The Aesthetics of Nakedness

It turned out that Michiko Kakutani did not review Norman Mailer's new novel, The Castle in the Forest for The New York Times. Instead, the job went to Janet Maslin, who can't help tittering over Mailer's blunderbuss prose, cheap Freudianisms, and fascination with bees. In the Times'  Sunday Book Review Lee Siegel provides a long review essay on Mailer's career. Siegel urges us to see Mailer as a major figure in American letters, but mostly Siegel ends up reiterating Mailer's irrelevance. This isn't to say that Mailer hasn't had his moments.  Siegel points to a 1962 interview in which Mailer predicted that after the Cold War the next great ideological struggle in the United States would be a conflict between liberals and conservatives. But after the fine autumnal novel The Executioner's Song (1979), Mailer hasn't had anything valuable to say about the times in which we live.

Siegel's main claim is that throughout his career Mailer has practiced what could be best called an aesthetic of nakedness. Siegel writes, "Mailer, from the beginning, has had a rage for what he calls 'nakedness.' It is a passion for emptying his psyche onto the table in front of the reader, much as a person who has just been arrested will be ordered by the police to empty his pockets as he is being booked." Siegel clearly admires Mailer for his radical transparency, and at first glance it seems that such heedlessness for social and artistic norms takes admirable courage. But examined more closely Mailer's "authentic presentation of self" just seems like a lack of impulse control.  There's something narcissistic and controlling about Mailer's "brutal honesty about the limitations of life, and of writing." Like the addict who takes drugs so that he knows exactly how he will feel throughout the day, "Mailer’s obsession with being 'naked' in public," as Siegel describes it, is a way of preempting any responses from other people. The tactic is also a good way to throw oneself into traffic to protect one's wobbly art; wretchedly self-indulgent prose becomes ennobled by personal sacrifice.

Siegel says "Nakedness in public, saying the unsayable, becomes a form of power." Perhaps, but in Mailer's case, as it is with a lot of ego exhibitionists, this particular type of power is an end in itself. Nakedness is not a means of entering another's consciousness, as Siegel claims. It's not even a means of entering one's own consciousness, at least in Mailer's work.  Rather, in his late fiction , as his own artistic powers wane, Mailer tries to appropriates, rather than just simply represent, the ontological  vividness of his subjects. The further he strays from the spotlight, the shriller his attempts to be naked in public become: In his last two novels he's tried to inhabit Jesus Christ and the young Hitler. Mailer has always been at his best in works like The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner's Song when he invites us to inhabit characters who are trapped in the desert of the real, their protective layers ground to dust by forces beyond their understanding, and yet proceeding heedlessly to their chosen ends.

Comments

[Ted Burke]

Shrillness is not how I'd describe
Mailer's late work, since he abandoned addressing himself in the third person with "The Executioner's Song". From that book onward, Mailer's self-announcing presence has noticeably
receded and the narrative itself took priority. For something approaching "shrillness", you have to go back to "Advertisements for Myself" and "Why Are We In Vietnam?", writings filled with exuberance, ego, loud clashing verbs and careening metaphors. It was a style that worked for Mailer for a long period, and the author was smart enough to have given it up before it became that rote, breathless template that a more promiscuous writer like Joyce Carol Oates relies on. Regardless of what you think of him as person, Mailer's "The Gospel According to the Son" is not a novel inspired by any hysterical force; it is calm, simply phrased,
poetically spare, and effective as in result in it's evocation of Christ's burden of being both of heaven and of earth. Mailer's presence and his ideas are always noticeable in his later work, but there's a mature,yes, mature voice at work here which has served him well. The problem with much of the nay saying of Mailer's writing is that some act as if he hasn't changed his style. To think so is not to have read him closely at all it seems.

[Richard Prouty]

I've not read "The Gospel," so my inference that it's a bad novel is shaky, to be sure. But I can't help being very skeptical about its concept. By "shrillness" I was referring to Mailer's authorial overreaching in his choice of subject matter, his claim to our attention, not his authorial voice. There are good reasons why novelists with greater talent and stronger religious convictions have demurred from making Christ a main character. As for Hitler, there's already been sixty years of novels about Nazi Germany. For Mailer to ask us to believe he's got something original to say about Hitler is arrogance of a particularly banal kind. Maybe the subject matter of "The Gospels" wasn't a cheap stunt to gain publicity, but "The Castle" certainly seems like one.

My main points in the entry were to voice dissent with the whole idea of nakedness as an aesthetic value (Siegel is hardly the only one who argues for its value) and to assert that Mailer isn't a relevant writer any more. My own preference is for the Flaubertian ideal of the impersonal artist. Besides, I think the artifices people choose are far more revealing than what people want to call their own honesty, brutal or otherwise. Mailer strikes me as the exact opposite of the impersonal artist, and his choice of subject matter after "Executioner's Song" seem inauthentic, a significant flaw in a writer who so stridently and consistently lays claim to authenticity.

[Ted Burke]

Christ has been a character in novels and in film, so Mailer's brief recasting of the Greatest Story Over Told is hardly an exercise in ego gratification. Mailer has some well known ideas about God that he's written about over the decades, and it was rather a surprise that he could weave them into the Christ story as delicately and successfully as he had. Perhaps you should read the book before condemning it out of hand. A little less tub thumping is called for. If you don't like it, at least you'll be in position to discuss the degrees of it's flaws with authority. You'll be in the position to critique it as a novel, not an audacious act.

Flaubert's notion for the "impersonal artist" is a fine theory and works well with respect to writers with similar aesthetic values as the author of "Madame Bovary". It's not the only idea in how literature and art ought to made however, and certainly applying it to Mailer's aims as a novelist is a bit besides the point. Impersonality in writing is more a goal than anything achievable, I would say, and it's only in the reaching for the result that one might end with interesting results. Genius enters into the equation, as in not all writers have equal abilities, whatever standard they avow. Nakedness as a value in writing works only as well as the writer who decides to make it an operating
concern, and it worked well enough for Mailer in the early and middle points of his career, a projection of the self hardly more assaulting than Whitman's or the cynical rumblings of an older Mark Twain. Mailer, as I said before, left this persona behind in 1979 with the publication of his masterful "Executioner's Song",when he he realized that after a couple of decades of theorizing about violence and killers, he needed to conceal his presence and tell the spectacular and complex story in front of him.

A wise decision, and a method he's wisely maintained with each books.
"Harlot's Ghost","Oswald's Tale"
are not the spewings of an egomaniac trying to flummox his readership with hyperactive vocabularies; the books, central efforts in his late period, are carefully wrought works of historical narrative, brilliant and flawed. For Mailer's ideas, these are not the rants of a young hothead picking an argument, but of a mature artist Making A Case.

To say that there are too many books and novels about Hitler is patent nonsense. Hitler was such a monster and pall over the last century that it's at our peril that artists, writers, scholars, novelists stop trying to comprehend him. Mailer's has an eccentric take on the formations of the amoral Hitler's unblinking willingness to bring carnage , and for all the snipes and snips from naysayers ,he does evoke the mindsets of those who's self-infatuation and indifference to the results of their actions makes
the Devil's grooming of the child for future mischief seem plausible in a fictional narrative.