Comments on: William Burroughs and Norman Mailer http://realitystudio.org A William S. Burroughs Community Mon, 21 May 2012 11:22:06 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 By: John Wilson http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/william-burroughs-and-norman-mailer/comment-page-1/#comment-87316 John Wilson Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:26:37 +0000 http://realitystudio.org/?page_id=1218#comment-87316 The comments here show an in-depth knowledge of various literary styles and influences are humbling. I would only add that--I felt Burroughs was on the whole more internal and ruminative than Mailer, who was more about the grand sociological treatise. As a result, Burroughs gave a more impressionistic psycholgical or "feeling" interpretation of institutions and events, whereas Mailer did the kind of essay thing that has become so tiresome with newspaper and magazine pieces and blogs--the amateur, or more appriately the BAD WRITER trying to describe the wide lens view or prognosticate the future by extrapolating the present. If you accept Updike's explanation of the novel as a device to help the reader feel less lonely, Burroughs' approach will of course have more lasting interest in literature than Mailer's, because Mailer's is more external and "surface" and more a thing of the moment. But you have to give Mailer his due, when he wrote as a journalist he was a GREAT journalist and he compelled you to turn the pages. The comments here show an in-depth knowledge of various literary styles and influences are humbling. I would only add that–I felt Burroughs was on the whole more internal and ruminative than Mailer, who was more about the grand sociological treatise. As a result, Burroughs gave a more impressionistic psycholgical or “feeling” interpretation of institutions and events, whereas Mailer did the kind of essay thing that has become so tiresome with newspaper and magazine pieces and blogs–the amateur, or more appriately the BAD WRITER trying to describe the wide lens view or prognosticate the future by extrapolating the present. If you accept Updike’s explanation of the novel as a device to help the reader feel less lonely, Burroughs’ approach will of course have more lasting interest in literature than Mailer’s, because Mailer’s is more external and “surface” and more a thing of the moment. But you have to give Mailer his due, when he wrote as a journalist he was a GREAT journalist and he compelled you to turn the pages.

]]> By: jed http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/william-burroughs-and-norman-mailer/comment-page-1/#comment-84327 jed Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:16:33 +0000 http://realitystudio.org/?page_id=1218#comment-84327 If you write it, I would love to read it and put it on RealityStudio. Sounds like the makings of a great essay. If you write it, I would love to read it and put it on RealityStudio. Sounds like the makings of a great essay.

]]> By: John http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/william-burroughs-and-norman-mailer/comment-page-1/#comment-84326 John Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:01:00 +0000 http://realitystudio.org/?page_id=1218#comment-84326 Cool, Jed. I appreciate you appreciating the posts. I was thinking of an essay comparing Mailer and Burroughs to the "Young Conservatives," Heidegger, Junger, and Gehlen. Mailer seems to be at his most fascistic when he goes Darwinian and claims that a woman's responsiblitiy is to bear a child that will benefit the race and when he advocates the individual divorcing himself from society through violence. Burroughs is at his most fascistic when he talks of eliminating women and reducing them to the function of bearing strong male children. His fetishization of gun technology isn't unlike that of the Futurists and his insistence that artists should be in charge sounds creepily like Wyndham Lewis and the rest of the WWII anti-democratic intelligentsia. His Eliotic negativism and relativism may have fascist implications as does Mailer's intutitionism. They both reject the Enlightenment philosphical edifice to some extent and it would be interesting to explore. I'll probably never write it. I always enjoy reading your essays. Cheers. Cool, Jed. I appreciate you appreciating the posts.

I was thinking of an essay comparing Mailer and Burroughs to the “Young Conservatives,” Heidegger, Junger, and Gehlen. Mailer seems to be at his most fascistic when he goes Darwinian and claims that a woman’s responsiblitiy is to bear a child that will benefit the race and when he advocates the individual divorcing himself from society through violence. Burroughs is at his most fascistic when he talks of eliminating women and reducing them to the function of bearing strong male children. His fetishization of gun technology isn’t unlike that of the Futurists and his insistence that artists should be in charge sounds creepily like Wyndham Lewis and the rest of the WWII anti-democratic intelligentsia. His Eliotic negativism and relativism may have fascist implications as does Mailer’s intutitionism. They both reject the Enlightenment philosphical edifice to some extent and it would be interesting to explore.
I’ll probably never write it. I always enjoy reading your essays. Cheers.

]]> By: jed http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/william-burroughs-and-norman-mailer/comment-page-1/#comment-84323 jed Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:23:26 +0000 http://realitystudio.org/?page_id=1218#comment-84323 John, BTW I am considering re-reading Why Are We In Vietnam and re-reading Faulkner's The Bear. I havent read both in over a decade. I have always felt WAWIV to be one of my favorite Mailer books. Again it has been years since I read it but I really enjoyed it then and looking back on it I think there was alot going on in that book that I missed. It seems to me many people dismiss that book which I think is mistake. Mailer may have been given the short hand throughout his career. I know Burroughs is not read as closely and deeply as he deserves. John,

BTW I am considering re-reading Why Are We In Vietnam and re-reading Faulkner’s The Bear. I havent read both in over a decade. I have always felt WAWIV to be one of my favorite Mailer books. Again it has been years since I read it but I really enjoyed it then and looking back on it I think there was alot going on in that book that I missed. It seems to me many people dismiss that book which I think is mistake. Mailer may have been given the short hand throughout his career. I know Burroughs is not read as closely and deeply as he deserves.

]]> By: jed http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/william-burroughs-and-norman-mailer/comment-page-1/#comment-84322 jed Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:11:06 +0000 http://realitystudio.org/?page_id=1218#comment-84322 John I really appreaciatge your comments on the Mailer piece. You have thought deeply about Mailer and you raise great points. I have no doubt overstated the case in places and the point that Mailer knew Ginsberg and Solomon in the early 50s and was not such a late player to the game is right on. I should also make clear that Burruoghs has his "conservative" side as well. Rob Johnson's book on Burroughs in Texas makes this clear and I suggest it in the end of the piece. I am exploring some paradoxes in Burroughs' heroin use right now that highlights this point. That post should be up in a week or so. I look forward to any comments you might have on that piece and any other pieces you have read. Again thanks so much for your comments; they were very informative and gave me much to mull over. John

I really appreaciatge your comments on the Mailer piece. You have thought deeply about Mailer and you raise great points. I have no doubt overstated the case in places and the point that Mailer knew Ginsberg and Solomon in the early 50s and was not such a late player to the game is right on.

I should also make clear that Burruoghs has his “conservative” side as well. Rob Johnson’s book on Burroughs in Texas makes this clear and I suggest it in the end of the piece.

I am exploring some paradoxes in Burroughs’ heroin use right now that highlights this point. That post should be up in a week or so.

I look forward to any comments you might have on that piece and any other pieces you have read.

Again thanks so much for your comments; they were very informative and gave me much to mull over.

]]> By: John http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/william-burroughs-and-norman-mailer/comment-page-1/#comment-84260 John Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:58:15 +0000 http://realitystudio.org/?page_id=1218#comment-84260 Please excuse the grammar and spelling on my posts. Note to self: do proofread your comments. Please excuse the grammar and spelling on my posts. Note to self: do proofread your comments.

]]> By: John http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/william-burroughs-and-norman-mailer/comment-page-1/#comment-84258 John Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:01:36 +0000 http://realitystudio.org/?page_id=1218#comment-84258 I like to expand a little a the comments I made earlier. The problem with comparing Mailer and Burroughs, I think, is that they are two different kinds of radicals. It was as much coincidental as opportunistic that Mailer took to the Beats. Stalinism had shown that generation the horrors of totalitarian communism, and the radical intellectuals of that time, most of them anyway, were turning toward some form another of radical individualism. The ego, the motor of the dialetic, was pushed to it's farthest extreme, the socially conditioned ego couldn't hold, or so they thought. It's no surprise then that Mailer turned to the Beats as possible progenitors of a cultural revolution. Mailer, was a Freudian Marxist while Burroughs was a radical individualist, who nonetheless believed is some sort of libertarian communism but tempered with a pessimism based on the brute facts of "biological materialism." Mailer, while very calculating about his career, took real chances. Look at "Barbary Shore." He knew arguing Russia represented state capitalism and the U.S. represented monoply capitalism, and really were two forms of the same phenomenon, wasn't going to be terrible popular. But he went ahead and he suffered from it. Mailer argues for a future insurrectionary career for the novel's protagonist as an individual against the state, and here I think he was anticipating much of what was to come with the Beats and the 60's. Here he was ahead of the game. As for the the "Quick and Expensive Comments" essay, he does dole out a bit more praise then you give him credit for. Broyard isn't the only one who recieves praise. He says Styron wrote the prettiest novel of his generation. He praises Jones and says "From Here to Eternity" was the best American novel since the war. He claims Capote was the most perfect writer of his generation. There's some light praise for Algren, who he respects for staying radical, and he commends Bourjaily's "The Violated." Myron Kaufman has more to say about the deadening of individuality in the American Jew than other write and saying Ellison is a good write is dull to say. When he criticizes these writer's I'm not sure it's pure egotism. He wants to push to be more competitive and more exploratory and more dangerous. In regards to quaranting Burroughs, it doesn't seem like that's the case. Comparing him to Genet makes perfect sense, as Genet was a major influence on Burroughs, although I'm not sure Mailer knew that, and they share many thematic and philosphical affinities. Genet and Celine would've made the only apt comparisons. The Sartre influence in regards to "The White Negro" may be overstated a bit. Sartre had a major influence on most everybody of that generation. Mailer took the basic idea of the criminal as existential figure and thew a spiral dialetic inspired by Goethe, some vitalistic ideas that owe much to Bergson, alot of Wilhelm Reich, and the beginnings of his pseudo-Manichean theology. It really seems a far cry from Sartre's phenomenological approach. When Mailer ran for mayor of New York, he wasn't proposing simply tweaking the system. He called for secession, the cutting up of New York into autonomous segments, some based on free love, hahah, the self-policing of blacks by blacks.. Surely this a anarchistic reordering of New York Burroughs could've approved of. Mailer, all similarities accounted for, was a just different. He traveled to the USSR with Boris Souvarine, his Marxist analyses for were some of his more interesting writings and his orientation was different in many ways from Burroughs. Burroughs was pessimistic about communism from the beginning. Burroughs's radicalism can be absorbed by the market system. Look at the Nike commercial. A real economic reordering of society from the bottom up is little harder to deradicalize. In the Manso biography, Ginsberg does refer to Norman's macho ideas as naive, but he also refers to him as a knight riding to the rescue. Burroughs that he was a real ally because of "The White Negro" and his support against censorshoip. Ginsbery and Solomon knew Mailer as early as 1951/1952. Mailer was in on his fairly early on. Mailer's conservatism, it seems to me, is usually a anti-rationalist naturalism. But he also seems to be arguing for endless individuation, in whatever permutation it took. In "The Metaphysics of the Belly," he argues for a positive scatology and claims that the grandeur of one's work comes from the artist's proximity to the "dirty ape" or id. Hardly puritan. Both Bloom and Poirier argues that sodomy in Mailer is dialectial and that it is simulataneously creative and decreative. Bloom argues that sodomy for Mailer is an antimonian act that reveals a true order behing the highly false one, and that it is preferable to normal sex for Mailer. Alot for the "conservatism" seems meant to ward off the dyspeptic "Brave New Worldism" of liberalism. For instance, he doesn't want sex to be divorced from guilty, he wants all the emotions brought to bear on it. Podhoretz commented that he thought Goodman, Norman O. Brown, and Mailer brought discipline to bear on the eruption of instinct that the Beats didn't. I tend to agree. I like to expand a little a the comments I made earlier. The problem with comparing Mailer and Burroughs, I think, is that they are two different kinds of radicals. It was as much coincidental as opportunistic that Mailer took to the Beats. Stalinism had shown that generation the horrors of totalitarian communism, and the radical intellectuals of that time, most of them anyway, were turning toward some form another of radical individualism. The ego, the motor of the dialetic, was pushed to it’s farthest extreme, the socially conditioned ego couldn’t hold, or so they thought. It’s no surprise then that Mailer turned to the Beats as possible progenitors of a cultural revolution. Mailer, was a Freudian Marxist while Burroughs was a radical individualist, who nonetheless believed is some sort of libertarian communism but tempered with a pessimism based on the brute facts of “biological materialism.”
Mailer, while very calculating about his career, took real chances. Look at “Barbary Shore.” He knew arguing Russia represented state capitalism and the U.S. represented monoply capitalism, and really were two forms of the same phenomenon, wasn’t going to be terrible popular. But he went ahead and he suffered from it. Mailer argues for a future insurrectionary career for the novel’s protagonist as an individual against the state, and here I think he was anticipating much of what was to come with the Beats and the 60′s. Here he was ahead of the game.
As for the the “Quick and Expensive Comments” essay, he does dole out a bit more praise then you give him credit for. Broyard isn’t the only one who recieves praise. He says Styron wrote the prettiest novel of his generation. He praises Jones and says “From Here to Eternity” was the best American novel since the war. He claims Capote was the most perfect writer of his generation. There’s some light praise for Algren, who he respects for staying radical, and he commends Bourjaily’s “The Violated.” Myron Kaufman has more to say about the deadening of individuality in the American Jew than other write and saying Ellison is a good write is dull to say. When he criticizes these writer’s I’m not sure it’s pure egotism. He wants to push to be more competitive and more exploratory and more dangerous.
In regards to quaranting Burroughs, it doesn’t seem like that’s the case. Comparing him to Genet makes perfect sense, as Genet was a major influence on Burroughs, although I’m not sure Mailer knew that, and they share many thematic and philosphical affinities. Genet and Celine would’ve made the only apt comparisons. The Sartre influence in regards to “The White Negro” may be overstated a bit. Sartre had a major influence on most everybody of that generation. Mailer took the basic idea of the criminal as existential figure and thew a spiral dialetic inspired by Goethe, some vitalistic ideas that owe much to Bergson, alot of Wilhelm Reich, and the beginnings of his pseudo-Manichean theology. It really seems a far cry from Sartre’s phenomenological approach.
When Mailer ran for mayor of New York, he wasn’t proposing simply tweaking the system. He called for secession, the cutting up of New York into autonomous segments, some based on free love, hahah, the self-policing of blacks by blacks.. Surely this a anarchistic reordering of New York Burroughs could’ve approved of. Mailer, all similarities accounted for, was a just different. He traveled to the USSR with Boris Souvarine, his Marxist analyses for were some of his more interesting writings and his orientation was different in many ways from Burroughs. Burroughs was pessimistic about communism from the beginning. Burroughs’s radicalism can be absorbed by the market system. Look at the Nike commercial. A real economic reordering of society from the bottom up is little harder to deradicalize.
In the Manso biography, Ginsberg does refer to Norman’s macho ideas as naive, but he also refers to him as a knight riding to the rescue. Burroughs that he was a real ally because of “The White Negro” and his support against censorshoip. Ginsbery and Solomon knew Mailer as early as 1951/1952. Mailer was in on his fairly early on.
Mailer’s conservatism, it seems to me, is usually a anti-rationalist naturalism. But he also seems to be arguing for endless individuation, in whatever permutation it took. In “The Metaphysics of the Belly,” he argues for a positive scatology and claims that the grandeur of one’s work comes from the artist’s proximity to the “dirty ape” or id. Hardly puritan. Both Bloom and Poirier argues that sodomy in Mailer is dialectial and that it is simulataneously creative and decreative. Bloom argues that sodomy for Mailer is an antimonian act that reveals a true order behing the highly false one, and that it is preferable to normal
sex for Mailer.
Alot for the “conservatism” seems meant to ward off the dyspeptic “Brave New Worldism” of liberalism. For instance, he doesn’t want sex to be divorced from guilty, he wants all the emotions brought to bear on it. Podhoretz commented that he thought Goodman, Norman O. Brown, and Mailer brought discipline to bear on the eruption of instinct that the Beats didn’t. I tend to agree.

]]> By: Graham Rae http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/william-burroughs-and-norman-mailer/comment-page-1/#comment-84076 Graham Rae Sat, 17 Oct 2009 15:06:23 +0000 http://realitystudio.org/?page_id=1218#comment-84076 "But about Mailer, I feel differently. I think it is too bad that because he is so vociferous, so loud a writer, his work is not considered as it should be, a case of mental unbalance. It is unsound and dangerous...In The White Negro he wrote that it takes courage to kill an old lady. He influences young people. A young poet who writes me from jail admires mailer and thinks an act of violence would liberate his creativity. On the contrary, violence is a symptom of impotence" - Anais Nin on Mailer. Guess not all the French side Mailer was being headspinfluenced by were particularly enamored of his macho machinations. “But about Mailer, I feel differently. I think it is too bad that because he is so vociferous, so loud a writer, his work is not considered as it should be, a case of mental unbalance. It is unsound and dangerous…In The White Negro he wrote that it takes courage to kill an old lady. He influences young people. A young poet who writes me from jail admires mailer and thinks an act of violence would liberate his creativity. On the contrary, violence is a symptom of impotence” – Anais Nin on Mailer. Guess not all the French side Mailer was being headspinfluenced by were particularly enamored of his macho machinations.

]]> By: jed http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/william-burroughs-and-norman-mailer/comment-page-1/#comment-84073 jed Sat, 17 Oct 2009 12:40:07 +0000 http://realitystudio.org/?page_id=1218#comment-84073 Some other points that remained on the editing floor that might be of interest. Adele Morales, Mailer's wife, was also the former girlfriend of Jack Kerouac. Here again Mailer inserts himself on the Beat Scene by stealing the girl. There are elements of incest and sacrifice here. In addition, Allen Ginsberg was at the party at which Mailer stabbed Adele. By all accounts the party was out of control and had a bad vibe. Ginsberg had to be separated from Norman Podhoretz in an argument over Podhoretz's negative treatment of the Beats. So the Beats and the controversy surrounding them was in the air at the party even though The White Negro was published three years earlier. Some other points that remained on the editing floor that might be of interest. Adele Morales, Mailer’s wife, was also the former girlfriend of Jack Kerouac. Here again Mailer inserts himself on the Beat Scene by stealing the girl. There are elements of incest and sacrifice here.

In addition, Allen Ginsberg was at the party at which Mailer stabbed Adele. By all accounts the party was out of control and had a bad vibe. Ginsberg had to be separated from Norman Podhoretz in an argument over Podhoretz’s negative treatment of the Beats. So the Beats and the controversy surrounding them was in the air at the party even though The White Negro was published three years earlier.

]]> By: Davee Mac http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/william-burroughs-and-norman-mailer/comment-page-1/#comment-84065 Davee Mac Sat, 17 Oct 2009 10:04:53 +0000 http://realitystudio.org/?page_id=1218#comment-84065 on a totally superficial note, i always loved Bill's hair in that newspaper report pic... digging the fringe. :) on a totally superficial note, i always loved Bill’s hair in that newspaper report pic… digging the fringe. :)

]]>