Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art, Some Thoughts on Writing - Book Review

Literary Review, Summer, 2003 by Thomas E. Kennedy

New York: Random House, 2003.

An impoverished New York Times review of Norman Mailer's The Spooky Art (22 February 2003) focuses on the book's idiosyncrasies--which, admittedly, are well in evidence--and ignores the power of its substance. Despite its flaws, it is I think probably the best book I have ever read on writing. Perhaps the greatest works are inevitably flawed for they reach toward the unreachable in comparison to small works satisfied with small accomplishment.

Genius often seems to provide place amidst its lushness for crackpot ideas. I think of Hemingway's imaginary boxing matches with Turgenev and Maupassant, Stendahl, and Tolstoy. Or Karen Blixen's speculation that her syphilis was probably, on the whole, worth having suffered because it also brought her the title of baroness. In a similar box could fit some of Mr. Mailer's revelations and speculations here, most especially those about women, masturbation, and masculinity

The Times reviewer grants that The Spooky Art, "contains a number of sensible observations," but he seems not to notice the enormous power of what Mr. Mailer has to say about writing--about the writer's relationship with the unconscious, about primitive dread, about the narcissistic dread of the world outside oneself, about classical structure vs. the absurd, being vs. nothingness, the social novel vs. "the trip up the Amazon of the inner eye," the myth of objective reporting, America's apparent need to be deadened by its television and its politicians, about the rational mind's inability to comprehend the modern world.

Mr. Mailer has bracing advice for writers: "It's the life you can't escape that gives you the knowledge you need to grow as a writer." His meditations on the relationship between the conscious and unconscious in the act of writing are both awe-inspiring and energizing ("Suppose the unconscious has a root in the hereafter that our conscious mind does not. If so, it will have deeper notions about death than we do ... is on close, even familial, terms with that most elusive presence in the conscious mind--our soul. If that is the case, the unconscious can feel exploited by the push of the novelist to extract so much of his product from its resources.") This is a book on writing that goes far deeper than the pedestrian advice of most such volumes:

   The artist seeks to create a spell. Today, of course, the artist is
   no primitive man; he is all but completely insulated from the senses
   primitive man once had. By now, the artist usually acts as a
   mediator between magic and technology. But no matter how
   technologized he becomes, his central impulse is to create a spell
   equivalent to the spell a primitive felt when he passed a great oak
   and knew something deeper than his normal comprehension was reaching
   him. Perhaps the primitive felt close to what we feel when we see a
   great painting on a museum wall. We are near then to something we
   can't even call knowledge. It's larger, less definable, and
   certainly more resonant.

Without sinking into the morass, which in the 1980s called itself a debate on "moral fiction," he also addresses the question of fiction's moral role--most specifically with reference to Kierkegaard's suggestions that "at the moment we're feeling most saintly, we may in fact be evil. And that moment when we think we're most evil and finally corrupt, we might, by the startling judgments of God, be considered saintly. The value of this notion is that it strips us of the fundamental arrogance of assuming that at any given moment any of us has enough centrality ... (to) determine our own moral value ... That is why I love the novel ... the form best suited for developing our moral sensitivity--which is to say our depth of understanding rather than our rush to judgment."

He sees the novel as perhaps the only art form capable of saving America from the apocalypse of cannibals disguised as Christians plundering the country with lies for personal profit, "cannibals selling Christianity to Christians and because they despised the message and mocked at it in their own heart, they succeeded in selling ... an electronic nihilism ..." A notion that seems highly applicable to the stance of America at the moment of this writing--a wounded giant poised in crazed arrogance to shower yet another nation or two with flames and rockets while mouthing abstractions about God, patriotism, and democracy.

Mailer's conclusion seems to be that the novel has failed, that America has proved stronger than its novelists and their characters. "Literature has failed, the work was done by the movies, by television."

Yet he is not willing to concede after all: "... we are there to make sense of those concentrated if frozen fantasies we pretend to call facts. Someday, may it be, we will say, those old fantasies we used to call facts until we learned how to unpack them ... The beauty and the terror of creation is that it is not fixed, not absolute, not imperishable, but is existence itself and so may rise to more or decompose and/or explode into less. How much fear this arouses in us, and on rare splendid days, what exaltation."