From the TLS of June 10 1983
NORMAN MAILER
Ancient Evenings
709pp. Macmillan. £9.95.
0 333 34025 6
Until its final revision, Ancient Evenings carried the subtitle "The
Egyptian Novel". It was a helpful hint that what was to follow was
meant to be quite unlike the so-called "American novel" or the
English, French, German or Russian novel. Ancient Evenings is indeed the
strangest of Norman Mailer's books, and its oddity does not in any important
way have to do either with its Egyptian setting or with the exotic career -
exotic even by ancient Egyptian standards - of Menenhetet, its
protagonist-narrator whose four lives, including three reincarnations, span
180 years (1290 to 1100 BC) of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties (1320
to 1121 BC). What is remarkable here is the degree to which Mailer has
naturalized himself as an ancient Egyptian, so that he writes as if
saturated with the mentality and the governing assumptions, some of which he
revises rather freely, of a culture in which the idea of the human is
markedly different from what it has been in the West for the last 1,500
years or so. Mailer has never before tried anything so perilous, and the
prodigious demands he makes on the reader are a clue to his ambitions. This
is at once his most accomplished and his most problematic work.
Of the twenty-three books Mailer has written so far, only Ancient Evenings
achieves the magnitude which can give a retrospective order and enhancement
to everything else. Up to now it has been possible to think of him as
perhaps a great writer, but one who had yet to write his major book. Many
commentators have mistakenly credited him here, and in his last novel The
Executioner's Song, with a new degree of self-effacement. Looking back from
the new book one can see even more clearly than before that the central
condition of nearly all his writing depends not on some prior sense of self,
the famous Mailer ego, but rather on self-fragmentation and dispersal. Even
when, as is so often the case, Mailer is his own subject, he cannot be said
to exist simply in the narrative that tells his story, but is to be found
instead within a larger, expressive structure of which his voice is only one
part looking for other parts. Just as it radically reduces his literary, let
alone his, personal identity, to assume that the voice in Armies of the
Night refers us directly to the "real" Mailer, so it is equally
mistaken to assume that because that voice is absent from Ancient Evenings
he has thereby and suddenly become invisible.
Quite the reverse. The book comes into focus only when we are able to
recognize the complicated way in which it is the most self-revealing of his
works. Menenhetet, for example, carries out the implications of Mailer's
more directly autobiographical writings because even as he tells stories
about himself he is by that very process trying to put himself together from
several different, remembered versions. This is also the case when Mailer
writes about a march on the Pentagon or a championship fight. He treats the
earlier Mailer who participated in those events as if he were already a soul
or a spirit. The Mailer of the later time not only records but contends with
earlier versions of himself, until the work is a record of the abrasions out
of which will emerge, or so he hopes, a form he can call himself or his work
or his career. The form his narratives achieve is what has survived of "Mailer"
from the past, but the achievement is conditioned by a recognition that some
of the many selves who make up a single person have been sacrificed to the
making of form. Any form, especially for a believer in karmic roots, creates
a longing for some possibly larger and more inclusive one. "Karma tends
to make more sense than a world conceived without it", he remarks in a
recent interview, "because when you think of the incredible
elaborations that go into any one human being, it does seem wasteful of the
cosmos to send us out just once to learn all those things, and then molder
forever in the weeds .... There is some sort of divine collaboration going
on."
Books of sustained visionary ambition - and this is true even of Paradise Lost
or Moby-Dick - are bound to have stretches of tiresome exposition, phrasings
that are ludicrous, whole scenes that, as Johnson remarked, should have been
not only difficult but impossible. Ancient Evenings has Honey-Ball's scenes
of spellbinding in "The Book of Queens". Nearly anything can
happen here, and does, and what is remarkable is not that the American
reviewers found things to make fun of, but that the risks usually pay off:
moments of subliminal ecstasy, visionary descriptions of royal personages,
of pools at sunrise and gardens which bring on a kind of sexual swooning, of
floatings down the Nile. Mailer seems more at home in the writing than in
any of his books except for Why Are We In Vietnam? He luxuriates, sometimes
to the limits of patience and beyond, in accounts of Egyptian low life, in
the power put into play during a royal dinner party, in details of costume
and what must have been at best a truly awful cuisine. Near the beginning
Meni calmly tells us what it feels like, moment by moment, to be eviscerated
and embalmed, and there are equally confident accounts of the practice of
magic and of the wholly chaotic polytheism of the Eygptians.
Mailer has imagined a culture that gives formal, and not merely
anthropological sanction to what in his other works often seems eccentric or
plaintively metaphysical, like his obsessions with "psychic darts"
and mind-reading, with immortality, with battles of the gods (Liston and
Patterson, it now seems, were later versions of the Egyptian gods Horus and
Set), with villainous homosexuality, with magic and sorcery, and with
excrement as an encoding of psychic failure or success. Having so often
written as if the self had several versions, he is completely at ease with
Egyptian names for the seven spirits of the self that continue to. exist in
different degrees of intensity after death.
Two spirit-forms that figure importantly in this book are the Ka and the
Khaibit. The Ka, for which the term Double is a useful but inadequate
substitute, is born with a person to whom it belongs and bears his exact
resemblance; even after death it is that part of a person that requires the
food and drink left for it in the tomb. It also requires sensual
gratification. Thus, the Ka of, say, a third incarnation could encounter the
Ka of the first and have sexual commerce with him - which means with himself
- just as could a Ka with his own Khaibit, or Memory. In fact, Meni, who
died mysteriously at twenty or twenty-one and thinks that he may have been
one of the reincarnations of Menenhetet, finds himself, soon after the novel
begins, kneeling on the floor of the Pyramid of Khufu with the elder
Menenhetet's member in his mouth, and while it is an abhorrent experience he
realizes that he may be coping, as it were, with himself and that the
unpleasantness is a kind of preparation for his passage from the Land of the
Dead through the horrors of the Duad to either the upper or the lower world.
It is possible to assume that the two forms remain fixed in this position -
the time, we can with difficulty work out, is roughly 100 BC - while they
visualize the immensely long night of storytelling, the Night of the Pig,
when any truth can be told without the fear of retaliation, a millennium
back at the palace of Rameses IX.
Whether at the palace or at the pyramid, the scene of the novel is a scene of
telling, of narration, of recollection. At the palace, where the reader
mostly finds himself, Menenhetet and Meni are more decorously positioned
than they are in the pyramid. The elder is telling the stories of his lives
to the Pharaoh, who hopes by listening and interrogation to become more
closely identified with his great ancestor Rameses II, while the younger,
his great-grandson then aged six, nestles between his mother, Hathfertiti
(who is Menenhetet's granddaughter and, for many years, his lover) and the
Pharaoh (whom little Meni, using his powers of clairvoyance, knows to be his
real father) while his reputed father (Hathfertiti's brother as well as her
husband and Overseer of the Cosmetic Box) sulks to one side before
eventually absenting himself.
The novel does not yield to summary or to any clear sorting out of family
trees, and depends instead on the blurring of distinctions between persons
or between historical events and visionary ones. Divided into seven books,
possibly in obedience to the seven spirits or lights of the dead, it begins
with the awakening of a Ka: "Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my
state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain
is near that will be like no pain felt before." Some central themes are
immediately announced: birth and rebirth, mystifications of identity and of
genealogy, elemental dread. Once it has slithered out of the pyramid, the Ka
walks through the avenues of the Necropolis in a vague search for the tomb
of a friend named Menenhetet II. He finds the tomb, after some suitably
macabre incidents, in one of the cheaper neighbourhoods and gradually
realizes that he is himself the Ka of Meni II and that next to his partly
exposed and deteriorating remains are those of the renowned Menenhetet I,
moved from its own much grander resting place by the spiteful Hathfertiti.
After getting acquainted and finding their way into the great Pyramid of
Khufu, they begin their recollection, which is also their attempted
recollection of themselves. Even at the outset, and with only two figures in
question, the effort to distinguish between them takes us into a thicket.
And that is where we are meant to be. We are meant to understand that
multiple identities, identities that in their passage through time come to
blend with one another, are common among the fantastic array of Egyptian
gods and therefore among those humans for whom the gods are a paradigm of
mortal existence. Any Egyptian of high birth, for example, can consider
himself an Osiris, the greatest of the gods (but not always), and can find a
pattern for his own past life, or anyone else's past life, in the pains and
indignities that were visited upon Him. It is therefore appropriate that
Meni, in his bewilderment about himself, should ask Menenhetet to tell the
stories that make up the long second book, "The Book of the Gods".
The story of Osiris, Isis, and of the bitter, buggery-ridden battles between
their son Horus and his uncle Set is a phantasmagoric version of much that
happens to Menenhetet as his story unfolds in subsequent books.
Menenhetet, born the son of a whore, has an innovative skill as a charioteer
which brings him to the attention of the extraordinarily beautiful and
imposing Rameses II or, as he is called, Unsermare. At his side, and
assisted by the Pharaoh's pet lion, Hera-Ra, Menenhetet helps turn disaster
into victory against the Hittites at the battle of Kadesh. But he is then
held responsible for the death of Hera-Ra, who sickened from eating too many
amputated Hittite hands, and is exiled for fifteen years as a supervisor of
a remote gold mine in the desert. It is there that he learns from a dying
friend that a man may be born again by dying during the consummation of
sexual intercourse. Bribing his way back into the court of Unsermare, he
becomes the commander of troops and then Governor of the Secluded - which
means that he supervises the Pharaoh's "little queens" while being
forbidden their sexual favours.
He breaks this interdiction with Honey-Ball in retaliation against Unsermare
for having taken him by "both mouths" before Kadesh. And! when
Unsermare repeats this violation, this time in the company of some of the "little
queens", Menenhetet is driven to the still more dangerous revenge of
embarking on an affair with the most exalted of the queens, Nefertiri, who
turns out to be one of Mailer's most engaging characterizations. Even as he
is stabbed to death by the Crown Prince, he manages to leave within
Nefertiri the seed of his first reincarnation. He thereby becomes his own
father, though his and, above all, Nefertiri's parentage must be hidden from
Unsermare, who is persuaded by Honey-Ball that he has begotten the child
with her. And so it goes. The urgent, exploratory stories told by Menenhetet
and the others are accompanied throughout by an attendant detail so
exasperatingly complete as to suggest now and then that Mailer, like
Pynchon, cannot resist displays of his encyclopedic researches - said to
have included a total absorption of the Egyptian funerary literature called
the Book of the Dead.
Mailer has convinced himself that the book must be dense if it is also to be
authentic. Thus Meni needs to be told the intricate story of the gods, the
Pharaoh needs to be told exhaustively about his ancestors, Menenhetet needs
to rehearse his lives because each of them is convinced that only a person
who can remember and explain his deeds when alive, or when he somehow
partook of the life of another, can pass out of the Land of the Dead. And
because of the endless mirroring of one life in another and in the lives of
the gods, there is, for the anxious spirit, no limit to recollection, no
ascertainable boundary.
While over the course of the seven books the various tales do manage to
achieve some degree of narrative sequence and development - as they would
have to do when all the characters are in search of some kind of teleology -
each book also spirals out of and back into the scene of telling, and even
that scene is set in a time when events have already become encrusted with
centuries of re-telling and interpretation. No American reviewer of the
novel has yet noticed the crucial admission by Menenhetet to Meni in the
last chapter: that what might be called the Egyptian "gospels" in "The
Book of the Gods" constitute an interpretation rather than an
authentication of what they report. "If you think of the story of our
Gods at the beginning of our travels, I will now confess that I imparted it
to you in the way that these Romans and Greeks tell it to each other. That
is why my tale was familiar yet different from what you know. For our Land
of the Dead now belongs to them, and the Greeks think no more of it than a
picture that is seen on the wall of a cave."
Ancient Evenings to some extent resembles Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! or
those novels of Conrad such as Nostromo, where, as Edward Said describes
them, there is "evidence of a felt need to justify in some way the
telling of a story". Faulkner and Conrad are more successful than
Mailer in creating suspense and expectation within the stories, and among
characters vividly differentiated; though Ancient Evenings is not lacking in
suspense of this kind - it is there in the stunning account of the battle of
Kadesh, or the intrigues between the rival Queens, Nefertiri and Rama-Nefru
- the design of the book as a whole refers us finally to motives which are
as vague as Mailer's or any novelist's motives for writing. Mailer offers
none of the illusions so brilliantly sustained by Conrad, that there is
something we want to know and that we will eventually know it, that a centre
will be located in a wilderness of possibility, that the true shape of a
person's life will emerge out of the mysteries that have shrouded it. The
disaffection or impatience which many will feel with Ancient Evenings is
likely to result from the fact that telling and listening have less to do
with a desire to get somewhere (unless the reader is satisfied with being
told that it has something to do with the saving of souls, and is meant to
help Meni and Menenhetet pass through the Duad) but to get away from
darkness, waste and dissolution which are, interestingly enough, the
conditions Mailer has worried about since the mid-1950s as peculiar to the
fate of the writer, in the last half of this century.
It is in this context that one should consider his obsession with buggery. The
obsession has in the past carried Mailer into a metaphysics of human
biological creativity as a compensation for meaninglessness (the forty-six
chromosomes in each cell of the body are, he tells us in The Prisoner of
Sex, "a nest of hieroglyphics") and from there to a religion of
artistic creativity (he had already observed in The Armies of the Night that
these hieroglyphics are "so much like primitive writing"). Like
the building of Hell in the nether regions by Milton's Satan, buggery for
Mailer is a perverse response to God's invitation that we join him in the
creation. For some centuries - long before Rojack in An American Dream
refers to an evil girlfriend's backside as "der Teufel" - buggery
has been associated with the Devil's terrain. In nearly all his work Mailer
at some point contemplates the significance of a juxtaposition concisely
described by Lawrence when in "Pornography and Obscenity" he
observed that "The sex functions andr the excrementary functions . . .
work so close together, yet they are, so to speak, so utterly different in
direction. Sex is a creative flow, the excrementary flow is towards,
dissolution, decreation . . .".
Though Menenhetet, like the Mailer of "The Metaphysics of the Belly"
(The Presidential Papers), offers positive theories of scatology, the anus
is mostly imagined as the site of evil. But there is also for Mailer a kind
of art which is a trope for buggery. Writing about Genet he has referred to
those aesthetic acts which "shift from the \ creation of meaning to the
destruction '"of it", offering as further examples "the
therapy of the surrealist artist, of Dada, of Beat". And he continues,
speaking now of his own involvement in his dilemma: "jaded, deadened,
severed from our roots, dulled in leaden rage, inhabiting the centre of
illness of the age, it becomes more excruciating each year for us to perform
the civilizing act of contributing to a collective meaning." Ancient
Evenings represents such an attempt, haunted by failure, to discover "collective
meaning", to create spiritual (and literary) genealogies that are as
strong and mysterious as biological ones.
Questions of origin soon become, for Mailer, questions also about originality
and authorship. It is impossible to claim either of these, so the book will
tell us, without first accepting one's incalculable obligations to a
marvellous but murky antecedence. Mailer's (and our) debts to the past, it
is suggested, are enormous; they are also mysteriously entangled and
untraceable. It is therefore a mistake to suggest, as some reviewers have
done, that because Menenhetet is given "that look of character
supported by triumph which comes to powerful men when they are sixty and
still strong" he is meant to represent Mailer, or that he is Hemingway,
Mailer's precursor. Mailer partakes both of Meni and Menenhetet, who at the
end are transformed into yet another dual figure: a triumphant
Icarus-Daedalus. In the final scene Menenhetet embraces and dissolves into
the young man's Ka as it tries to escape the destructive force of "the
abominable onslaught of offal" and to ascend the ladder of lights,
knowing it will take not goodness to get to the top, but strength.
The joining has been made possible because Meni comes at last to accept all
the stories he has been listening to, and, along with these, all the burdens
of the past. "The tales he has told our Pharaoh, had been told for me
as well. It was I whom he wanted to trust him." He cannot disown any of
it because he cannot even know for sure that he did not somehow father
himself or father his own father, whoever that might be, as did Ra in
Egyptian mythology. Way back in the book we were told that "The God
begets the God who will be his father. For the Gods live in the time that
has passed, and time that is to come."
Genealogies confound one another to create a future that can call on the
assembled strengths of Menenhetet, Meni, all the characters they have loved,
the Egyptian gods, along with their latest manifestations in Christian
mythology, and, not least, the now enriched figures of Mailer's earlier
writings and earlier selves. The "I" in the last paragraphs is a
composite of all these but it is also the creative spirit with whom Mailer
associates himself in an apocalyptic vision that could anticipate either the
coming of, in Yeats's phrase, "the fabulous, formless darkness" of
Christianity, or the last phase of our own civilization:
"A pain is coming that will be like no pain felt before. I hear the
scream of earth exploding. In this terror, vast as the abyss, I still know
more than fear. Here at the centre of pain is radiance. May my hope of
heaven now prove equal to my ignorance of where I go. Whether I am the
Second or the First Menenhetet, or the creature of our twice seven separate
souls and lights, I would hardly declare, and so I do not know if I will
labor in greed forever among the demonic or serve some noble purpose I
cannot name. By this I am told that I must enter into the power of the word.
For the first sound to come out of the will had to traverse the fundament of
pain. So I cry out in the voice of the newly born at the mystery of my first
breath, and enter the Boat of Ra."
This is, then, Mailer's "portrait of the artist as a young man", but
it does not allow, as Joyce's does, for much distinction between that "artist"
and the author of the book. If we are reminded of Joyce it is certainly not
for the ironic reservations about Stephen implied in the last chapter of A
Portrait and the first section of Ulysses, or even for the moment on the sea
shore when Stephen imagines that "his soul had arisen from the grave of
boyhood, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly
out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name
he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable,
imperishable." This is a beautiful but forever embarrassing moment in
the long history of the artist exalti, and Joyce meant to bring into
question the prospects of anyone in the twentieth century who chooses to "enter
into the power of the word". Mailer has always been frighteningly naive
about this "power" and especially - as was revealed by his
involvement with Jack Abbott - the privileges that should be accorded it,
and he fully endorses Meni's grandiloquence. This is his most audacious book
largely because behind it all is the desire, once and for all, to claim some
ultimate spiritual and cultural status for the teller of stories, the
Writer. Which is yet another ancient and perhaps pernicious story, though
Mailer will always need to believe every word of it.
