The Mailer Discord/Discourse
Better a writer who confronts US racism objectionably than one who evades it "innocently"
Late last year I read Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities for the first time, and I was surprised—even unnerved—by how much it engrossed me. I was in college when I Am Charlotte Simmons came out, and after plodding through its excruciatingly cringe-y 650+ pages, I figured I had ample reason never to test the waters of a Wolfe novel ever again.
I confess that the only reason I reneged on that promise to myself was that Audible includes Bonfire in its complementary selection of free audiobooks for subscribers. I wanted something long and immersive just then, and I planned to bail if it—like Simmons—was insufferable. But while many of Wolfe’s weirdest tics—for instance, his fixation not just on muscles but on musculature, on using anatomically precise terms while inhabiting the consciousnesses of men who would use far more general or truncated terms1—were present in Bonfire, there was so much going on that I could have cared less. (Actually, there was still a fair bit of eyerolling.)
In Bonfire there was such head-on interest in how power both amalgamates and disaggregates racial and class privileges (gender is more sporadically present), constantly intertwining whiteness and wealth, and then shoving them into a grater to demonstrate how the relativity of either—one can always be whiter as one can always be wealthier—makes each form of privilege dangerously unstable. Even more, Bonfire was bracingly frank, unsparing, in its portrait of white male fear and insecurity, and Wolfe approached this ugly image over and over again not as something unknown—as something in need of revelation or exposure—but as something so pervasive that society had just adapted to, making it literally unremarkable. White men’s fear of the physical strength and sexual potency of racial others, of the corrosiveness of women’s laughter, of the impotence felt in the face of other white men’s disdain—this composite terror was not something that anyone actively disavowed because, as long as white men held power, insecurity and entitlement were simply called competitiveness and authority. Only with the real threat of having to share power (not of losing it entirely) would white men’s psychic deficiencies come to seem like weaknesses or problems, and not like normal behavior.
Sharing power—specifically with African Americans—is precisely the phantom threat that looms over the white male characters in Bonfire, and it permits Wolfe to take a canted angle on the egos of three powerful, very vain, very entitled men. But the point that I want to make, and that I’ll extend to Norman Mailer in a moment, is that Wolfe is not orchestrating his plot to say something denunciatory about structural racism or even personal racism: there is no way, I think, to read Bonfire of the Vanities as a deliberately antiracist book. And yet, in a manner that is quite rare (certainly among white writers) Wolfe strides right past the usual dissembling maneuvers that keep racism as a subject either pinned to the margins of the novel or sublimated, permitted only to appear as a symbol or a subconscious presence, as something “playing in the dark,” as Toni Morrison put it.
Another way to say that is that Wolfe knows that New York City (and, as he shows us in other novels, the rest of the US) is a fundamentally multiethnic, multiracial society, and that any attempt to sidestep that fact in fiction—any attempt to write a plot that “just happens” not to have non-white characters—willfully violates plausibility and realism. Wolfe knows that a novel cannot take place in “white America” because there is no such thing—or rather, an author has to work very hard to create such a thing, has to stretch themselves very far to achieve it.
Even though his first novel is set in a segregated military,2 Norman Mailer thought along identical lines about fiction (as well as non-fiction) and race. Obliviousness to race and racism was for him an incoherent premise for any realistic depiction of US society. As a Jew, his angle of vision was different from Wolfe’s, but he also knew that the US was a multiethnic, multiracial nation—not a nation with “minorities.” Those are very different things, and Mailer knew that, too. Minorities can be hived off in their own region or their own neighborhood (i.e., segregated); they can be deported or their “minority culture” suppressed; they can assimilate and no longer exist as a minority. “Minorities” are a contingency within the necessity of the nation; their sudden disappearance would not change the nation in any meaningful way. To look at the US as a nation with minorities presupposes that it could become (or had been) a nation without minorities.
Mailer and Wolfe knew the fatuity of this presupposition; not all white writers do. Jess Row’s brilliant White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination makes that latter point abundantly clear. There are dozens of different ways that US writers have deceived themselves and their readers into believing that realist novels can take place in “white America.” There are even several novelists revered by white liberals (and by Barack Obama) who promulgate this idea. Their scrupulous avoidance of “incorporating” race as an element in their story (as if it isn’t already there, and they’re not just hiding it or pretending not to see it) sometimes passes as part of an artist’s freedom to shape their materials, much as they choose the time when the story takes place or the names of their characters. They are given the benefit of the doubt of “innocence” about race—it’s just not important to the story they want to tell.
I found many of Wolfe’s ideas about what Black people do, what Black people sound like, and what Black people want to be crude and hideous, derived from racist stereotypes and from his own fantasies about Black male potency. I would say much the same about Mailer. But there is so much more to be gained from reading them than from any US writer who writes from “white America.”
No one in history has thought as much about how their sternocleidomastoid muscles appear to others as Larry Kramer, the lawyer from Bonfire. (Speaking of which, Wolfe had to have been unconsciously stealing that name from the ACT UP activist, right? Bonfire was published the same year ACT UP was founded, but Kramer must have been frequently in the NYC news because of his earlier work in the Gay Men’s Health Crisis.)
There are, however, characters in The Naked and the Dead who would be classified today as “people of color”—these characters are Latinos and Native Americans.