MORRIS DICKSTEIN
205
Recall the premise that Kennedy and Rojack are alter egos, both war
heros, both elected to Congress in the same year. But Rojack has ex–
plored the nether side of violence and power, explores it in the whole
book, coming out only' 'something like sane again" in the last line.
The book's plot can be seen as an enactment of his fantasies, his ir–
rationalities, his madness . Walking along the parapet of a skyscraper
to prove his courage and manhood, he hears voices that tell him he
can fly. The whole book is steeped in magic and dread, the dark un–
derside of a too-purely Apollonian Kennedy vision of power without
price or penalty. Rojack is not Mailer but rather Mailer's ambiguous
self-portrait as an archetype of the age. Only the best writers have the
gift of using the accidents of their own experience, the stuff of their
fantasy life, in that significant way, and we can hardly blame the
book's first readers, myself included, who were still under the sway of
Camelot's idealized Apollonian self-image, for seeing bad taste and
confessional self-aggrandizement in its allusions to both Kennedy
and the author's own recent bad-boy history.
Today time allows us quite another perspective on that period
and its literature . From
Catch-22, Mother Night
and
V.
to
Cat's
Cradle, Little Big Man
and
An American Dream,
the black humor
novels of the first half of the sixties, even when conceived earlier, are
like a secret history of the Kennedy years, when the terrifying specter
of thermonuclear war flared garishly one last time before beginning
to dim, when fond hopes for building a better society were repeatedly
mocked by our inability to deal with the society we have, when a Pres–
ident's civilized, cosmopolitan vision helped conceal the expansion of
our imperial role . Pynchon and Heller, like Mailer and Berger, are the
first novelists of a new imperial America, even when they write about
World War II, that just war, or about German Southwest Africa, or
the Fashoda crisis of the 1880's (which neatly foreshadows the Suez
crisis of the 1950's), or about the political machinations of Argentine
exiles in Florence in 1902.
V.
especially is a novel whose wide-ranging
imagination, strongly influenced by European novelists of imperial–
ism like Conrad and Graham Greene, peculiarly parallels America's
new world role. Just as
An American Dream
is ambivalent towards
power-sexual power, political power, American power-
V.
is ambiv–
alent toward history, seeing it on the one hand as having an exhil–
arating if frighteningly comprehensive shape and design, but seeing
