Norman Mailer in Amsterdam 2001

Unauthorized translation of the Newspaper article in NRC Handelsblad

Norman Mailer about the wounded ego of his home country, ‘Americans cannot stand criticism.’

Amsterdam, 29 Oct.


Norman Mailer was in top condition, Saturday afternoon at the ‘Nieuwe de le Mar theater’ in Amsterdam. As an extra performance after his show at the Crossing Border Festival. For a full room of invited people he held a brilliant and completely improvised speech about ‘the American ego.’ Him entering the room with the use of two walking sticks must have been a shock to many people who have become used to the ultra-masculine image that he has kept up for the past fifty years. Although Mailer is almost eighty years old, his mind is still clear.

 

He doesn’t want to downplay the human tragedy of the thousands that died when the two planes hit the twin towers in Manhattan, but the American writer will not cry for the disappearance of those towers.

‘In the aftermath of the events it turned out how much these towers were worshipped by the American people’ he says, “Not as examples of beautiful architecture, but as distinguished pieces of corporate power play. The WTC  wasn’t only an architectural monster, because it disturbed the rhythm of Manhattan’s skyline, but also a symbol of lack of respect. It was also a monster for the people who did not work there, because it said to those people: if you didn’t make it up there, boy, you’re out of it. Therefore I am sure that if these towers would have been destroyed without any loss of life, a great number of people would have cheered. Everything that is wrong about America has led this country to the point that it built this Tower of Babel, that would have to be destroyed subsequently.

‘One shock followed another and another as the days followed, and it soon turned out that the impact was so much bigger than all other events because these disappear to the background very soon in a country that has such a short collective memory as ours. First Americans saw something which looked like a fifty-million-dollar-movie-scene, those magnificent images of a plane that entered the building. It was as if God and the devil had decided they could do a better movie shot than any of these bastards down below would be capable of. And then came the next shot: we had to realize that those who did this were brilliant people. It turned out that the ego which we could uphold until the 10^th of September was inadequate.’

Mailer is without mercy in his analysis of present-day Americas. ‘America is a country that is built on a tremendously optimistic and risky idea of human nature: if you give people enough freedom, ’good’ will always overcome ‘bad’ Many elements of this idea lived on long after World War II, even until today. That was the reason why we became known as a very friendly country, something the country needed because it lacked roots characteristic to many other countries.’

The rise of technology in the fifties and sixties is partly responsible for the eradication of these roots. Television, with its unrelenting commercial interruptions added to this.

‘Television does not tell you anything about the meaning of events, it disturbs and twists every notion of what could be important. We leave the thinking to what I would call pundits, people that keep babbling to us from the TV screens and know for themselves that there is nothing inside, except deep mediocrity.’

The material success of the country together with the lack of roots and historic insight gave rise to a soothing and unpleasant feeling of self-love that made it ever more difficult to talk about a few essential characteristics that were lacking.

‘We have completely lost our respect for language. A democracy cannot function without accuracy and intensity of language. Take a good bureaucrat like Colin Powell, how can he talk of an attack by cowards? That is an enormous misuse of language. You might call it a monstrous deed, devilish, low-down , but how can you say the terrorists were cowards?”

Americans cannot get themselves to say that courage is needed for such an act, that those people might well be admired. Your words might be explained in the wrong way. The key issue is that we in America are convinced that they were blind, lunatic fanatics that did not know what they were doing. But what if the perpetrators are right and we are wrong? We have lost the ability to rationally analyze the enormity of our enemy’s position long ago.’

Like the 20^th century stated in 19145, the 20th century started 11 September 2001. The last century was according to Mailer ‘the worst century in the history of Christianity’ but the 21st century might become worse. ‘The possibility that we in this panic, with all security measures that are in place- will degenerate into a police state –there are many Americans who would like that idea anyway – is real, when not enough people will keep cool. Chance is that these ideas will flourish, because in the past decade the country has become numb and less alert, more stupid and most of all more spoiled than twenty years ago. All other values became second after money, we became obsessed by it. We have become a country, where among ego means a mental condition that does not like questions a of which the answer takes longer than 10 seconds. That’s why we finally have in George W. Bush the president we deserve.’

When someone from the audience criticizes Mailer for his not so patriotic points of views, he shakes his head slowly. ‘The true test for a great country is that it can stand criticism. We do not behave like that, because we cannot stand it. There is something more important than ‘my country right or wrong’ and that is the idea: let us hope we are right and use our best talents to try to show are. I never liked the idea that you have to be thankful because the country has given you so much. You do not have to spend the rest of your life on your knees cleaning the dust from your parents’  shoes with your tongue because you have so much to thank them for.’

Anyhow, something good might arise from this new situation. ‘An end to all those decades or arrogance and ignorance, the mentality of  don’t bother me with all those questions I don’t have to think about, I’m an American, I know.’

 

[ This report was put out by Reuters, I obtained it from www.dawn.com   a paper in Pakistan. I obtained an English translation from the original Dutch at www.middleast.org/comments/1.359.shtml].

 

 

The Festive Perception of the World by Mikhail Bakhtin

At the early stages of preclass and prepolitical social order it seems that the serious and the comic aspects of the world and of the deity were equally sacred, equally ‘official.’ This similarity was preserved in rituals of the later period of history. For instance, in the early period of the Roman state the ceremonial of the triumphal procession included on almost equal terms the glorifying and the deriding of the victor. The funeral rite was also composed of lamenting (glorifying) and deriding the deceased. But in the definitely consolidated state and class structure such an equality of the two aspects became impossible. All the comic forms were transferred, some earlier and others later, to a nonofficial level. There they acquired a new meaning, were deepened and rendered more complex, until they became the expression of folk consciousness, of folk culture. Such were the carnival festivities of an ancient world, especially the Roman Saturnalia, and such were medieval carnivals. They were, of course, far removed from the primitive community’s ritual laughter.

What are the peculiar traits of the comic rituals and spectacles of the Middle Ages? Of course, these are not religious rituals like, for instance, the Christian liturgy to which they are linked by distant generic ties. The basis of laughter which gives form to carnival rituals frees them completely from all religious and ecclesiastical dogmatism, from all mysticism and piety. They are also completely deprived of the character of magic and prayer; they do not command nor do they ask for anything. Even more, certain carnival forms parody the Church’s cult. All these forms are systematically place outside the Church and religiosity. They belong to an entirely different sphere.

Because of their obvious sensuous character and their strong element of  play, carnival images closely resemble certain artistic forms, namely the spectacle. In turn, medieval spectacles often tended towards carnival folk culture, the culture of the market-place, and to and certain extent became one of its components. But the basic carnival nucleus of this culture is by no means a purely artistic form nor spectacle and does not, generally speaking, belong to the sphere of art. It belongs to the borderline between art and life. In reality, it is life itself, but shaped according to certain patterns of play.

In fact, carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. Footlights would destroy the carnival, as the absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance. Carnival is not a spectacle seen by a people, they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal, in which all take part. Such is the essence of the carnival, vividly felt by all its participants. It was most clearly expressed and experienced in the Roman Saturnalia, perhaps received as a true and full, though temporary return of Saturn’s golden age on earth. The tradition of the Saturnalia remained unbroken and alive in the medieval church, which expressed this universal renewal and was vividly felt as an escape from the usual official way of life.

Clowns and fools, which often figure in Rabelais’ novel, are characteristic of the medieval culture of humor. They were the constant, accredited representatives of the carnival spirit in everyday life out of carnival season. Like Triboulet at the time of Francis I, they were not actors playing their parts on stage, as did the comic actors of a later period, impersonating Harlequin Hanswurst, etc., but remained fools and clowns always and whenever they made their appearance. As such they represented a certain form of life, which was real and ideal at the same time. They stood on the borderline between life and art, in a peculiar mid-zone as it were; they were neither eccentrics nor dolts, neither were they comic actors.

Thus the carnival is the people’s second life, organized on the basis of laughter. It is a festive life. Festivity is the peculiar quality of all comic rituals and spectacles of the Middle Ages.

All these forms of carnival were also linked externally to the feasts of the Church. (one carnival did not coincide with any commemoration of sacred history or of a saint but marked the last days before Lent, and for this reason was called Mardi gras or  careme-prenant in France and Fastnacht in Germany.) Even more significant is the genetic link of these carnivals with ancient pagan festivities, agrarian in nature, which included the comic element in their rituals.

The feast (every feast) is an important primary form of human culture. It cannot be explained merely by the practical conditions of the community’s work, and it would be even more superficial to attribute it to the physiological demand for  periodic rest. The feast had always an essential, meaningful philosophic content. No rest period or breathing spell can be rendered festive per se, something must be added  from the spiritual and ideological dimension. They must be sanctioned not by the world of practical conditions but by the highest aims of human existence, that is, by the world of ideals. Without this sanction there can be no festivity.

The festive always essentially related to time, either to the recurrence of an event in the natural (cosmic) cycle, or to biological or historic timeliness. Moreover, through all the stages of historic development feasts were linked to moments of crisis, of breaking points in the cycle of nature or in the life of society and man. Moments of death and revival, or change and renewal always led to a festive perception of the world. These moments, expressed in concrete form, created the peculiar character of feasts.

In the framework of class and feudal political structure this specific character could be realized without distortion only in the carnival and in similar marketplace festivals. They were the second life of the people, who for a time entered the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance.

On the other hand, the official feasts of the Middle Ages, whether ecclesiastical, feudal, or sponsored by the state, did not lead people out of the exiting world order and created no second life. On the contrary, they sanctioned the existing pattern of things and reinforced it. The link with time became formal; changes and moments of crisis were relegated to the past. Actually, the official east looked back at the past and used the past to consecrate the present, Unlike the earlier and purer feast, the official feast  asserted all that was stable, unchanging, perennial: the existing hierarchy, the existing religious, political, and moral values, norms and prohibitions. It was the triumph of a truth already established, the predominant truth that was put forward as eternal and indisputable. This is why the time of the official feast was monolithically serious and why the element of laughter was alien to it. The true nature of human festivity was betrayed and distorted. But the true festive character was indestructible; it had to be tolerated and even legalized outside the official sphere and had to be turned over to the popular sphere of the marketplace.

As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchies, ranks, privileges, norms and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.

Hell Aint Half Full by Cormac McCarthy

 They arrived at last before a wooden door. It was hinged into a large door or gate and all must step over the foot-high sill where a thousand boots have scuffed away the wood, where fools in their hundreds have tripped or fallen or tottered drunkenly into the street. They pass along a ramada in the courtyard by an old grape arbor where small fowl nod in the dusk among the gnarled and barren vines and they enter a cantina where the lamps are lit and they cross stooping under a low beam to a bar and belly up one two three.

There is an old disordered Mennonite in this place and he turns to study them. A thin man in a leather weskit, a black and straightbrim hat set square on his head, a thin rim of whiskers. The recruits order glasses of whiskey and drink them down and order more.. There are monte games at tables by the wall and there are whores at another table who look the recruits over. The recruits stand sideways along the bar with their thumbs in their belts and watch the room. They talk among themselves of the expedition in loud voices and the old Mennonite shakes a rueful head and sips his drink and mutters.

They’ll stop you at the river, he says.

The second corporal looks past his comrades. Are you talking to me?

At the river. Be told. They’ll jail you to a man.

Who will?

The United States Army. General Worth.

The hell they will.

Pray they will.

He looks at his comrades. He leans towards Mennonite. What does that mean, old man?

Do ye cross that river with you filibuster armed ye’ll not cross back.

Don’t aim to cross back. We goin to Sonora.
What’s it to you, old man?

The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet, he speaks slowly. The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have the power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman’s making to a foreign land. Ye’ll wake more than the dogs.

But they berated the old man and swore at him until he moved down the bar muttering, and how else could it be?

How these things end. In confusion and curses and blood. They drank on and the wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right again and in the dawn the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who had been named Earl and they spoke his name but he never spoke back. He lay on his side in the dust of the courtyard. The men were gone, the whores were gone. An old man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood and none knew by whom. A third one came out to be with them in the courtyard. It was the Mennonite. A warm wind was blowing and the east held a gray light. The fowls roosting among the grapevines had begun to stir and call.

There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite. He had been holding his hat in his hands and now he set it upon his head again and turned and went out the gate.