NORMAN MAILER
19
Twentieth Century moves toward apocalypse (a full-gauge remark in
The Joker
states: "only the utmost crowding of individual destinies
corresponds to reality' ') then history may be accelerating through
liberations and repressions which become progressively more intense
until the totalitarianism of the future will not be lived out in uniform
so much as suffered along the unconscious programs of the psyche; at
such a time the rebellions to oppose it may first appear as no more than
new arts of the absurd, or of any other activity able to disrupt the
program without destroying itself.
Something has happened to our view of bureaucracy over these
twenty years; and it is this change which shifts
The Joker
from an
isolated little book into a poetic instrument which enables us to think
again about the oncoming bureaucracies of the future. For it is in
Malaquais' vision to comprehend bureaucracy not as a monolith but an
organism, a beast, with habits and mating customs, hungers and
fevers , and just as animals are separated from history, so too is the
mythical bureaucracy he creates for us in
The Joker
all separated, a
bureaucracy utterly out of time for it draws from so far back as the 19th
century
paperasses
of the official French clerk and goes forward into
projections of techniques the future has not yet envisaged. His bureau–
cratic villain Babitch is so simple , so French, so
clerical
as to cluck with
delight at one point because finally,
"This morning, just fancy, I was entrusted with the ftrst ink of my
career. . . . It's a new and most valuable promotion. And to
think it comes so soon after the other.... I will admit that I still
do not have an inkpot for my ink, but I believe it will not be long
.
"
m commg now.
Yet Babitch is so devious, so skillful, so
tuned
to the opportunities
of bureaucratic disc(;)Urse that
he didn 't care
i~
the least what I said so long as I kept talking. My
agreement
of
disagreement made him equally happy... .
" It's my turn to follow you perfectly, " I said . "The true and
the false , the myth and the real, alike incline the scales to your
side . Your entife art is reduced to this simple procedure : say any
word at all afid I will have you hanged ."
