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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Norman mailer observed several years ago that American Protestantism, with the exception of Tillich and other Protestant existentialists, had become “oriented to the machine, and lukewarm in its enthusiasm for such notions as heaven, hell and the soul.” The religious tradition of the West had been preoccupied with the soul and had delineated its progress from earth to heaven and its struggling movement between darkness and light, Satan and God, as part of a cosmic and apocalyptic drama. Although Roman Catholicism had remained somewhat more concerned than Protestantism with such conceptions, argued Mailer, Christianity in general had left them behind and become tepid in the process.
1 “Catholic and Protestant” in “The Hip and the Square,” in Advertisements for Myself (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1959), p. 426Google Scholar.
2 Stern, Richard G., “Hip, Hell, and the Navigator: An Interview with Norman Mailer,” in Advertisements for Myself, p. 384Google Scholar.
3 Ibid., p. 382.
4 Of a Fire on the Moon (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p, 15Google Scholar. All references are to this edition and are included in the text.
5 The reviews of Mailer's style and ideas in Of a Fire on the Moon are often as diametrically opposed in their judgments as the polarities of Mailer's vision. Concludes one sardonic critic: “The reader must await another momentous event for any further personal information by Mailer about Mailer.” Another states that Fire on the Moon is a superb, beautiful, and profound book that “might well remain unequaled.” DeMott, Benjamin, in a thoughtful consideration of the work in Saturday Review, 01 16, 1971, pp. 25–27, 57–58Google Scholar, argues that Fire on the Moon “does matter; this much lies beyond question.” There is nothing trivial or marginal, he states, in Mailer's accomplishment. Despite its flaws, the work is “a stunning image of human energy and purposefulness,” and “at those moments when [it] rises to the level of its highest aspirations, it is itself an act of revelation—the only verbal deed to this moment that begins to be worthy of the dream and the reality it celebrates.”
6 Mailer's difficulty in defining the astronauts as “heroic” stems in part from their apparently technological and machine-like natures. As individuals, they insist that they are representatives of a “collective will.” Indeed, Armstrong, on being asked to admit that his endeavor was equal in magnitude to Columbus' adventure, seems to Mailer virtually to reply, “If not me, another,” and to assert that “there had been only one Columbus—there were ten astronauts at least who could do the job, and hundreds of men to back them up” (p. 38). Finally, however, the astronauts are not machines; of their courage as individuals Mailer has no doubts and for it he has only admiration. His more profound difficulty with their heroism has its origin in their necessarily persistent faith that the universe is benign and that the emptiness of space will conceal no malevolence. Given this inevitable conviction, their “resolute avoidance of a heroic posture” follows logically; the astronauts seem set on demonstrating that “heroism's previous relation to romance had been highly improper—it was technology and the absence of emotion which were the only fit mates for the brave” (p. 108). For “the astronauts, brave men, proceeded on the paradoxical principle that fear once deposed by knowledge would make bravery redundant. It was … the complacent assumption that the universe was no majestic mansion of architectonics out there between evil and nobility, or strife on a darkling plain, but rather an ultimately benign field of investigation” (p. 109) that leaves Mailer most outraged.
7 Stern, , op. cit., pp. 380–381Google Scholar.
8 Ibid., p. 381.
9 Ibid., esp. p. 376 and pp. 380–384. To say that Mailer “believes thoroughly in the vision” is not to say that Fire on the Moon is without its doubts and ironies—indeed, Mailer argues that he “preferred” this vision to a vision of absurdity or to no vision at all. Nonetheless, when he states that “his sense of irony once aroused, his sense of apocalypse could never be far behind” and that he is “quick to hunt for reason in absurdity” (p. 150), he suggests that irony is an inevitable part, but never even nearly the whole, of his vision and work. Like Ishmael, his awareness of his—and man's—limitations in trying to find meaning in an overwhelming phenomenon often leads to ironies of self-deprecation. But, again like Moby-Dick, Fire on the Moon is an extremely serious work whose heightened language and meaning are not ultimately ironic. The use of irony in each work never dominates the genuine seriousness and conviction of its tone or its view of man's experience.
10 Mailer, writes: “Nobody could be certain whether light was composed of little pellets, or traveled like sound in a wave, or was both. Both!” (pp. 165–166)Google Scholar. His impatience with such a synthesis, whether scientific, political, or moral, stems from the glibness with which it often may be advanced and the ease with which it disposes of mystery (“When it came to ultimate scientific knowledge we were no further along than the primitive who thought light came from God. Perhaps it did. No physicist could begin to prove it didn't. So we didn't even know what a flame was” [p. 166]). Given his own view of man as ultimately “twin-souled”—a creature of good and evil rather than of one exclusively —his quarrel is not with the recognition of complexity but with the overly facile way in which x is equated with y or in which x and y combine to form a bland substance in which neither is seen as really existing.
11 In light of the preoccupation of American literature with the questions of defining reality, of the dream, and of wedding, in Hawthorne's words, the “actual” and the “imaginary,” it is significant and appropriate that Mailer builds his theory of the “psychology of astronauts” on the “fact” of Armstrong's dream (p. 48). The “pearls of one's legends were not often founded on real grains of sand” (p. 45). But here, Armstrong's dream, itself a fact, becomes the foundation for the attempt to unite the incongruous elements of an unimaginable yet factual journey. Mailer's descriptions of technology, like Melville's descriptions of cetology, delineate facts; and in each case, these “facts” become incredible, staggering, and dream-like. Finally, they become not only symbolic but inseparable from the “factual dream” of the journey, and, transformed by the imagination, part of the union of the imaginary and the actual that comprises each work.
12 These “profound and accelerating opposites” characterize the century and the voyage in such a way as to make them inseparable. In their apocalyptic contradictions, the times, the journey, and the astronauts are as one: “The century would seek to dominate nature as it had never been dominated, would attack the idea of war, poverty and natural catastrophe as never before. The century would create death, devastation and pollution as never before. Yet the century was now attached to the idea that man must take his conception of life out to the stars. It was the most soul-destroying and apocalyptic of centuries. So in their turn the astronauts had personalities of unequaled banality and apocalyptic dignity. So they suggested in their contradictions the power of the century to live with its own incredible contradictions and yet release some of the untold energies of the earth. A century devoted to the rationality of technique was also a century so irrational as to open in every mind the real possibility of global destruction. It was the first century in history which presented to sane and sober minds the fair chance that the century might not reach the end of its span. It was a world half convinced of the future death of our species yet half aroused by the apocalyptic notion that an exceptional future still lay before us. So it was a century which moved with the most magnificent display of power into directions it could not comprehend. The itch was to accelerate—the metaphysical direction unknown” (pp. 47–48).
13 In the moments before the landing of the Eagle, states Mailer in retrospect, “one got ready for the climax of the greatest week since Christ was born” (p. 111). His allusion to the birth of Christ at this point needs to be seen in the light of his earlier response to a statement of Braun, Wernher Von: “He had declared that reaching the moon would be the greatest event in history since aquatic life had moved up onto land, and that was a remark! for it passed without pause over the birth and death of Christ” (p. 79)Google Scholar. Here, the President's exultant remark immediately precedes a chaplain's prayer of thanksgiving to God the Father that concludes “in the name of the Lord.” If the generally religious nature of the response to the astronauts' safe return—or deliverance— is obvious, Mailer's previous juxtaposition of his own remark and Von Braun's (despite Von Braun's ostensibly Christian belief as shown in the same interview in which his “aquatic life” comment occurred) suggests the difficulty of defining its more particular religious meaning for an America at once pluralistic, proud of its “new creation,” and professedly humble before its God.
14 Contrast to Mailer's interpretation of the moon rock as sign and symbol Mircea Eliade's description of the prevailing modern view of the world and experience: “The cosmos has become opaque, inert, mute; it transmits no message, it holds no cipher … the world is no longer felt as the work of God.” The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Trask, Willard R. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959), p. 17Google Scholar.
15 Cf. pp. 150–151: “If God finally was the embodiment of a vision which might cease to exist in the hostilities of the larger universe, a vision which indeed might be obliged to prevail or would certainly cease to exist, then it was legitimate to see all of human history as a cradle which had nurtured a baby which had now taken its first step.” See also pp. 111–113.
16 Mailer's, insistence that “anyone [can] lose his soul” (p. 140)Google Scholar and his continual awareness of death—indeed, his work shares with the traditional literature of imagined moon voyages a sense of the voyage as a journey into and beyond death and a confrontation with the afterlife (see esp. p. 35 and pp. 108–109)—give his apprehension of life as a religious drama a striking immediacy and intensity. “What I would hope to do with my work,” he has stated, “is intensify a consciousness that the core of life cannot be cheated. Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit. … the choice is not to live a little more or to not live a little more; it is to live a little more or to die a little more.” Stern, , op. cit., p. 385Google Scholar. Again, the either/or nature of the drama is apparent.
17 Mailer uses the explicit image and idea of the “navigator” throughout Fire on the Moon. It is associated at once with man's conscious sense of purpose, with his unconscious, and with God's design in the universe. Cf. Mailer's concluding statement in “Hip, Hell, and the Navigator”: “the unconscious … has an enormous teleological sense … It is with this thing that [we] move, that [we] grope forward—this navigator at the seat of [our] being” (p. 386).
18 “The End of the World,” in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 239Google Scholar.