The Castle in the Forest
by Norman Mailer
Random House
Theologian is not a term usually associated with Norman Kingsley Mailer.
Like many postwar radicals, Mailer grew up in the shade of Sartre, Freud and Marx. Absorbing and participating in the midcentury existentialism he often made more of an ass than an angel of himself. He was voracious. Through the decades he prowled and pontificated in public, in print, and on film through presidential debates, the moon landing, cold war paranoia, Hollywood, Kennedy conspiracies, the CIA, Egyptology, Henry Miller, Marilyn Monroe, Muhammed Ali, the trial and execution of Gary Gilmore, feminism, the moon landing and an alternate narration of the New Testament. Amid the mess came two well-deserved Pulitzers (in both fiction and nonfiction!) and roughly six powerful and lasting tomes. With the masterpieces, of course, came much drek and stupidity. All in all not bad for a scribbler who, riding the wave of his radical chic, once said that the only ambition he had was "to forge a revolution in the consciousness of our times."
In the process — almost in spite of it — he made his own religion. It goes a little something like this: God and the Devil do in fact exist, influence the world, and are vying for control of human possibilities. For Mailer, they are existential beings, which means they are limited and incomplete entities who are each trying the best they can to influence the imagination and material progression of mankind. Each force also contains elements of the other. Emanations from either party can manifest themselves in nature or technology, love or violence, Jesus or Hitler. Whether or not mankind is brave enough to challenge and transform these celestial institutions is the big question. God or the Devil could appear in a glass of wine, an election, a meal or a transcendent orgasm. What matters most is whose free will is tipping the cup. No soul is ever sure if their moments of rapture are heaven sent or infernal to the core. Call it a paranoid theory of divinity.
The Castle in the Forest, Mailer's first real attempt at a major work in a decade, deals with a suitably evocative scenario. A fastidious, dissenting demon narrates from within the body of an SS man named Dieter. He is a kind of minor offical in the ranks of his master, referred to as "The Maestro"; in other words, a celestial CIA buearocrat. His task is to see if he can make something of the psyches of his "clients". In this case, it involves the family romance of an Austrian customs agent named Alois Hitler, his mistresses, his wife and his children. Mailer particularly focuses his attention on the emerging consciousness of the anxious, sickly son named Adolf.
What follows is Mailer's demonstration of his theory in practice. Outside influences beckon different members of the Hitler family. Incidents and desires mesh to manifest the supernatural. For example:
And then it went beyond such a moment, for she — the most angelic woman in Braunau — knew she was giving herself over to the Devil, yes, she knew he was there, there with Alois and herself, all three loose in the geyser that came out of him, and then out of her, now together, and I was there with them, I was the third presence ... and indeed, I knew the moment when creation occurred. Even as the Angel Gabriel served Jehovah on one momentous night in Nazareth, so too was I there with the Evil One at the conception on this July night nine months and ten days before Adolf Hitler would be born, on April 20, 1889. Yes, I was there, an officer of rank in the finest Intelligence service that has ever existed.
This can sound alternately intriguing or ridiculous, depending on your philosophical bent. It's like that with Mailer: what makes him wise also makes him a fool. There's a great anecdote in his massive compilation The Time of Our Time in which he earnestly pours out his Kierkegaardian metaphysics to Jimmy Carter, progressively weirding out the future president with successively complex theories on God, the Devil, technology and the soul of the Republic. For all of Mailer's existential vigor, he gets a "well, that sure sounds neat" from the mild-mannered teacher of Sunday School.
The Castle in the Forest is shaped more like an argument than a novel, as some critics have pointed out. What saves his tale from mere sermonizing is that, for the majority of his narrative, Mailer keeps the plot humming and the ruminations colored in eloquent shades of gray. One of the successes that holds this risky and sometimes belabored framework together is the rippling steel voice of Dieter as he reports on the small but growing pockets of discontent that begin to grow with Adolf's slow ascent into early adolescence. It lures the reader in until the unfolding of the story proves itself — almost — not as a plausible explanation but as a meditation on the knife edge of eventual apocalypse.
 |
|
|
Every great novel ultimately resists ideology. The aesthetic effect burns through whatever program the author might have in mind, surpassing it, and hovers on a deeper, more difficult, spiritual silence that the reader senses and goes back to for years to come. This is where Mailer has always run into trouble and this work is no exception: he has always faltered when trying to tell what he needs to show. This is where the story starts to break down. It's not terribly necessary to read that Hitler's mother toilet trains him vigorously, rubbing his anus until it "gleams like an opal". It's especially bad when the reader gets the sensation that the author believes in the assessment of one's spiritual character by the quality of one's turds. It's a nice idea as far it goes but "For Christ's sake," the reader wants to shout, "lay off the ultra-Freudianism." Sometimes a shit is just a shit. This sort of interlude (and it's not the only one) weighs down the magic metaphor of the story and trades enchantment for lecture.
Mailer has made what will likely be his last work into an eloquent, haunting, spare, and ultimately flawed remnant of magic. It's not the first time someone has argued Hitler from any ideological perspective, and it won't be the last. Mailer does not convince the reader that his version of Hitler is correct. What he does do is create a challenge from a fading radical to the rationalists and fundamentalists of our day. Spritual striving is not a remnant of an earlier, simpler time and it is not the property of the wild-eyed and provincial. Mailer is, true to form, challenging orthodoxies across the board, but he is also offering only a noble failure of an alternative. After this, it's not assured by any stretch that there will be many more.
— Matt Hanson (junglegroove@gmail.com)
