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

Janet Malcolm opens her book, The Journalist and the Murderer,1 with a stringent criticism of journalistic practice: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." (3) Malcolm focuses on what she views as the inherent imbalance in the relationship between the subject of a piece of nonfiction and the writer. Malcolm argues that the subject-writer relationship is “morally indefensible” because the journalist must entice the subject to share their story and try to understand the subject’s point of view without ever having “the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intend[ing] to write a story of his own.” (3) The journalist holds all of the power in the subject-writer relationship: while a subject can try to influence the opinion of the journalist one way or another, once the interviews are concluded the journalist transforms the subject into a literary character, creating a portrayal of the subject (that may or may not be accurate) dependent entirely on the journalist’s “narratival” agenda. (163)

To investigate this moral dilemma of journalism, Malcolm uses the lawsuit between Jeffrey MacDonald—convicted of killing his wife and two daughters—and Joe McGinniss, author of a book about the crime entitled Fatal Vision. In this lawsuit, MacDonald accused McGinniss of fraud, claiming that McGinniss deceived him by pretending to believe his innocence, thus gaining his trust, even while believing that MacDonald had committed the crime and intending all along to write the book asserting MacDonald’s guilt. Malcolm’s primary interest is this sense of betrayal, which she believes to be a symptom of the inherent divide between the interests of the subject and the journalist: "What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject’s blind self-absorption and the journalist’s skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject’s account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists." (144) Malcolm argues that the validity of a piece of writing as journalism derives from the unbiased and critical approach of a writer towards the subject matter. This argument suggests that the initial distance between the subject and the journalist is what provides legitimacy to the writing.

How then is a reader to judge a piece of writing in which the journalist and the subject are one and the same? In Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night,2 this is the case. Subtitled “History as a Novel, The Novel as History,” The Armies of the Night could arguably be classified in either genre of history or the novel. Book One is written with many of the stylistic elements of the novel and Book Two adheres, for the most part, with the general conventions of historical writing. For this discussion, however, the term “journalism” is still applicable, as the entire text is a nonfiction account of a recent event—Book One was published in Harper’s Magazine as “The Steps of the Pentagon,” in March 1968, just five months after the events of the narrative; the entire text was published later that year.

Focusing on the 1968 March on the Pentagon, Book One details Norman Mailer’s own participation, and Book Two offers a historical account of the March.3 It seems safe to assume that at the conclusion of The Armies of the Night Mailer did not feel “the catastrophe suffered by the subject” (3) that Malcolm is concerned with; in other words, (as she described what she hoped would be the case for her interview with McGinniss,) “here, clearly, there would be none of the moral uneasiness that the naïve subject all but forces the journalist to endure as the price of his opportunity to once again point out the frailty of human nature.” (8) But if the subject and journalist are collapsed to the same person, removed also is the “tension between the subject’s blind self-absorption and the journalist’s skepticism,” the very thing which Malcolm argues distinguishes journalism from publicity.

In The Armies of the Night, Mailer uses third person narration to split his identity as character and narrator. While the book is autobiographical, Mailer writes about himself as if he is a separate individual, never using a first-person pronoun except in the context of a character’s thoughts or speech. Mailer creates a narrative persona that interjects between the character and the author Mailer. This division between character and narrator allows Mailer to maintain the journalistic “skepticism” towards a “subject’s blind self-absorption.” The portrayal of Mailer in The Armies of the Night is certainly not entirely flattering: the book depicts Mailer as “an egotist of the most startling misproportions,” (54) at turns rude, jealous, and narrow-minded. Frequently the narration contradicts the opinion of the character Mailer. The following passage describes Mailer’s approach to the Pentagon: "They were now passing fences with high barbed wire—cause to wonder if they were open pens to hold the masses soon to go under arrest—that was Mailer’s idea. (Invariably his sound perceptions were as quickly replaced by wild estimates; he should have divined that the government was not going to pen people in full view of others who were free[…])" (116)

Here the narrator directly assigns the thought that the barbed wire fences were in fact “open pens to hold the masses” to the character Mailer, and then immediately points out the error of this idea, implying that it is a “wild estimate” rather than a “sound perception.” The narrator disparages the character Mailer for not divining what the narration now states to be true, that “the government was not going to pen people in full view of others who were free.” This disparity of knowledge between the character and the narrator creates an appearance of the subject-journalist tension Malcolm views as the “vitality” of journalism.

Moments in the text such as this one, in which the disparity in knowledge is the difference between experience and hindsight, suggest that the subject-journalist distance Malcolm requires can perhaps be achieved through an act of recollection. In an article entitled “Style in Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night,” James E. Breslin argues that the main purpose of the narrator’s critiques of Mailer “is to allow him to make criticisms of himself before we can make them, and thus to ward them off.”4 Breslin’s objection to the narrator’s criticisms indicates that a temporal separation between subject and journalist is not sufficient proof of the necessary initial skepticism, because gestures towards that skepticism could be merely attempts to preemptively “ward...off” criticisms.

In The Armies of the Night, the distance between the character and the narrator is not purely temporal; Mailer emphasizes the distinct identities of the two by frequently following a common editorial convention of using a plural pronoun when writing actions that occur in the realm of narration. The first book begins with the sentence, “From the outset, let us bring you news of your protagonist.” (3) The “us” here is the voice of the narrator. This voice can directly address the reader—“you” and “your” refer to the reader. (This opening sentence also cleverly implicates the reader in the story immediately, because it suggests that Mailer was the reader’s protagonist even before the first sentence began.) While the literary character Mailer exists only in the world of the narration, this narrative voice exists in the world of reader.

Even at the moments of the text in which the narrative voice is most closely associated with Mailer himself, he maintains detachment through the use of third-person pronouns and abstract titles. "To write an intimate history of an event which places its focus on a central figure who is not central to the event, is to inspire immediate questions about the competence of the historian. Or, indeed, his honorable motive. The figure he has selected may be convenient to him rather than critical to the history. Such cynical remarks obviously suggest themselves in the choice of our particular protagonist. It could be said that for this historian, there is no other choice. While that might not be necessarily inaccurate, nonetheless a presentation of his good motives had best be offered now." (53) The first three sentences of this passage operate in the abstract; “the historian,” and the pronouns “his,” “he,” and “him” refer not to Mailer specifically but to any historian whose writing “places its focus on a central figure who is not central to the event.” In the fourth sentence, the narrational voice employs a possessive plural pronoun—“our”—that refers to the narrator identity. The referents of the last two sentences of the passage are less clear. “This historian” could identify the narrator, but the subsequent reference to “his good motives” suggests a figure separate from the narrator because it is written in the third person.

The narrator seems to refer to a figure distinct from itself but existing outside of the narrative. Later in the text, the narrator introduces this figure again: "So a modern novelist must apologize, even apologize profusely, for daring to leave his narrative, he must in fact absolve himself of the charge of employing a device, he must plead necessity.