The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History Book

A Novel History

This loosely "fictionalised" account of the 1967 anti-Vietnam war March on the Pentagon won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

While many of Mailer's political and philosophical concerns could be said to have dated (like much of Sixties culture), I really enjoyed re-reading it.

I suspect that many of my own views about Sixties politics (particularly the relationship between the Old Left and the New Left) were shaped by my first reading.

To that extent, it's had a lasting effect on me, despite its flaws.

History as a Novel

The work is divided into two parts:

* History as a Novel; and

* The Novel as History.

Part I is New Journalism in which the author is inserted into the action. Except he is cast as a semi-fictional third person protagonist, hence it is just as much post-modernist metafiction as journalism.

Mailer was both a speaker and a demonstrator at the events described in the novel. This is how he justifies the choice of himself as protagonist:

"An eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan is required, further he must be not only involved, but ambiguous in his own proportions, a comic hero...Mailer is a figure of monumental disproportions and so serves willy-nilly as the bridge...into the crazy house, the crazy mansion...Once History inhabits a crazy house, egotism may be the last tool left to History."

Despite his overt and unashamed egotism, Mailer also paints himself as a clown in a vaudeville or burlesque show.

Running late for his speech, he can't find the lights in the venue toilet and accidentally urinates on the floor, which event he builds into an extended impromptu metaphor in his speech a few minutes later. Inevitably, he both takes a piss and takes the piss.

The sense of humour doesn't quite balance the egotism, but at least it broadens his rhetorical palette.

The Novel as History

Part II dispenses with this artifice. However, it also quotes liberally from other contemporary accounts of the March on the Pentagon, illustrating the point that, if they had formed the factual basis of History, it would have been erroneous:

"...the mass media which surrounded the March on the Pentagon created a forest of inaccuracy which would blind the efforts of any historian; our novel has provided us with the possibility, no, even the instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of light a labor of lens-grinding has produced."

In this light, Part I proves to be an equally valid contribution to History, even if it's a subjective account of what went on in the mind of a minor protagonist:

"His history of the Pentagon...insisted on becoming a history of himself over four days, and therefore was history in the costume of a novel."

The two parts are therefore equally contributions towards a History that might be derived from an aggregation of different perspectives.

Stormin' Norman

Mailer's favourite stance on any issue (moral, political or otherwise) is adversary or contrarian:

"The clue to discovery was not in the substance of one's idea, but in what was learned from the style of one's attack (which was one reason Mailer's style changed for every project)."

However, in pursuit of a "theatre of ideas", he does give ample airtime to his adversaries, and his accounts of their views are often sufficiently fair to allow you to embrace their views in preference to his.

His own views might not always be reliable or persuasive. However, at least he tells you both sides of the story, unlike much contemporary journalism or historical analysis, which frequently contains an unacknowledged but transparent bias.

Moral Action, Not Just Calculus

Until the March, Mailer was content to express his political opposition to the Vietnam War and the social and political culture that generated it, by way of his writing.

The March presented to him both an opportunity and a challenge to go beyond his writing and actually participate in political action. The Novelist became a Participant, as well as a Protagonist in his metafiction.

There comes a time when a moral calculus might not be enough. If you genuinely care about your subject matter, sooner or later it has to be translated into moral or political action on an individual and/or group level.

No matter how small his contribution to the March (he was one of the first ten to be arrested and jailed), he contributed to a tangible, if symbolic, political action.

This action was significant in its own right, quite apart from his documentation of it in novel form.

Unlike some current moral commentators, he was not content simply to describe the predicament of people who might be seen as victims, he sought to do something political about it.

Morality is not just about thinking, it's also about action.

A writer who fails to acknowledge this risks entrapment in the world of art for art's sake. This is not to denigrate the pure artist, only to caution against hagiography of the inactive.

The Theatre of Ideas

Mailer's own politics were difficult to define at most points in his career.

In 1967, if not the whole time, they were in a state of flux and transition.

At no point did he ever really throw his hat in with one Weltanschauung. He remained individualistic, to the point of egotism.

However, the March highlighted the fact that he found himself sandwiched between two adversaries.

The first was the Old Left, the second the New Left.

To some extent, the March was a unique rainbow coalition of the two (plus Mailer, to the extent that he stood outside both camps), and these are genuine rainbow stories. However, the two movements coexisted like two aspects of a dialectic, that would both preserve the old and give rise to something new.

The Old Left

Whatever its goals, the Old Left represented rationality and logic. Mailer refers to its adherence to the "sound-as-brickwork logic of the next step in some hard new Left program". To the extent that it was Marxist, it belonged to the tradition of Scientific Socialism.

However, the excesses of Soviet Communism had undermined both Socialism and confidence in its rationalism. In its Totalitarian manifestation, it was more oppressive than Capitalism. Understandably, the children of the Old Left were seeking an alternative.

Mailer had been on the Board of the Socialist magazine, "Dissent", before finding that he too had moved away from the other members politically (he refers to himself as a "quondam Marxist"), despite remaining "fond" of them personally.

The New Left

The New Left was less dependent on a faith in rationality and logic. The Old Left logic was almost too dull and boring for the children of the New Left:

"The new generation believed in technology more than any before it, but the generation also believed in LSD, in witches, in tribal knowledge, in orgy, and revolution. It had no respect whatsoever for the unassailable logic of the next step: belief was reserved for the revelatory mystery of the happening where you did not know what was going to happen next..."

It adored Che Guevara and modelled its politics and political aesthetic on him. The primary goal was to embrace Revolution as a political strategy. However, Revolution had ceased to be a means to an end. It had become an end in its own right.

Nobody could know what would replace the current economic, social and political order, until the Revolution had succeeded and we saw how all of the cards had landed.

Spontaneity was the primary impulse: "Trust the authority of your senses...If it made you feel good, it was good." If it made you feel good, do it. There was no desire to subject the Revolution to rationality and logic and five year plans.

For the Old Left, this was infantile, dangerous and counterproductive. Why support such a movement if you couldn't tell whether it would simply replace one form of oppression with a reign of terror?

Mailer was more sympathetic to the vision of the New Left than was the Old Left. However, his analysis of the New Left agenda doesn't dig particularly deep, and as a result it suffers from its superficiality. In fairness, the New Left had only just formed and hadn't yet started to focus primarily on Identity Politics. Thus, it's difficult to say what it represented in 1967.

Nihilism and Authority

Mailer doesn't expressly use the "A word" (Anarchism) to describe the New Left. Its advocates are hippies. He often suggests that they believe in Nihilism, not in the sense that it might oppose chaos to order, just that they believe that something has to be torn down, before something can be (re)built in its place.

What the Nihilists and hippies oppose is "the Authority": "their radicalism was in their hate for the Authority". Mailer doesn't refer to it as the State. It seems to be broader than the institution of government. The Authority encompasses the military-industrial complex as well. Within the Capitalist system, there is a conspiracy of the State and Business. Society must conform or be oppressed.

Mailer discovers that he has some nuanced sympathy for these views. He sees in the March "a confirmation of the contests of his own life."

Equally, there are differences. Historically, his drug of choice has been speed (supplemented by whiskey, marijuana and seconal). The hippies' preference is LSD.

Mailer actually suspects that acid enhances the prospects of survival of the Authority, by destroying the minds of the next generation.

Totalitarian Acceleration

At times, Mailer's description of the plight of this generation seems to foreshadow Pynchon and De Lillo:

"The nightmare was in the echo of those trips which had fractured their sense of past and present...nature was a veil whose tissue had ben ripped by static, screams of jet motors, the highway grid of the suburbs, smog, defoliation, pollution of streams, overfertilisation of earth, anti-fertilisation of women, and the radiation of two decades of near blind atom busting..."

Still, Mailer was prepared to overlook this difference, on the basis that the Revolution might be a vital part of a twenty year war that, if won, would result in some economic, social and political alternatives that he was prepared to try out. If the hippies didn't last the distance, well, that was their bad luck.

On the other hand, "nothing was worse than a nihilism which failed to succeed - for totalitarianism would then be accelerated."

The Beast

Mailer's worldview is not restricted to a battle between the individual and the Authority (and its "oncoming totalitarianism").

He describes one of his personae as "the Beast". He doesn't elaborate on this concept in this work. However, it represents his animalistic nature, perhaps an irrational or non-rational Self that is opposed to the oppressiveness of society.

There is little discussion of Freud in the novel (apart from a veiled reference of Marcuse in terms of "the Freud-ridden embers of Marxism"). However, it's possible that the Beast is the Ego and potentially the Id, and that its adversary is the Super-Ego.

Sexuality and Guilt

Mailer raises these issues in the context of his discussion of sex (a subject upon which his ideas now seem to be the most perverse).

Mailer's adversary, Paul Goodman, believes that all forms of sexuality (including homosexuality and onanism) are equally valid. He strives for a choice of sexualities, none of which should be associated with guilt.

On the other hand, Mailer, despite his apparent support of libertarianism, advocates only one valid sexuality (heterosexuality):

"Mailer, with his neo-Victorianism, thought that if there was anything worse than homosexuality and masturbation, it was putting the two together."

He also regards guilt as a vital part of the pleasure derived from sexual activity.

If sex wasn't somehow sanctioned, he believes there would be no drama involved in sexual activity. It would become dull (the worst of all possible crimes). The prospect of guilt introduces an element of theatre and dramatic tension. Individuals need guilt and social sanction, so that they have something with which to do battle and win.

Great Balls of Defiance

Mailer's philosophy requires an adversary which it can defy.

He is not so much interested in harmony as the type of creativity that emerges from conflict. Without a dialectical opposition, there is no excitement, there is no life.

This is how he describes the symbolic battle between demonstrator and soldier:

"I will steal your elan, and your brawn, and the very animal of your charm, because I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence is such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit, I am stealing your balls."

Beauty and the Beast

Mailer's ideas descend further into idiosyncrasy when he addresses the role of women, particularly in the act of sex.

Mailer's philosophy is very male-oriented. Women are the object upon which the male subject acts. Sex is the vehicle for the expression of male dynamism and power. Women are mere passive vehicles or conduits for male self-expression. There is no sense of a personal or sexual relationship as mutual or other than an Hegelian Master/Servant relationship (in which the male is always the Master and the female is always the Servant).

Interestingly, men need to go on a journey to discover and realise their version of Mailer's Beast. Men are not born men or beasts. Paraphrasing Simone de Beauvoir, men become men or beasts. Men have to earn their beastliness:

"Nobody was born a man; you earned manhood provided you were good enough, bold enough."

Masculinity and sex are sporting activities, perhaps even blood sports. Just as professional sport puts men to the test, so does sex. Only women are just the playing field upon which the sport is played or acted out.

We Can Be Heroes

If Mailer wanted to portray modern or post-modern life as some sort of heroic encounter between the individual and the State or the Authority or the Big Other (or perhaps even Death itself), he effectively shot himself in the foot by his rampant sixties misogynist, homophobic machismo. As Mailer says of himself in the third person:

"He would have been admirable, except that he was an absolute egomaniac, a Beast - no recognition existed of the existence of anything beyond the range of his own reach."

Regardless, I think there is something to be salvaged from his writing in terms of his focus on dynamism and activism, if not necessarily the constant quest for dialectical opposition or conflict (as a proof of manhood).

Besides, the quality of his prose is consistently excellent, if you forgive him his penis obsession and his peculiar ideological bent.

A Private Mixture

For all his flaws, it's also possible that this work can now be read more fruitfully by later generations.

Ultimately, Mailer defines his political views as "a private mixture of Marxism, conservatism, nihilism, and large parts of existentialism."

This mix might not have made much sense at the time when people tended to occupy one camp or another, but not two or more. Many of these old differentiations don't resonate any longer. Now, it's possible that the inconsistencies between the different camps can potentially be reconciled into one comprehensible worldview or temperament, at least on an individual basis.

Whatever, it's refreshing to read a moral calculus and a primer for action that's comprehensive, well-written and less than 300 pages long.