Norman Mailer’s Self-Dispersive Reconstruction of Self and History: A Reading of The Armies of the Night

Abstract

Among the American postmodern historical novel of the sixties and seventies, Mailer’s The Armies of the Night is an outstanding and even peculiar case that the authorial self is insistently projected into the process of historial reconstruction. Mailer utilizes egotistic perception to highlight a perceiving individual’s imaginative power to recapture the ‘feel’ of historical events beyond fetishised facts. It is the reason that he incorporates the novelistic genre of a personalized vision in history and, by so doing, blurs the boundary between fact and fiction. But at the same time The Armies of the Night claims that the ‘feel’ of reality itself is so intricate and changing as to require a variety of individual positions. For Mailer, the identity of the individual as the source of perception is not stable or coherent. This paper tries to examine how Mailer takes advantage of the instability of the self by becoming a self-manipulator. It further explores the complexity of egotism embedded in the manipulative process, one that operates under the self-dispersive or self-undermining control of the novel’s authorial self. Mailer’s self-dispersive narrative strategy works in both ways. On the one hand, the authority and power of the perceiving self is overtly emphasized as a necessary source of historical imagination. But on the other hand, Mailer undermines the very authority by foregrounding the fictionality and provisionality of perception. Rather than upholding a nostalgia for wholeness, this ambivalent approach to self and history demonstrates, as this paper argues, Mailer’s way of ironically repositioning, that is, both denying and reorienting the liberal humanist values in the postmodern condition.