Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 100

96

Popular Culture Review

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight.
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Armies brought Mailer the greatest critical acclaim he had had
since The Naked and the Dead (1948). It won both the 1968 National
Book Award for arts and letters and the Pulitzer Prize for general
nonfiction: but part of what distinguished it from Mailer's long list of
failures was simply its critical moment. For once, in his frankly
confessed confusion over these events. Mailer spoke for much of the
nation.
In less modest days he had clung to a politics of purism, turning
first to revolutionary socialism and then to the radical solipsism of
the "hipster." In The Vihite Negro he had accepted anarchy as the
only viable alternative to totalitarianism. Virtue lay in divorce
from society, and in setting out on an "uncharted journey into the
rebellious imperatives of the s e lf (Mailer, White 275-76).
Through the 1960s, however. Mailer's radicalism receded under
layers of doubt. This seemed to put him close to the New Left, with
its similar impatience for Old Left certainties; but the resemblance
proved fleeting. As new certainties replaced the old. Mailer found
himself "stranded in the sixties," fascinated and yet appalled by
stalwart revolutionaries such as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, or
especially Walter Teague, whose tireless lectures he suffered for
hours after his arrest (Armies 181). In Armies of the Night we find
Mailer—a self-styled "left conservative"—alienated not only from
the political factions nulling around him in the March, but even from
his own putative convictions.
Mailer's politics of uncertainty gains new meaning in the 1990s.
Granting all the doubts. Mailer refused to give up on political,
cultural and literary referentiality. He declined, that is, the
anesthetic of pure, textualist aesthetics. While he problematized
realism, he remained responsible to a world where literature has real
consequence and—in accord with today's "postmodernism of
resistance"—judgment may be the only alternative to complicity.
For Mailer, however, judgment is as much an imaginative act as a
rational one. If this view distances him from ordinary journalism
(Weber 81), it is not just because he takes fictional liberties.