u Ottawa L'Universitd canadienne Canada's university FACULTE DES ETUDES SUPERIEURES '— FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND ET POSTOCTORALES U Ottawa POSDOCTORAL STUDIES L,'Universit6 canadierme Canada's university Ashton Howley AUTEUR DE LA THESE / AUTHOR OF THESIS Ph.D. (English Literature) GRADE/DEGREE Department of English 7Acurifnrc"aE7DE?A^ Mailer Again: Studies in the Late Fiction TITRE DE LA THESE / TITLE OF THESIS David Rampton DIRECTEUR (DIRECf RICE) DE LA THESE / THESIS SUPERVISOR EXAMINATEURS (EXAMINATRICES) DE LA THESE / THESIS EXAMINERS J. Michael Lennon David Jarraway Tom Allen Bernhard Radloff Gary W. Slater Le Doyen de la Faculte des etudes superieures et postdoctoral / Dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies Mailer Again: Studies in the Late Fiction ASHTON HOWLEY Thesis submitted to Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the PhD program in English Literature Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa ©Ashton Howley Ottawa, Canada, 2008 Library and Bibliotheque et 1*1 Archives Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-48399-2 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-48399-2 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives and Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par Plntemet, prefer, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans loan, distribute and sell theses le monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, worldwide, for commercial or non­ sur support microforme, papier, electronique commercial purposes, in microform, et/ou autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. this thesis. Neither the thesis Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels de nor substantial extracts from it celle-ci ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement may be printed or otherwise reproduits sans son autorisation. reproduced without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne Privacy Act some supporting sur la protection de la vie privee, forms may have been removed quelques formulaires secondaires from this thesis. ont ete enleves de cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires in the document page count, aient inclus dans la pagination, their removal does not represent il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant. any loss of content from the thesis. Canada Mailer Again i:L Table of Contents Legend iii. Abstract iv. Acknowledgements vi. I. Introduction: Mailer Again 1. II. Imperial Mailer: Ancient Evenings 23. III. Heterophobia in Tough Guys Don't Dance 67. IV. Mailer's "Gnostic" Gospel 98. V. Conclusion 142. Endnotes 153. Bibliography 174. Mailer Again ii:L Legend (TPP) ... The Presidential Papers. (CC) ... Cannibals and Christians. (PS)... The Prisoner of Sex. (PP) ... Pieces and Pontifications. (AE) ... Ancient Evenings. (TG)... Tough Guys Don't Dance. (GS) ... The Gospel According to the Son. (TT)... The Time of Our Time. (S A)... The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing. (WW) ... Why Are We At War? (WE)... "I Am Not For World Empire." (EB)... "Empire Building: America and Its War with the Invisible Kingdom of Satan." Mailer Again Abstract This PhD thesis, participating in the burgeoning interest in Mailer's prolific achievement in his mature years, examines three ironies attending his career: that his leftist, antiwar writer has recently been described as a literary imperialist and as a proponent of a fascistic aesthetic, that he has been the target of feminists and gender theorists despite the fact that his writings reveal his longstanding engagement with the psychology of gender, and that he is commonly regarded as a Manichean writer, even though some defining components of this near-ancient recasting of Zoroastrianism hardly apply to his religious /• existential ideas. Chapter One, a study of Mailer's neglected Egypt novel, offers a Jungian-archetypal reading of Ancient Evenings (1983) while examining allegations that Mailer's brand of masculinity, labeled "rogue" (Faludi, 1999) and "imperialist (Savran 1998), evinces the "frontier psychology" (Olster 1989) that is synonymous with the fascistic attitudes attributed to him by feminists in the 1970s (Millet, 1971; Fetterley, 1978). Chapter Two, arguing that Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984) represents Mailer's subtle response to these allegations, claims that the novel gestures exoterically to the hard-boiled tradition—its title and main characters invoke David Madden's Tough Guys Writers of the Thirties (1968)—and esoterically to Reich's and Adorno's ideas about socio-biological constructions of gender. Mailer's achievement in Tough Guys resides in the ways in which he restores to the genre of mystery fiction the psychological elements that are usually lacking in its subgenre, the hard-boiled tradition of detective writing. Chapter Three treats The Gospel According to the Son (1997) as a "gnostic" narrative in which the narrator, in reconciling his Judaic and pagan inheritances, achieves a synthesis Mailer Again v between Platonic and Aristotelian principles, embodies the reasons that Mailer referred to himself as a "left-medievalist." This synthesis, implicit in the novel's many dualisms, in Satan's dramatic role and in the fact that Mailer incorporates an esoteric passage deriving from The Gospel of Mary, qualifies the critic's tendency to label the prodigal and iconoclastic Mailer as Manichean—a commonplace in Mailer studies since the 1950s. As I argue in this chapter, Mailer's Gospel, if only because it participates in current debates about the meaning of the term "Gnosticism," warrants greater critical attention. Mailer Again vi Acknowledgements Progress on this thesis was greatly facilitated by the support of my supervisor, David Rampton, by other sources of encouragement, Bernhard Radloffe, Nicholas von Maltzhan and Diane Corcoran, and by various members of The Norman Mailer Society, particularly J. Michael Lennon, who offered to review my work for publication, John Whalen-Bridge, who continues to provide publishing opportunities, and Peter Levenda, an inspiring and entertaining interlocutor. Introduction: Mailer Again A highly controversial presence in American literary culture until the mid 1980s, author of over forty books, and winner of every major literary prize (but for the Nobel, for which he received a nomination in 1969), Norman Mailer continued writing until his death on November, 10th, 2007, at eighty-four years of age. His reputation waned in the 1980s, and it is only in the past few years that interest in his writings has begun to revive. Yet the consensus on even his award-winning writings held by the editors of The Norton Anthology of American Literature denies what Mailer's few stalwart supporters insist is their warranted canonical status in post-WWII American literature to which it contributed so significantly. "His work and his career," the editors of Harper's anthology affirm, "surely stand among the more notable achievements of our time." The decades-running neglect of late Mailer's achievement, and the fact that he "has written more in his 'retirement years' than many writers do in their whole lives," to cite John Whalen- Bridge's call for papers for the special issue on Mailer in The Journal of Modern Literature (2006. 30. 1), inspired the inauguration of The Norman Mailer Society at the congress of the American Literature Association in 2003, numerous panels on late Mailer at this and other ALA conferences since then, The Mailer Review, an annual publication devoted to all aspects of his career, and a forthcoming collection of essays, Absolutely Dauntless: Essays in Remembrance of Norman Mailer, also dedicated to his mature writings. These efforts to reclaim Mailer's reputation are necessary to assess the consequences of the fact that he garnered for himself a great deal of hostility amongst Mailer Again 2 critics, feminists and gender theorists. Reviled by feminists in the 1970s for the unrestrained chauvinism and sexist bravado suffusing his books and magazine articles of the previous (and Mailer's most prolific) decade, the writer Time magazine called their "major ideological opposition" eventually refrained from publishing inflammatory statements, but not before he invited some of that emergent movement's most influential exponents to an open panel discussion at Town Hall, in New York in 1971. Later that year, The Prisoner of Sex, Mailer's apologia for his part in the invective at the much publicized, garrulous conference, offered little in the way of a tenable defense in the eyes of many, mainly because the majority of its readers refused to take its biology-based assertions—for example, on the "existential" necessity of abjuring the use of contraception—seriously in this decade of incipient AIDS awareness. Notwithstanding the critical acclaim that Mailer received for The Fight (1975), for Some Honorable Men: Political Conventions 1960-1972 (1976), for Genius