36
RICHARD POIRIER
whole book. I am speaking, again, of D.J. not merely as a character,
a Texas adolescent, but as a unit of energy, a composite mind, a
medium for the way things are. In effect this whole book is about
buggery. D.J. is merely unable to accept the clearest evidence of this
in his lust for Tex, while Tex, being a sometime bugger anyway,
brings this propensity into the "electrified mind" which at the end
is
sealed as their common property. Recognizing this is important to
an understanding of D.J.'s style, with its incessant jokes about bug–
gery and the allusions to the North Pole as the hole of Satan. Another
pair of travelers in Dante's Inferno, it might
be
remembered, also
encounter the asshole of Satan: in the blooded arctic ices of the pit
reserved for traitors. Mailer would know this, and his allusiveness in
this case, interestingly enough, is never submitted to the destructive
literary parody of D.J.
The book is about buggery because
it
is about the destruction
of meaning, about that process of decreation which here, in its
imagined sexual exercise, does not even alternate with acts of possible
creation, as in the sexual exchange between Rojack and Ruta
in
An American Dream.
The now actively functioning connection
in
Mailer's imagination between sexuality, creativity - meaning
writ–
ing - and the state of culture is what makes
Why Are We in Viet–
nam?
perhaps his most brilliant and certainly one of his central texts.
It
realizes in a style of fantastic comic energy a position he had
articulated in
The Presidential Papers:
As cultures die, they are stricken with the mute implacable rage
of that humanity strangled within them. So long as it grows, a
civilization depends upon the elaboration of meaning, its health
maintained by an awareness of its state; as it dies, a civilization
opens itself to the fury of those betrayed by its meaning, precisely
because that meaning was finally not sufficiently true to offer a
life adequately large. The aesthetic act shifts from the creation of
meaning to the destruction of it.
So, one could argue, functions the therapy of the surrealist artist,
of Dada, of Beat. Jaded, deadened, severed from our roots, dulled
in leaden rage, inhabiting the center of the illness of the age, it
becomes more excruciating each year for us to perform the civil–
ized act of contributing to a collective meaning. The impulse to
destroy moves like new air into a vacuum, and the art of the best
hovers, stilled, all but paralyzed between the tension to create and
the urge which is its opposite. How well Genet personifies the
dilemma. Out of the tension of his flesh, he makes the pirouette
