Janet Malcolm and Norman Mailer: Navigating Author, Narrator, and Subject

Because McGinniss was writing nonfiction, he could not directly attribute anything to MacDonald which had not occurred. McGinniss displaces the work of characterization from his own voice onto these inclusions, effectively saying, “MacDonald is a pathological narcissist. This is what pathological narcissists are like,” and therefore the reader concludes that is what MacDonald is like. Malcolm argues that McGinniss fails in this endeavor to show that “MacDonald was the kind of person who could have committed the crimes,” because he does not successfully prove that MacDonald was a narcissist or psychopath, and thus the displaced characterization fails to impact his portrayal of MacDonald.

The characterization of Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night is often displaced as well, but because the character and the source of the characterization are the same—both are Norman Mailer—this displacement succeeds where McGinniss’, according to Malcolm, failed. At several points in the book, long descriptive sentences form what seem to be the stream-of-consciousness interior thoughts of the character, but are actually ruminations provided by the narrator: "If the novelist had never heard of Hell’s Angels or motorcycle gangs, he would still have predicted, no, rather invented motorcycle orgies, because the orgy and technology seemed to come together in the sound of 1200 cc’s on two wheels, that exacerbation of flesh, torsion of lust, rhythm in the pistons, stink of gasoline, yeah, oil as the last excrement of putrefactions buried a million years in Mother Earth, yes indeed, that funky redolence of gasoline was not derived from nothing, no, doubtless it was the stench of the river Styx (a punning metaphor appropriate to John Updike no doubt) but Mailer, weak in Greek, had nonetheless some passing cloudy unresolved image now of man as Charon on that river of gasoline Styx wandering between earth and the holy mills of the machine." (82)

The sentence is structured such that the description of the motorcycles seems to be the thoughts of Mailer the character: this is what “he would still have predicted, no, rather invented,” even if he “had never heard of Hell’s Angels or motorcycle gangs.” This endows the character Mailer with an apparent accuracy and depth of perception, as the passage claims that he would have perceived the reality of motorcycle orgies without knowing anything about their existence. But of course, Mailer had heard of Hell’s Angels and motorcycle gangs, and so this tangent is not an instinctual impression, but an informed reaction; the hypothetical posed by the narrator is what charges the description with a sense of inevitability.

At the end of this passage, Mailer the character perceives only dimly what Mailer the narrator presents explicitly: “no, doubtless it was the stench of the river Styx...but Mailer, weak in Greek, had nonetheless some passing cloudy unresolved image now of man as Charon on that river of gasoline Styx wandering between earth and the holy mills of the machine.” The narrator first claims that “doubtless it was the stench of the river Styx,” and then the character Mailer vaguely perceives this. The narrator has a clearer interpretation of the situation than the character. But the phrases describing the motorcycles, including the phrase, “no, doubtless it was the stench of the river Styx,” seem to be internal thoughts—the sensory reaction of the character Mailer to the motorcycles—and not insight from the narrator gained in retrospect.

Because of the connection between the narrative persona and actual Mailer, passages such as this endow the character Mailer with strong insight or perception, because as readers we are aware that as the narrator says Mailer had “some passing cloudy unresolved image” of something that the narrator describes specifically, that description is Mailer himself perceiving that image clearly. Mailer may be “weak in Greek,” but the narrator nonetheless successfully makes the allusion to classical Greek literature, and in the process acknowledges John Updike’s novel The Centaur; therefore we know that the actual Mailer made this association between the motorcycles, Updike, and the classics. Knowing that the author is Mailer, the ultimate impression for the reader is that the character Mailer possesses the same wisdom as the narrator.

Like Clark Kent and Superman, the journalistic “I” will always be, in some sense, an extension of the author. However much this narrative persona is a created character, any knowledge that the narrator possesses, so too must the author; an observation made by the narrator is made by the author, ironically or seriously; the narrative “I” is inescapably derivative of the author. Malcolm, in arguing that the journalistic “I” is connected to the author only tenuously, does not suggest that they bear no relation to one another, but rather highlights the danger of requiring one to reflect the other precisely. This requirement, she argues, would undermine the entire journalistic process. In The Armies of the Night, Mailer invents a narrative persona that both separates the subject and author, and navigates that divide by utilizing the persistent connection between narrator, author, and in this case character, to replicate characterization and display an awareness of these multiple identities within the text.

---

1.) Janet Malcom, The Journalist and the Murderer (New York: Random House, Inc., 1990).

2.) Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (New York: Plume, 1994).

4.) Breslin, James E.  The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 8, American Literature Special Number (1978), pp. 157-170