Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 101

Stranded in the Sixties 97 Zavarzadeh credits Armies with advancing another generic form entirely: the nonfiction novel (53), in accord with Mailer's contention that history requires nuance as well as fact (Weber 87). In Armies, however, nuance so completely overwhelms fact that it may fairly be asked how such a work can be called history. The strongest case for the historical status of Armies is made by Robert Merrill, who fruitfully compares Armies with Hemingway's The Green Hills of Africa (1935) and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1965), both of which share with Armies a central concern with a real event (Merrill, Norman 110). Part of what distinguishes Armies from these works is the character development of Mailer's mock-heroic protagonist. This fictional Mailer comes close to Henry Miller's fictional Miller, though Miller made no historical claims for his character. Another difference, according to Merrill, is that while Mailer's character does develop to some degree through the course of Book One, this does not occur as a novelistic end in itself, but as an instrument for the cultural and political judgments of Book Two, an ostensive history. Merrill stresses that Book One, as a novel, is structurally supportive of Book Two. Clearly the goal of Armies "is to interpret an historical event rather than dramatize its hero's spiritual growth" (117). Since Book One is largely given over to self-referentiality, literary critics such as Laura Adams have been prone to treat it as the (Quixotic and properly literary section, to which Book Two plays at best a prosaic Sancho. In fact. Mailer is exhibiting the weaknesses of both approaches when taken alone. Somewhere in the indeterminate middle. Mailer is suggesting a third option, close to the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, though more philosophically exploratory. By self-deconstructing his own insights. Mailer could better transmit the raw experience of the Pentagon March. Realism finally triumphs over self-referentiality through a powerfully charged sense of time and place. Book One establishes the protagonist Mailer as the lens for this anomalous contextualism. Much as Henry Adams turned alienation into a cultural asset in his famous Education, Mailer's political lens is all the more powerful because he is ideologically "stranded," inoculated against the lures of any given political preachment. He establishes himself, for example, as the lone Novelist among journalists, and as a "left-conservative" among liberals and ordinary