Norman Mailer (1923-2007)
Gavin said:
Then why apologize for it with this harping on "trials and juries" as if that somehow ameliorated all the gross injustice of the death penalty, something both conceptually disgusting but also ABHORRENT in its administration through an incredibly unfair for-profit legal system?
Ah, yes, and with apologies for this ostensible derailment given my tangential/tendential mood tonight, but I blame the re-introduction of capital punishment in the US in 1976 largely on ... the now
late Norman Mailer! [You can see him in acting-out pseudo-macho action
in this clip from a ridiculous film he made in the 1970s. Send in fucking Hemmingway - and his favourite bull]
His overbearingly romanticised central theme of the untamed male libido/id being more virtuous and more deserving of our castrated 'empathy' than educational, mechanical, chemical, or state-sanctioned brutal attempts to regulate or control it - well, he laboured extensively on this topic, and, indeed, it was what motivated him to defend Gary Gilmore's "right" to be properly state killed/executed - rather than rot-away in prison - according to the then ignored - mid-1970s - criminal law, in order for Gary to become a "virtuous" male again, to become, or fully realise, the "real" man mystique through the ultimate masculine goal of authentic self-sacrifice. Not only flushed with success there, but it also later spurred Mailer, ironically, to lobby - successfully again - for the release of another killer "who shows writing ability", and who subsequently went on to kill yet again. Mailer, in later 'more mellowed' years of course, professed his "regrets", the short-sightedness - and the very real, destructive long-term consequences - of his own misguided actions back then. Presumably,
then, that's why he never once bothered to subsequently campaign for a reversal of those self-same destructive policies following his cathartic 'regrets.'
But Mailer became the archetypal living instantiation of a certain misplaced literary bias, manifested by what he became, as much for his past 'political interventions'. Of what he became versus what he could have been. Essentially, as he even admitted in his autobiography, he was a failed novelist, having mistakenly settled for the latter after abandoning a brilliant career as a superb and incisive political reporter/war correspondent [and his best writings to this day remain his political commentary, though his more recent contributions were - unlike a Chomsky, say - highly opinionated and poorly researched] to persevere with the anachronism, with the myth of writing The Great American Novel, which never happened and was never going to happen. Mailer seems manacled to a pre-1960s mindset, frantically oblivious or in denial about the social and cultural transformations that began in that decade: his autobiography is riddled with such tell-alls as "when I meet novelists and their wives". Eh, right, Norman. Where was Mailer hangin' out these past 40 years? But I suppose such as Toni Morrison, Nadime Gortimer, Anita Bruckner etc, many superior literary figures to Mailer, were just mere feminist fluff.
He's naked and he's dead, all right.