Mailer's Psychology of Machines

Abstract

Summer 1990 issue. OR YEARS has dreamed of writing a great of America, a creation equal to phenomena of country itself (Cannibals 99). For some readers, closest he has ever come to this is still The Naked and Dead (1948), endebted though he may have been, at age of twenty-five, to Farrell, Steinbeck, and especially Dos Passos for book's panoramic vision of American society. Yet it is in strong work of 1960s-the psychological romance of An American Dream (1965) and imaginative journalism of The Armies of Night (1968)-that came to see his own life as a possible embodiment of contemporary history and began, Whitman-like, to identify his personal destiny with destiny of nation. Here is American author who sets himself task of being American author and who continues to engage readers despite diminishing likelihood of his ever completing his great work. Of a Fire on Moon (1970) is one of Mailer's most formidable attempts to read history-the flight of Apollo 11 to moon-as a chapter in an ongoing fiction of his own, a novel in line of Armies and his 1968 convention piece, Miami and Siege of Chicago. Like precursors, moon book is of more than journalistic value, and because dramatizes his failures no less scrupulously than he does his successes, it comes to reveal, as few traditional novels have been able to, difficult relation between technology and private imagination. Alvin B. Kernan rightly situates Mailer's subtle attack against rationalist world of NASA within the entire radical wing of romanticism, tough, revolutionary line that leads Blake and Byron, for all their differences, through such poets as Rimbaud to Sartre and Genet (155). Laurence Goldstein includes Fire in his fascinating survey of flying machines in modern literature, and George P. Landow concludes his ground-breaking study of nonfiction prose from Carlyle to Mailer with an able exposition of most complexly technical passage in book. But this powerful lineage cannot quite make up for a singular failing, a seeming inability on part of to bring temperamental force of personality to bear on what he himself, early in book, calls these