trying to take on the masculine resources of the man who enters
him,
and often succeeds in doing so. Homosexuality is doomed, in his
view, by a contest between the partners for sexual identity which
each could achieve only with a woman; they compete for what each
of them has surrendered, and the sexual act ceases to have any life–
giving dialectical energy.
There is scarcely any point in arguing, as some have, that the
boys
might have been saved for humanity if they had been able
to make love. I doubt that the question is a real one here or in any
of the other American novels where one finds similar male pair–
ings. The imagination of possible destinies for friends and neighbors
is a legitimate and sometimes irresistible pastime, but it is a wholly
inappropriate concern when it comes to characters in a book. D.].
and Tex, Huck and Jim, for that matter, exist not to enact a life
but to help realize a form; they exist in and for a structure of mean–
ing wherein character is merely one contributory item. Mailer's
maneuver at the end of the novel in fact demonstrates how the
form of the book cannot be wholly surrendered to the form even of
the governing consciousness within it. D.J. cannot himself express
that possible saving remnant of human feeling within him which
was apparently deadened at Brooks Range by the "crystallization"
of his and Tex's mind. And
it
is this same "crystallization" which
in
turn gives form to the narrative. We are at least allowed to
wonder if D.J. and Tex possibly did have in them some filament of
strangled humanity, and the pessimism of Mailer's view is most
evident in the fact that when this humanity comes near to expressing
itself its only possible form is buggery, which Tex indulges in now
and then anyway, just for the hell of it.
The tenth of
The Presidential Papers,
entitled "Minorities," is
given to a review of Genet's
The Blacks
which anticipates and helps
explain the complex significance to
Wh y A re W e in V ietnam?
-
and
also
to Mailer's posture in it as a creator - of sexually perverse ten–
sions, tensions of the kind found in Tex and D.]., in Rojack of
An
American Dream
and in Mailer himself. Buggery between two men
is
the equivalent in sexual conduct of D.J.'s literary conduct in the
