Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 101
Stranded in the Sixties
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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