Laurie Eckhart

Research Review: “Mailer’s Psychology of Machines,” by Joseph Tabbi and other critical selections on Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon.

The Man

Norman Mailer loved dichotomy. In Fire he uses it to explore meaning in the space program. “Mailer is keenly aware of the complexity of the experience and is rarely given to complete certainty about anything” (Ehrlich).  

A few examples:

Astronauts were: Technicians and Heroes. Robots and Saints. Adventurers and Cogs of the Machine.

The Digital Computer: was a diabolical machine and the greatest instrument ever handed to man

“Implicit in all of Mailer’s self-characterizations during the sixties was the idea that he could best discern and express the social upheavals and political conflicts of the time by becoming ‘an egotist of the most startling misproportions, outrageously and often unhappily self-assertive,’ one who could, in not quite comprehend the age, at least exemplify its larger patter (Tabbi).

“The odd fact of the matter is that while Mailer is always advocating revolutions—of consciousness, of minorities, of sexual radicals – no successful revolution is possible within in the terms he sets and none would be temperamentally acceptable to him. He does not want an accomplished revolution, assuming there even is such as thing. Rather he wants the intensification of the dialectical tensions that induce revolutionary fervor” (Poirier). Emphasis is mine.

Bufithis on Mailer. “I am an epical poet, he seems to be saying, and therefore take all human experience as my province. No discipline is foreign to me. Within me lie the capabilities of all men and I can successfully try my hand at whatever their trade may be. I can be an engineer and a poet and everything in between.” 

       “…yes, we might have to go out into space until the mystery of new discovery        would force us to regard the world once again as poets, behold it as savages who knew that if the universe was a lock, its key was metaphor rather than measure” (Mailer).

Mailer had “a kind of schizophrenic view of virtually everything and everybody in Fire.” He “hardly knew whether the Space Program was the noblest expression of the Twentieth Century or the quintessential statement of our fundamental insanity” (Ehrlich). *

The Mode

In Moby Dick Melville offered many definitions for his whale in an attempt to convey “its ultimate incomprehensibility.” Likewise, Mailer “continually re-evaluates the meaning of the moon launch…” Poe disgorged long passages of a technical nature to create verisimilitude, but Mailer, according to Ehrlich, “purposefully [spent] much time poring over the endless physical details of the launch in order to ground his speculations in the material world.”

Aquarius. Mailer’s use of this persona was his way of injecting meaning, and irony, in the narrator’s truth-seeking status. He uses the name “knowing that, as America moved into the seventies and the celebrated Age of Aquarius, he had “never had less sense of possessing the age” (Tabbi).

“In one of his many attempts to define what he means by metaphor, Mailer has remarked that it ‘exists to contain contradictions’ …” (Poirier).

The Machines

“[Fire] is about the deformations of the body and the atrophy of the sense which result, as Mailer sees it, from the technologizing of human existence.” “[Mailer] is involved in an imagined war between God and the Devil, Nature and Technology, Creativity and Waste…” (Poirier).

For Mailer the machines represent a backdrop against which to examine society. He asserts that “the white Protestant’s ultimate sympathy must be with science, factology, and the committee rather than with sex, birth , heat, flesh, creation, the sweet and the funky – they must go with the Russians rather than the Hip[ster], for the Soviet sense of science and formal procedure will be more attractive to them.” He felt that the technocratic culture generally suppressed or officially ignored the “irrational desires, class truths, and psychic contradictions” (Tabbi).

“The suicide of America’s ‘greatest living romantic,’ happening near the start of the decade that would end in the flight of Apollo 11, had left a void in the culture: ‘Technology would fill the pause’” (Tabbi).  **

“And so Armstrong, sitting in the commander’s seat, space suit on, helmet on, plugged into electrical and environmental umbilicals, is a man who is not only a machine himself in the links of these networks…but is also…a veritable high priest of the forces of society and scientific history…a general of the church of the forces of technology” (Poirier).

The Questions

1. How might Mailer’s inability (unwillingness?) to polarize his opinion about the space program affect his authority with a reader? Does it help? Hinder? *

2. Given Mailer’s love of the dichotomy, how do you interpret his opening Fire with Hemmingway’s death? Was it confusing? Did it add any sort of meaning to the chapters you read? **

3. The moon mission played a role in the American psyche. Given the few facts above, would you assume Mailer saw the bid for the moon as an expression of man’s control over nature, or a rediscovery of his mysterious partnership with it?  Consider his attitude towards technology.

Bufithis, Philip H. “Norman Mailer.”  New York: Frederich Ungar Publishing Co, 1978. 100-105

Ehrlich, Robert. “Norman Mailer: The Radical as Hipster.” Metuchen, N.J. & London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1978. 134-143

Joseph, Tabbi. “Mailer’s Psychology of Machine: Of a Fire on the Moon.” Postmodern Sublime. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995. 30-50

Poirier, Richard. “Norman Mailer.” Modern Masters.  Ed. Kermode, Frank.  New York, NY: Viking Press, 1972.  94-103