This chapter explores hybridity by exploring the figure of the Minotaur in the context of a number of similar ancient creatures, such as the centaurs and satyrs, and of the god of shepherds, flocks, and the wild: Pan. It illustrates that the peculiar hybridity of the Minotaur and the ancient story explaining his genesis raise questions about the scope and limits of human intervention into the realm of nature. It shows that, rather than exploring the limits of the human in positive ways, the figure of the Minotaur manifests the monstrous consequences of human transgression.

In Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, Mailer attempts to make sense of the life of a painter he deemed one of his greatest influences. In Advertisements for Myself, he included a short piece called “An Eye on Picasso,” and had also planned to pen a biography of Picasso as early as 1962. Moreover, Mailer himself also dabbled in the visual arts, producing a number of sketches that invoke a Modernist aesthetic in their relative abstraction. This chapter traces these connections, and illuminates the role that Cubism played in determining the shape and dimension of Mailer’s literary canon during the second half of the twentieth century.

In the late 1940s, in the wake of the Liberation, it was the communist-aligned Fédération nationale des déportés et internés résistants et patriotes that took the lead in commemorating the heroes of the Resistance who had died in the camps. It did so in the name of anti-fascist solidarity, and survivors of many political persuasions rallied to its ranks. Under FNDIRP’s aegis, a rough dozen camp memorials were erected in a corner of Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the first of which, dedicated to Auschwitz victims, was dedicated in 1949.