Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 104

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Popular Culture Review

By collapsing the distinction between fiction and journalism, or
literature and history. Mailer would discredit ordinary reporting and
restore a realistic base to literature. Against the grain of so much
postm odern literature, David Lodge credits A rm ies with
revalidating interpretative experience (321-22). This results in what
Zavarzadeh terms "fictuality" or ”bi-referentiality," an amalgam of
self-referentiality and external verifiability (57-58).
To what extent does Mailer actually achieve this referential
hybrid? Was it not Mailer's sense of his own limitations which led
him to divide Armies, against his declared literary aims, into two
books, a novel and a relatively conventional history? Mailer was
finally unable to suppress his romantic idea of authorship—which is
a serious shortcoming so far as bi-referentiality is concerned. Like the
confessional poetics of Allen Ginsberg, which did so much to renew
the radical force of realism in the sixties (Thornton and Thornton
103),
Mailer's personalism finally limits what Bakhtin has
identified as the heteroglot dimensions of literature, especially with
regard to the novel (Collins 66). Though Mailer's express ambition is
to sustain the dialogical tension to which Bakhtin refers, and though
he has worked throughout his career to support the rel Wf