There was time in my youth that I devoured every thing I could get my hands on by Norman Mailer. While that urgency is no longer true I nevertheless still find him an interesting political and philosophical opponent. What was the reason for that enthusiasm in my youth? Simple, it was Mailer’s commitment to do novelistically and journalistically for the philosophy of existentialism what the French writers, especially, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, did for the philosophical argument itself. That philosophy, borne of terminal despair at the carnage, brutality and inhuman cruelties of World War II, the seeming inability of the international working class to go beyond Stalinism and Social Democratic reformism in the quest for socialism and an acknowledgement that modern humankind had let technological developments outstrip its capacity to understand and control those forces, has nevertheless become threadbare with time. We live too existential lives to find much conform in such philosophy.
Let us face it; every political and social commentator is
confronted with the need to find some basis to ground his or her analysis of
the seemingly random events that demand our attentions and explanations. Over
long experience I have found historical materialism a much more grounded philosophy
for looking at the apparently random individual facts of existence. Although I
have not read very recent Mailer all his works I have read lack this
connection. So be it. We are after all political opponents. Nevertheless, the
man can turn some rather nice metaphors in his arguments. And he sure as hell
can write. For this compilation of articles, reviews etc., written in the
mid-1960’s I recommend his articles on Mohammed Ali and prizefighting, bullfighting
(apparently obligatory for male writers), his stint as a man of the theater and
his polemic against the pretensions of the 1960’s New York liberal literary
establishment (which in the end is where his real political fight was always aimed).
Read on.
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