This thesis examines the American novelist Norman Mailer’s relationship to
the 20th century avant-garde. Mailer is often remembered as a pioneer in the new
documentary modes of subjective non-fiction of the sixties. Looking beyond the
decade’s themes of fact and fiction, this thesis opens up Mailer’s aesthetics in general to
other areas of historical and theoretical enquiry, primarily art history and psychoanalysis.
In doing so, it argues that Mailer’s work represents a thoroughgoing aesthetic and
political response to modernism in the arts, a response that in turn fuels a critical
opposition to postmodern aesthetics.
Two key ideas are explored here. The first is narcissism. In the sixties, Mailer
was an avatar of what Christopher Lasch called the “culture of narcissism”. The self-advertising
non-fiction was related to an emerging postmodern self-consciousness in
the novel. Yet the myth of Narcissus has a longer history in the story of modernist
aesthetics. Starting with the concept’s early articulation by Freudian psychoanalysis,
this thesis argues that narcissism was for Mailer central to human subjectivity in the
20th century. It was also a defining trait of technological modernity in the wake of the
atom bomb and the Holocaust. Mailer, then, wasn’t just concerned with the aesthetics
of narcissism: he was also deeply concerned with its ethics. Its logic is key to almost
every major theme of his work: technology, war, fascist charisma, sexuality, masculinity,
criminality, politics, art, media and fame. This thesis will also examine how narcissism
was related for Mailer to themes of trauma, violence, facing and recognition.
The second idea that informs this thesis is the theoretical question of “the real”.
A later generation of postmodernists thought that Mailer’s initially radical work was
excessively grounded in documentary and traditional literary realism. Yet while the
question of realism was central for Mailer, he approached this question from a modernist
standpoint. He identified with the modernist perspectivism of Picasso and his eclectic
“attacks on reality”, and brought this modernist humanism to a critical analysis of
postmodernism. The postwar (and ongoing) debates about postmodern and realism
in the novel connect in Mailer, I argue, to what Hal Foster calls the “return of the
real” in the 20th century avant-garde. This thesis also links Mailer to psychoanalytical
views on trauma and violence; anti-idealist philosophy in Bataille and Adorno; and later
postmodern art historical engagements with realism and simulation. Mailer’s view was
that a hunger for the real was an effect of a desensitising (post)modernity.
While the key decade is the sixties, the study begins in 1948 with Mailer’s first novel
The Naked and the Dead, and ends at the height of the postmodern eighties. Drawing on
a range of postmodern theory, this thesis argues that Mailer’s fiction sought to confront
postmodern reality without ceding to the absurdity of the postmodern novel. The
thesis also traces Mailer’s relationship to a range of contemporary art and visual culture,
including Pop Art (and Warhol in particular), and avant-garde and postmodern cinema.
This study also draws on a broad range of psychoanalytical, feminist and cultural theory
to explore Mailer’s often troubled relationship to narcissism, masculinity and sexuality.
The thesis engages a complex history of feminist perspectives on Mailer, and argues that
while feminist critique remains necessary for a reading of his work, it is not sufficient to
account for his restless exploration of masculinity as a subject. In chapter 7, the thesis
also discusses Mailer’s much-criticised romantic fascination with black culture in the
context of postcolonial politics
