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For those with an interest in writing, literature, and contemporary American culture, you probably noted the glowing obits for Norman Mailer, a cultural novelist-cum-prophet of 20th century America. In case you need a dissenting opinion about his influence on culture, you might like this essay by Roger Kimball. In a discussion of “The White Negro,” one of Mailer’s more popular essays (about how whites adopted black culture…long before hip-hop, I might add), Kimball writes:
Although many critics took issue with Mailer’s exoneration of violence, the real message of the essay - if it feels good, do it! - was just then beginning to sweep the country with irresistible force. “The White Negro,” along with some of Mailer’s other essays from the late 1950s, represented an important opening salvo in the war on convention, restraint, and traditional morality. This, not his literary accomplishment, was the ultimate secret of Mailer’s broad appeal. Mailer, as Joseph Epstein observed, “was one of the key men responsible for releasing the Dionysian strain in American life.” He promised his readers what they longed to hear: that ultimate, self-centered ecstasy was theirs for the taking. Mailer once said that he would “settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.”
Well, you have to admire a man with goals.
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Keywords: culture, literature, Norman Mailer, radicals |  |
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Ugh. No, you don’t. Admiration comes with appropriate goals and appropriate means. Mailer was not cool.
Mailer was the poster child for wasted gift. Which place he purposely stole, btw, from Heminigway. What great things he could have written had he gotten past his own ego. Or his own testosterone.
I never could stomach Mailer’s writing. No offense intended toward his admirers.
How can one not be disturbed regarding the sixties nihilism that Mailer represents. I’ve read virtually all of his stuff, including Harlot’s Ghost, a thousand-plus page story without an ending and little real understanding of a spook’s life. The man is obsessed with sexual matters, especially buggery, and cruelly fascinated with the sort of criminality of Abbot and Gilmore.
Mailer in the end gave up his profound Jewish roots for a mess of sixties pottage. Harvard was apparently of little help, other than a bit of literary knowledge and craftsmanship. Compared to Saul Bellow he is a cipher.
Peter Leavitt
Read about Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, some time. Or the Marquis de Sade.
It’s too funny when the evangelical Christians of modern American thing depravity was invented in the 20th Century.
RN, who said depravity was invented in the 20th Century? Did I miss a post?
who said depravity was an invention I thought it came with the whole package.