According to Cherry, a character in Norman Mailer’s An American Dream, people are either “souls” or “spirits”. The souls are those that are powerful enough to run America and the spirits are merely everybody else, the ordinary people who don’t. The people who are worst off are the souls who fell and became spirits because they are able to remember what it meant to have influence. This is the main thrust of this novel. Almost all of the main characters are people who pursued the American Dream, maybe got a taste of it, and then fell into obscurity.
Stephen Rojack is the main character, an ex-congressman, a talk show host, a college professor, a decorated war hero, and a man who once was on a first name basis with John F. Kennedy. His life starts to go to hell when he realizes he doesn’t fit in with the upper crust of American society and everything then gets worse when he kills his wife then tries to make it look like a suicide.
As the novel opens he is having a conversation with the moon. The moon tells him to kill himself but he doesn’t and goes after his wife Deborah instead. The moon serves different purposes throughout the novel. First, it is a reference to the moon goddess and the muse of poetic inspiration, a literary tradition that goes as far back into history as the written word itself. The contrast between the moon’s elevated position in the sky and the symbolism of falling run through the whole story. At a primal level, the moon is also associated with witchcraft and magic; references to the occult permeate the narrative. The moon also indicates Rojack’s mental instability, hence the word “lunatic”. His delusional belief in the powers of magic ambiguously demonstrate the possibility that Rojack can not face reality, possibly due to mental illness. The moon talks to him and tells him what to do, acting as his conscience and guide but the question pf whether he is sane or not, a psychotic man hearing voices, is a constant theme, a question that only gets answered in the epilogue. Finally, the moon moves the story along as a literary device the same way that the witches function as a chorus in Macbeth. Mailer semiotically invokes literary tradition but the character of Rojack also represents the end point of this traditional line of symbolism; he is a man who wants to leave his past behind and start his life over again.
Rojack’s wife, Deborah, plays a prominent role at the start of the novel. She is a wealthy, well-connected, high society woman. She has a social life that is both active and secretive as she and Rojack are separated. Not only is he of lower social class than her but she also belittles him, plays with him, and emasculates him with insults and cruel put downs. When he goes to visit her in her apartment, she demands a divorce so he strangles her and tries to make it look like a suicide by throwing her out the window. Notice the symbolism of falling.
While this murder is the main event of the story, what happens next plays a symbolic role in showing where Rojack’s life is heading next. Rojack seduces the German maid Ruta. While having sex with her, he alternates between penetrating her vagina and anus. This takes on significance as his own inner conflict between good and evil. When he is in her vagina, the sensation is described as Heaven and when he is in her ass it is described as being in Hell. He is faced with the choice of ejaculating in her vagina and getting her pregnant, this option of following the path of good, but ejaculating in her ass means choosing evil and following the path of Satan. Rojack chooses evil and therefore lies about his wife’s death to the police, reusing to admit that he murdered her, despite the obvious evidence against him.
Stephen Rojack later goes to a secretive after-hours bar to meet up with Cherry, a mafia princess and mediocre nightclub vocalist. Despite her less-than-stellar singing abilities, she proves to be a strong woman. She bosses the mafiosos in the bar around and it is clear that she holds power over them. She takes Rojack back to her apartment for sex but through their dialogue, the crux of their life situation is revealed. Cherry is romantically involved with an up and coming African-American singer and Harlem gang leader named Shago Martin but she wants to get rid of him. In fact, she wants to leave her whole past behind. She is tired of the mafia and craves an ordinary existence without all the violence. Rojack, showing no remorse, admits that he killed Deborah because he also feels empty and wanted to leave his old life behind. Both of them have become yet two more people who are lost in the world. They quickly fall in love and start making plans for the future. You have to wonder if they are just drunk and caught up in the heat of the moment or if they are serious but naive in regards to their circumstances,
A lot more gets revealed when Cherry’s boyfriend, Shago Martin shows up to confront Rojack. Shago comes at him with a knife but tensions ease and Rojack listens as the singer explains his point of view. He once had ambitions to be a prominent Civil Rights activist, going on Freedom Ride demonstrations in the South but upon returning to Harlem, jealous people accused him of being interested in publicity only after his picture appeared on the front page of the newspapers. Nonetheless, he continued trying to climb out of the ghetto by pursuing his career as a jazz singer. Shago actually hated Rojack’s wife, Deborah, because he once sang at a charity event and she was so patronizing to him, insulting him for being Black that he, ironically, wanted to see her dead. Both Rojack and Cherry listen to his story attentively and with some sympathy, but Shago again insists on fighting Rojack. The altercation ends with Shago being thrown down the stairs. Again, notice the symbolism of falling.
But it is not Shago’s fault that he descends so brutally down the stairs. He is thrown down by a white man. This is Mailer’s acknowledgment that the white power structure is holding the Black people down. The fist fight between Rojack and Shago is further emblematic of the statement Mailer makes about violence. The two men, while being angry and confrontational with each other, also display some mutual admiration for each other. This respect is not enough for them to resolve their conflict in an intelligent way though, so they resort to violence instead. If you read carefully, Rojack’s act of violence is ultimately a failure. If W.E.B. DuBois had read this novel, he might say that their fight resulted from a mutual incomprehension because Black and white people don’t know how to get along. That isn’t inherently bad, as he would have it; it just means that they haven’t learned enough about each other to have a constructive dialogue.
In regards to this fight as a variety of failure, at first Rojack feels triumphant for having won but this sensation is a short-term, fleeting stimulation. What happens next is that Cherry loses respect for him. She wants to leave her mafia life behind but at that point Rojack just looks like another violent mobster to her. The long term effects also have deadly consequences for Cherry later in the novel and Rojack loses her forever. Mailer is pointing out the futility of using violence as a means of solving problems.
The fight with Shago Martin is not the only act of violence that fails to solve problems. Returning to Rojack’s murder of his wife, he seems elated at first but as the novel goes on, he finds that no one believes his story about her suicide. Since the incident was reported in the news, everyone he meets brings up the subject, honestly telling him that they believe he murdered her. Rojack is the O.J. Simpson of the 1960s. He wants to escape from his past but people keep reminding him of it over and over and over again. To make matters worse, the negative publicity costs him his teaching job and his TV show gets cancelled, ironically replaces by a music show hosted by Shago Martin. The murder of Deborah has caused his life to collapse. Again, the act of violence leads to failure for Rojack, not success.
While on the subject of symbols, it must be pointed out that falling plays a key role in unpacking the meaning of this novel. Falling is what most of the characters have in common. As the novel opens, Rojack is vomiting off a balcony, onto the parapet below, an image that foreshadows the path everyone he encounters is on. The suicidal Rojack prepares to jump from that same balcony but changes his mind and instead throws Deborah out her window. Then Shago Martin gets thrown down the stairs. Finally Rojack flirts with death by walking along a tenth story balcony railing in the rain, risking a final, mortal fall. This falling symbolism is an echo of Satan’s fall from Heaven in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Remember that Rojack chose the path of evil when he sodomized Ruta. But Rojack had begun his fall before that. He fell out of favor with his wife and became an outsider in the privileged social life he strove to be part of. Her murder started an avalanche that took him further downwards, straight into hell. His subjective thoughts are permeated with images of loneliness and despair and he wanders in a fog of bad smells and fetid odors that he can’t escape from. As Rojack moves around New York City, his life just keeps getting worse.
Deborah is also a fallen character. When Rojack married her she was glamorous, charming, and pretty. By the time he kills her, she is a mean-spirited, overweight alcoholic. After the murder, he finds himself entangled in a web involving big corporate business, the mafia, and the CIA. He learns that Deborah was extremely promiscuous, working as a spy and having sex with men in exchange for intelligence. She was a low level agent, not taken seriously by others, and there is an implication that spies were feeding her false information so they could use her for sex. The more we learn about Deborah, the more her glamorous image is tarnished. Her darkest secret is revealed when Rojack meets with her powerful father at the end.
Shago Martin also falls while he is climbing. Not only does Rojack throw him down the stairs, but Cherry also dumps him after he insists she have an abortion. His desire to be a political activist got cut short because of the members in his community, while being a prominent gang leader in Harlem who gets beat up by a middle-aged white man can not be anything but humiliation. This is even worse because Rojack’s wife insulted him when he sang at her charity ball.
Cherry is also a character on the decline. Her ambition was to escape from a small-town life of poverty by getting cozy with the mafia. While she gained a high degree of respectability in that crowd, she still ended up being a small time lounge singer, more respected because of her beauty than her talents. Her dream of escaping the gangster life leads her into a relationship with a man who had just murdered his wife.
All of these characters are people who strove after fame, wealth, power, privilege, and everything that we think of as The American Dream. None of them made it there. Some of them came close but then fell. Rojack and Deborah were souls, as Cherry would say, who fell and became spirits like everybody else. Cherry and Shago wanted to to become souls but never made it. They never reached The American Dream and instead were living the titular An American Dream. The shift from the definite article “the” to the indefinite article “an” signifies a lot. The American Dream is a singular, sovereign goal while an American dream is just one dream out of a multitude of dreams. It is random, anonymous, and ordinary. Like the Deborah’s large number of sexual partners, Rojack declines to being just another ordinary partner in bed; he became a dream rather than The Dream. The characters in this novel are all living this ordinary dream; they all became nothing more than the masses of plain people, wandering like lost ghosts through the American landscape, chasing after something they don’t know how to get. Mailer is saying The American Dream is nothing but an empty illusion that fades away more and more the closer you get to it.
In the end, though, Rojack does achieve freedom. He gets away with murder but to be free of the consequences and the memories, he has to leave the America, supposedly the freest country in the world, and escape to Guatemala. He chose to follow the path of evil. He achieves freedom by running away from responsibility. It is a hollow victory. The American Dream for him has been reduced to nothing but a part of his past he wants to leave behind.
In this novel, Norman Mailer juggles some important themes but it is a mixture of powerful and flawed writing. The subjective inner monologue of Stephen Rojack does a lot to carry the story. In a lot of ways, this inner voice expresses the whole significance of the book, more so than the events and plot twists but the stream-of-consciousness style varied widely from being brilliant to being vague. But the characters are well-drawn and indicate social issues that were fiercely debated at the time of its writing. Unfortunately, this also makes the novel a little dated. When Rojack brings Cherry to orgasm, Mailer is acknowledging a feminist issue that was on the table in its day. The meaning of this will probably go right over the heads of younger readers, but people who are knowledgeable about that time will recognize that the female orgasm was considered an important current issue in popular culture back then. In our times, after standards and mindsets have changed, it just unfairly comes off as sounding crude. The biggest problem with this novel, though, is that Mailer does not take it far enough. It is about a desperate man in the grips of despair but the narrative is too detached to really drive this point home effectively. Mailer was too stoic, too unemotional, too cold, and too macho to be able to plumb the depths of misery in this story so Rojack does not strike the reader as strongly as he should.
It is hard to imagine An American Dream being remembered as a classic novel. The themes and style are out of touch with the direction our society is heading in now. But it does have some elements that still make it worth reading. One question remains: why did Norman Mailer write this? In real life he stabbed his wife during a psychotic breakdown and spent a couple years in a psychiatric hospital. Fortunately, she survived. Mailer, however, lived in this shadow of this crime while struggling with mental illness for the rest of his life. Did Mailer write this in an attempt to come to terms with his own violence? On the surface, the answer appears to be no. Rojack shows no remorse. But Mailer also portrays Rojack as an antihero, an unhappy loser, living with symptoms of schizophrenia and psychosis. If you read this novel carefully, he almost sounds as if he is offering a quiet apology but this apology is too subtle for your average reader to see at first glance. Then again, maybe this theory is all wrong. Norman Mailer is dead and we can never ask him now.One thing is certain though, An American Dream is a critique of American masculinity and its problematic nature.
Mailer, Norman. An American Dream. Vintage International/Random House Inc., New York: 1997.
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