Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 108

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Popular Culture Review

One and the historicity of Book Two) is ingeniously integrated. Thus
it was in Fire, far more than in Armies, that Mailer brought together
the twin poles of a new, postmodern referentiality.
Meanwhile, a different strain of postmodern referentiality was
taking shape in the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe. Like Mailer,
Wolfe grounded referentiality in consciousness, but instead of turning
inward to the cognitive resources of his own consciousness, Wolfe drew
upon the techniques of saturation reporting to sound out the
consciousness of his characters. After a decade of experimentation, he
brought the approach to maturity in The Right Stuff (1979), which
effectively turned Fire on its head, externalizing Mailer's selfreflexivity by projecting the mind frames of the Mercury astronauts
themselves.
In that same year. Mailer reversed himself and adopted the New
Journalist approach in The Executioner's Song. There, as in Armies,
America was portrayed as a divided land. Though the civil war of
Song was psychological rather than ideological, the conflict had a
similar provenience: the spiritual void of modern American life. In a
recent interview with David Frost, Mailer speaks of the ongoing
destruction of America's "spiritual ecology" throughout the Cold War
era. Never the utter pessimist. Mailer holds out the hope that with
the end of the Cold War America can get back to the good old civil
strife-ideological as well as psychological—that left its mark most
indelibly in The Armies of the Night.
National Cheng Kung University

William H. Thornton

Works Cited
Adams, Laura. Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer, Athens,
OH: Ohio University Press, 1976.
Collins, Jim. Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism,
New York: Routledge, 1989.
Dickstein, Morris. "Seeds of the Sixties: The Growth of Freudian
Radicalism." Partisan Review, Vol. 43, No. 4 (1976), pp. 502-23.
Gutman, Stanley T. Mankind in Barbary: The Individual and Society in the
Novels of Norman Mailer, New Hampshire: The University Press of
New England, 1975.
Howe, Irving. "Introduction." In Twenty-Five Years of Dissent: An
American Tradition, Edited by Irving Howe. New York: Methuen,
1979, pp. ix-xxv.