Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 107

Stranded in the Sixties

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guardsmen, he was just as disgusted as Howe was by those "drifters in
raggedy clothes" who managed to turn a demonstration for peace "into
a sickening, club-swinging mess" (Armies 290). He adds that by "the
end of the day, the only concern anybody could have was for the
soldiers who were taking the abuse" (Armies 290). He means, of
course, "anybody" of like background. The federal marshals who
arrested him reminded him of his old army buddies (Armies 174).
This concern for the soldiers and marshals, the dialogic other of
the Pentagon March, helps to raise Armies above the plane of
ephemeral politics. If Armies was the bible of the late 1960s
opposition politics, it was also an unheralded manifesto of political
indeterminacy. The complex "air of carnival" that Mailer retrieves
from the March (Armies 292) has its perfect analogue in Bakhtin's
camivalesque realism, the dead-end of fictional teleology. In accord
with the March itself, which had no coordinated plan (Armies 105),
A rm ies is a novel without a plot, and a history without any
discernible point. A carnival has no point. Armies succeeds,
nevertheless, in rendering (Dctober 21, 1967, as a lasting point of
reference for the political imagination.
It also, however, underscores the vast difference between a point
of reference and an article of truth. Referentiality, for Mailer, is a
process rather than a destination. Some years later he looked back
upon Armies as "a relation between mysteries where I am that
relation as the writing voice" ("Existential" 222). He concluded,
paraphrasing Trotsky, that "sometimes the only way you can tell the
truth is by a comparison of the lies" (222).
Epilogue
Soon after completing Armies, Mailer set to work on his far less
renowned Of a Fire on the Moon. Both nonfiction novels dealt with
the politics and social dynamics of technocracy. Armies, however,
was disadvantaged by the fact that its protagonist-narrator and the
armies of protesters beside him could scarcely get beyond the outer
parking lots of "technology land." Analogously, as Mailer well knew,
direct journalistic techniques could only scratch the surface of the
March. In Book One of Armies, as we have seen. Mailer turned from
ordinary journalism to the self-reflexive devices of postmodern
literature. This inward turn is further developed in Fire, where the
double vision of Armies (tom as it is between the personalism of Book