PARTISAN REVIEW
37
of his art, offering meaning
in
order to adulterate
it,
until at the
end we are in danger of being left with not much more than the
Narcissism of his style. How great a writer, how hideous a cage.
As a civilization dies, it loses its biology. The homosexual, alienat–
ed from the biological chain, becomes its center.
D.].'s mind is an instrument for the destruction of meaning, as
in
the inveterate punning on names and identities, and the adultera–
tion of the literary, philosophical, psychological authorities to which
the book alludes. Indeed the implication is that the form of the
book, which is also the form of D.].'s memory, expresses the instinc–
tive fury of a mind which feels itself betrayed by a civilization no
longer able to sustain or elaborate in its language any meanings which
provide a life adequately humane or large. The very effort to escape
that civilization, to ventilate and cleanse the mind of its "mixed up
shit," is betrayed both by the inhospitable landscape to which the
act, by this point in the twentieth century, has of necessity been
restricted, and by the implicit mockery of the act in the way literary
analogues to it are suggested. D.].'s memory is doomed to scatology,
and, though he dare not bugger his mate, his mind is obsessed with
jokes and images of buggery, of sexual entrances that lead not to
the centers of creations but to the center of waste.
The book, like Mailer's comments on Genet, proposes a connec–
tion between creativity in art and in sex which takes us to the nerve
of Mailer's sense of himself as a man and writer. "The
art
of the
best
hovers, stilled, all but paralyzed between the tension to create
and the urge which is its opposite." It is at just such a point of near
paralysis in the movement of
Why Are We in Vietnam?
that Mailer
momentarily takes over the narrative from D.]. What then happens
is
an infusion of creative vitality into an imaginative landscape
dominated by frigidities of environment and of feeling. The boys
are doomed to the kind of masculinity which has none of the dialec–
tical vitalities so profitably at work in Mailer, of being female as well
as
male, of feeling a space within where the gestations of imagina–
tion take place, and a keen sense of the space without, which calls
forth the will and lust for public power. He had already written in
his
long debate about scatology, "The Metaphysics of the Belly,"
that
"if
we wish to be more masculine we must first satisfy some–
thing feminine in ourselves"
[The Presidential Papers].
The homo–
lIC!lUal urges of D.]. and Tex promise the reverse of this satisfaction.
