Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 103

Stranded in the Sixties

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Mailer knew full well that most of his readership was composed
of the class he was blasting. This deliberate alienation effect is
compounded, in Book One, by his effort to present himself as
something of a buffoon, and a rather pompous and bellicose one at
that. Clearly he wants to preclude any easy identification on the
reader's part with Mailer the would-be hero.
The same can be said for his reliability as a first-hand witness.
While he does claim greater credibility than can be expected from
the Time article quoted on the first page of Armies, that is saying
very little. He sees the media in general as placing a "forest of
inaccuracy" between the American public and the events covered
(Armies 245). As did his Cannibals and Christians, 1966, Armies ties
media distortion to mass apathy. What else but apathy could result
when facts or events are stripped of their existential content? And
what better climate for totalitarianism could there be than this
apathy? The remedy, so far as Mailer is concerned, is a strong blast of
uninhibited, Maileresque reality.
Nevertheless, Mailer all but advertises the fact that his version
of the march is flawed. The real danger, so far as he is concerned, lies
in the attempt of standard journalism and historiography to
camouflage their distortions. TTiis explains Mailer's comment that
Book Two of Armies is in fact a "novel," while Book One--three
fourths of Armies by volume—is "a history in the guise or dress. . . of a
novel. . . " (Armies 284). Laura Adams takes Book One to be by far the
more important of the two (133); but Merrill's case for the structural
unity of the two books is cogent enough. Mailer's immediate concern
throughout is to save his history from abstraction. On the one hand
he takes his stand against the metafictional, anti-realist drift of
literature, while on the other hand he combats the temptation to
frame his realism in anything but subjective or tentative terms, or to
limit the scope of realism by adhering to what he dubs "the old
literary corset of good taste" (Armies 62).
As Zavarzadeh explains it. Capote's ambition in In Cold Blood
was to "re-cover" a set of historical events, whereas Mailer's aim is
to "cover" events (180). Mailer accepts the surrender of historical
closure as a fair price for the right to take a personal stand-in this
case a participatory stand. His ambition, clearly, is to penetrate
beyond surface phenomena to grasp the 'feel' or experiential meaning
of history in the making.