The Spooky Art

by Norman Mailer

  I may not be a good intellectual, but my avocation is, nonetheless, to create intellections. I put them on like adhesive plasters. In the case of Gary Gilmore, however, I had to pull them off. As I explored deeper into what Gilmore’s nature might be, I decided that every concept I had about him was inadequate. So I wanted the reader of The Executioner’s Song to confront the true complexity of one human. That state of perception will always arise by studying any person close enough. That he was a murderer made my task simpler, because we are all fascinated by killers. But any person studied in depth will prove fascinating. It is certainly the yeast in any good marriage. Take any soul alive, and he or she can prove exceptional provided you get to know him or her well enough. Of course, if we are dealing with a sad case, the exceptional element is more likely to be found in the canyons of their horrendous bad luck or in the contortions of an ongoing cowardice. Or both. Bad luck feeds fear; the obverse may be equally true.

  ATTACKS ON REALITY

  Readers often have a problem when an author mixes real and fictional characters. I’ve never been bothered by that. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all fiction. Let’s say for the purpose of argument there are a thousand large and small details necessary for a particular historian to capture a given moment in time—Napoleon’s return from Elba or the rise of Robespierre. Whatever is chosen, the historian has to decide which of those details are most relevant. He can’t use them all. More important, he can’t obtain them all. Let’s say he selects a few hundred pieces of information that adhere to his various assumptions on what probably happened within the event. These pieces of detail are usually called facts.

  Should the novelist come in, also ready to write about the same happening, he or she is not nearly as good, doubtless, at research and comes up with only forty or fifty details that seem vital. Nonetheless, I would argue that the historian and the novelist are both engaged in writing fiction. The difference is that the historian uses more facts, although they can never be numerous enough to enclose the reality. Moreover, the historian usually writes in a more pedestrian style. But there they are both doing fiction. The real point is that each, the novelist and the historian, is making an attack on the possible nature of reality. Such attacks are the fundamental element in good fiction whether the mode of assault is history or the novel.

  I’ve always been drawn more toward realism than fantasy, because it seems to me realism is endlessly interesting and finally indeterminable. Realism is a species of fantasy that’s much more integrated and hard-core than fantasy itself. If you are ready to come to grips with the inevitable slipperiness of most available facts, you come to recognize that realism is not a direct approach to the truth so much as the most concentrated form of fantasy.

  Borges has a magical ability to put plots through metamorphoses. So, he poses the difficulty of comprehending reality. He shows us that every time we think our mind is approaching reality, we have only been writing a scenario to comprehend it. The scenario is the equivalent of a hypothesis that seems correct until new evidence subverts it. In the course of this subversion, however, we learn a good deal. The revised hypothesis, ideally, should be superior. Reading Borges, you live in this highly diverting and not always agreeable business of seeing elaborate hypotheses destroyed by the one event that is able to turn them inside out. Borges is always teaching us that it is not enough to live with Aquinas’s dictum, Trust the evidence of your senses. Rather, trust them until they are dramatically revealed as inadequate, tricked, or downright betrayed—then refine them. Borges is not the least bit easy.

  Paranoia? It is either the center of one’s sanity or the edge of one’s psychosis. You never know when it’s devoted to your safety or to your ultimate breakdown.

  There is a famous story that Shelley rushed up to a mother, seized her infant, held it aloft, and cried out: “Babe, speak! Reveal your immortal truth!” Like Plato—a great Platonist at that point, was Shelley—he believed that the education you begin to receive when young obfuscates the instinctive knowledge with which you’re born. Then you spend the rest of your life trying to unmake that education.

  Well, I too am able to believe we’re born with a profound appreciation of the universe and do lose it in the first few years of our life (not to mention the first few weeks!) and then spend the rest of our time trying to gain it back. By the time we are six, the school system makes certain we lose it. I don’t think this is so awful. It is rather in the nature of things. It was intended that way. We’re supposed to lose it and regain it. I think it is impossible to conceive of any real achievements in knowledge without that fall. Because if knowledge is something we receive merely by opening ourselves to it, well—in the West, we can’t conceive of that. Most of us find something a hint repellent about Hindu philosophy. It’s the idea that you receive wisdom without a Faustian effort. We react against the assumption that the more you give yourself to the universe, and the more passive, therefore, you become, the nearer you will be to the secrets of existence. This thought is, of course, antipathetic to the Western mind. We feel you only get to the kernel of real secrets by smashing the shell. That’s the way we want it. It’s what we were built to do. If this doesn’t have something to do with novel-writing, then I don’t know what this book is about.

  The twentieth-century artist who conceivably had the most influence on my work was not a writer but Picasso. He kept changing the nature of his attack on reality. It’s as if he felt there is a reality to be found out there but it’s not a graspable object like a rock. Rather, it is a creature who keeps changing shape. And if I, Picasso, have been trying to delineate this creature by means of a particular aesthetic style and have come only this far, then I am going to look for another style altogether. And off Picasso goes into a new mode of attack on reality. It’s as if you have to work your way up the north face of the mountain, come back and do the south face, the southwest face, so forth.

  In line with Picasso, what I find most interesting in writing at this point is to keep making a new attack on the nature of reality. It’s as if reality has some subtle desire to protect itself. If we keep pushing forward in the same direction, reality is able to handle us or evade us and may even do it in the way organisms become resistant to various antibiotics and pesticides.

  We tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of life. Narrative is reassuring. There are days when life is so absurd, it’s crippling—nothing makes sense, but stories bring order to the absurdity. Relief is provided by the narrative’s beginning, middle, and end. Without an end, you have an obsession, a constant circling around a fact or situation that cannot be put in place. The danger, therefore, in recognizing the insubstantiality of fact is that one is all too ready to welcome the art of the absurd. That is one good reason why so many are obsessive (and endlessly boring) in their recitation of supposedly well-seated facts.

  SOCIAL VISION

  The great economists pondered the interchanges of human energy. They looked for those means and ways that such energy could be augmented institutionally or dissipated or even destroyed. In that sense, Das Kapital is a phenomenological novel, with commodities serving (and experiencing an extraordinarily vital life) as protagonists. The commodities gain and lose energy just as humans do in novels. Perhaps in future years we will read some magnificent writer, probably not yet born, who will transcend the categories and write a work to marry those visions of society that have to do with how we offer human energy to each other, and steal it from one another, develop it, divert it.

  Obviously, Freud brought off a revolution in our consciousness of the human psyche. But it may be wise to restrict his insights to the nineteenth century. I expect that his final importance in intellectual history will be that he gave us more insight into the underside of that century than anyone but Marx. Freud is the key to understanding how people put up with the psychic weight of the lives they led in the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s: locked up, terribly overstuffed, yet still existing with a considerable
amount of power, energy, and pressure. In those days the psyche was analogous to a plumbing system. People were accustomed to living under high pressure and finding ways, no matter how bizarre, to open the steam valve. That’s not what we have now. Today we know a world in which people not only act out many of their anxieties but work to find reassuring explanations of their conduct, which is often overtly contradictory rather than repressed.

  Marx, for vastly more complex reasons, is also not adequate any longer. First imperialism, then corporate capitalism, made their end runs around him. So I don’t try to create a bridge in my mind from Marx to Freud, not anymore. But when I wrote “The White Negro” back in the Fifties, I was ready to see that everything in society—from the largest institutions to private and intimate personal moments—might yet be connected as parts of a new and vast social vision. In a limited sense, I’m still trying. Of course, I grew up under the shadow of both men. I was nothing if not intellectually ambitious when I was young, and wanted to present a comprehensive vision of existence. By now I’ve come to realize that I have neither the intellectual discipline nor the scholarly retentiveness to begin to do anything of that sort. Still, it is important to connect up what one can. Until we understand how we are obliged to lead our lives in ways we don’t particularly enjoy (“The mass of men enter into social and productive relations independent of their will.”—Marx), until we understand more of those reasons why so many of us feel dead inside so much of the time, yes, until we recognize how much of that is not due solely to our lack of imagination or the grinding confines of a responsible life, but is also the product of vast institutional systems of greed, injustice, and manipulation that we are schooled to perceive as relatively benign manifestations, we have arrived nowhere. The only way I can tell something terrible is going on is that I feel a little duller than I ought to. Very often that’s at the end of a long chain, you might say, of social processes designed to keep us malleable, amenable, and short on such powerful emotions as outrage at injustice. In that sense, I still try to find the ultimate indictment against all that’s awful and, yes, evil in society—all the awfuls: plastic, high-rises, mall architecture, static, interruptions for commercials, making money out of money, and—certainly not least—the highly developed structures of injustice. They’re all there if one can find the grid on which to locate them. A devil’s grid.

  MORAL VISION

  Back in 1959, Ralph Ellison and I were out at the University of Iowa on a literary symposium gotten together by Esquire. We had a lively audience, and the show went on for several intense days. At the end, it seemed a little strange to me that we had really worked that hard, gotten into so many discussions with students and attendant academics, and even argued with each other as lively as hell. When it was over, there was even a bit of sadness. Something that had become just a bit exceptional was done. So I said to Ellison, “Why the hell do we do it? Why did we work so hard?” He said, “Man, we’re expendable.” I’ve always liked that remark.

  One’s work is just that—expendable. If any of my ideas can succeed in changing the mind of someone who’s more intelligent than myself, fine. If you advance a thought as far as you can and it’s overtaken and improved by someone who will argue on the opposite side, then in effect you have improved your adversary’s mind. We can, however, feel the confidence that someone will come along who will take your opponent’s improvement of your idea and lift it higher on your side. Democracy is the throbbing embodiment of the dialectic—thesis, antithesis, and synthesis ready to become the new thesis.

  You cannot have a great democracy without great writers. If great novels disappear, as they are in danger of doing, and our storytelling is co-opted by television and journalism, then I think we will be that much farther away from a free society. Novels that reinvigorate our view of the subtlety of moral judgments are essential to a democracy. Americans were affected for decades by The Grapes of Wrath. Some good Southerners even developed a sense of the tragic by reading Faulkner.

  I don’t like to say to myself, “I want to get this idea across.” Rather, I try to arouse a state of consciousness in the reader that will accommodate the material I am presenting. My hope is that my work will change their minds. Be it understood! I don’t want to change everybody’s mind in one direction—that’s equal to propaganda. Rather than move all my readers ten degrees to the left, I would be happier if I nudged some there while others were swinging to the right. My fundamental belief about a good society is that the cops get better and so do the crooks.

  I feel that the final purpose of art is to intensify—even, if necessary, to exacerbate—the moral consciousness of people. In particular, I think the novel at its best is the most moral of the art forms. You are exploring the interstices of human behavior—which is the first approach to religious experience for many of us, especially since the organized religions don’t begin to offer sufficient account of the terrible complexities of moral experience and its dark sibling, moral ambiguity. The wisest rule of thumb for the would-be moralist is: There are no answers. There are only questions.

  The logic of reincarnation, it seems to me, is that it may enable God to go back to certain projects, just as an artist sometimes wishes to improve his or her first attempt, work it further, go to the point where he can do better, or, if not, know at least that he has failed and can abandon a particular notion. Some human souls may represent some of the more poignant notions of God. You see, there’s an extraordinary beauty in the potential of most human relations if we’re willing to assume that under all the absurdities, the spleen, the waste, the brutality, there was, indeed, a blocked aesthetic conception.

  Speaking at the MacDowell Colony once, I found myself saying, “There is no reason to believe the novelist is not better equipped to deal with the possibilities of a mysterious and difficult situation than anyone else, since he or she is always trying to discover what the nature of reality might be. It’s as if the novelist is out there, sprung early, with something most people never contemplate—which is ‘How and what is the nature of this little reality before me?’ The novelist is the first to ask, ‘Do I love my wife? Does she love me? What is the nature of love? Do we love our child? How do we love? Would we die for our child? Or do we let the child die for us?’ The novelist has to deal with these questions because living with them is the only way to improve his or her brain. Without improving that brain, without refining the edge of one’s perception, it’s almost impossible to continue to work as a writer. Because if there is one fell rule in art, it is that uninspired repetition kills the soul. So the novelist is out there early with a particular necessity that may become the necessity of us all. It is to deal with life not as something given us as eternal and immutable but rather as half-worked, because it is our human destiny to enlarge what we were given, to forge (I might have said to clarify) a world which was always before us in a manner different from the way we had seen it the day before.”

  I’m right and I’m wrong so often that I have no interest in convincing others to think the way I do. I’m interested, rather, that we all get better at thinking. If a book is good enough, you cannot predict how your readers are going to react. You shouldn’t be able to. If it is that good, it is not manipulative, and everyone, therefore, can voyage off in a different direction.

  Yes, it is no ordinary human business to say you are going to write a novel. You are planning to create a world. This God-like presumption may be intoxicating, but it can never be comfortable. Nor should it be. To come up with a vision that can give us some notion of the Lord’s mind—that partakes of beauty. When we read Proust or Stendhal or Joyce, any, indeed, of the great novelists, Tolstoy, Mann, or Faulkner, or on occasion Hemingway, they do give us the idea that one special side of God’s mind is not alien to the style of their mind.

  I go back again and again to Dostoyevsky dying in despair because he could not write the novel about the great saint he envisioned.

  To us, now, it seems, “Why desp
air? Look at the great books you did write.” But Dostoyevsky, given his unique intuitions, may have sensed that Russia was heading toward a prodigious catastrophe that he could not quite name. Nonetheless, he felt he could help avert this oncoming disaster if he could create in his pages a saint who would be believable enough to the Russian people to inspire them.

  This is not as impossible a mission as it seems today. In Russia, in that time, a few novelists were revered like gods—or, if not a god, Tolstoy certainly was regarded by his readers as a major, virile, powerful saint. In turn, Dostoyevsky may have been looked upon as a mad genius, but absolutely a genius. It was taken for granted that you could learn more about life by reading their novels than from your own personal experience. The Russians paid just this exceptional attention to their novelists. So from Dostoyevsky’s point of view, if he could only make that marvelous saint in his mind come to life in a book, then he could help to save Russia. All right, slightly demented, as was so much of Dostoyevsky, but it was not wholly unbalanced. He had one chance in a hundred, one real chance in a hundred. That’s all a genius ever looks for—one live chance in that hundred. Geniuses, we do well to remind ourselves, are people who take those hundred-to-one shots because they see how strange is the luminescence in the flicker of the solitary candle.