40
RICHARD POIRIER
which prevent the solidification of either one. Solidification, or what
D.J. calls "crystallization," is not the function of Mailer's art and
is
instead ascribed to those forces in contemporary civilization to
which
his
art opposes itself. With what seems at times obtuseness he
chooses to put his stress of appreciation on those aspects of a subject
which anyone working in the rationalist, humanist, liberal tradition
would generally choose to ignore or condemn. He is therefore neces–
sarily committed to the democratic principle that
all
parts of any
subject are at least initially equal. Like Glenn Gould playing Bach or
Beethoven, Mailer decides that what everyone else treats as a subor–
dinate sound can be treated as a major one.
This
significantly com–
plicates the responses called forth by some of the characters in
his
later work. Thus, while D.J. and Tex are agents of some horrid,
proliferating power that propels America into Vietnam, they are also
in another sense "good." They are emphatically and unapologetically
what they are; they do what they do well, and
it
is possible in Mailer
to do anything well, to perform well even in the act of murder.
For that reason the obscenity in
Why Are We in Vietnam?
is
not a symptom of what
is
the matter with D.J. Instead it
is
a clue
to what might possibly be "good" about him. In
"An
Evening with
Jackie Kennedy, or, the Wild West of the East," Mailer proposed
to tell her "that the obscene had a right to exist in the novel," a
desire typical of his wish to bring apparently uncongenial ideas into
situations designed to exclude them.
As
"queen of the arts" she would
understand, he likes to think, that it was "the purpose of culture
finally to enrich all the psyche, not just part of us" because
"Art
in all its manifestations . . . including the rude, the obscene, and the
unsayable ... was as essential to the nation as technology"
[The
Presidential Papers].
Elsewhere he makes the point that an artist who
does not bring into art those qualities which might disrupt formal
coherence is guilty of doing to art, and to culture, what Eisenhower
did to politics during what were for Mailer the worst years of
his
time in America: "he did not divide the nation as a hero might
(with a dramatic dialogue as a result) ; he merely excluded one part
of the nation from the other. The result was an alienation of the
best minds and bravest impulses from the faltering history which
was made"
[The Presidential Papers].
Mailer
will
exclude nothing in the interests of formal arrange-
