Editor's Introduction

"Late Mailer," our first cluster of essays in this issue, reverses long-standing critical neglect of Norman Mailer's late fiction. Nothing much has been said so far, either by general readers or academic critics, about any of the four novels, starting with Ancient Evenings, that Mailer has published since 1983.

One reason for academic neglect of Mailer has been his commitment to phallocentric concerns. The fiction represented by "Late Mailer" spans the era of feminism's success in English studies and its aftermath. To scholars whose liberating address to representations of women was succeeded by consciousness of the artificiality of gender, masculine and feminine, Mailer's unblinking investment in masculinity in Ancient Evenings or Tough Guys Don't Dance has looked late indeed—positively out of date.

But, if only in the spirit of Blake's "Opposition is true friendship," it is unfair to drop Mailer out of sight. The inspiring intelligence and moral backbone of Mailer's non-fiction in the era of President Kennedy remains a model for all aspirants to the role of public intellectual. It also is wrong to overlook Mailer in light of a possibility that his later work, revising his youthful productions, accords with current perspectives. With such rectifying thoughts in mind, editors of jml welcomed a suggestion from John Whalen-Bridge, Associate Professor of English at National University of Singapore and author of Political Fiction and the American Self (University of Illinois Press, 1998), that on jml's behalf he solicit essays from critics interested in a revisionary address to Mailer. This issue contains the fruit of Whalen-Bridge's collegial enterprise, for which jml is most grateful.

Already in the 1980s Mailer perhaps caught up with one component of his academic opposition by having "queered" his picture of masculinity. Earlier, in the 1960s, Mailer's protagonists of An American Dream and Why Are We in Vietnam? vanquished homosexual temptations in order to prove their alliance with masculinity and with a gnostic God against cosmic evil. Despite such gender melodrama, however, a potential in homosexuality for dissolving Mailer's treasured version of manliness has fascinated Mailer from the start. His anxious interest—represented, for prime example, by the character Marion Faye in The Deer Park—always has promised a hoisting of Maileresque masculinity on its own petard. A truly brave man might have to be fearless even about surrender to homosexual eros. But the result of surrender would dissolve assurance about what is masculine (or feminine), and would uncouple Mailer's ideas about moral bravery—which early Mailer seems to equate with authentic masculinity—from gender bias.

Ancient Evenings suggests such surrender and uncoupling. In this issue's interview with Whalen-Bridge, Mailer says he "hated the thought" that his protagonist narrator in Ancient Evenings would be anally penetrated, indeed raped, by Ramses II; but Mailer considered it part of his "honor as a novelist" to open himself imaginatively to "buggering." Mailer's honor had not countenanced such possibility in Why Are We in Vietnam?, wherein Mailer identified homophobia as a prime motive of American imperialism, yet simultaneously maintained a line in the sand against homosexuality that he already had drawn in An American Dream. In these latter decades, Mailer's vision has become more capacious. Opening himself to more, Mailer now asserts that homosexuality is "an element in all men" and "a bigger theme than I ever gave it credit for being."

Our commentators on Mailer's next novel after Ancient Evenings, the hitherto contemned Tough Guys Don't Dance, emphasize changes in Mailer's perspective. An American Dream enlisted stock elements of crime fiction and masculine heroism in order to reveal visionary meanings of contemporary American experience, whereas twenty years later Tough Guys Don't Dance uses the same elements to demonstrate a reduction of visionary American possibilities to sordid cliché. Accordingly, as James Emmett Ryan's essay suggests, masculine heroism of Steve Rojack's type (see An American Dream) has lost its creative function, and is only a commodified ghost of itself in Tough Guys Don't Dance. Following Ryan, Scott Duguid argues that the novel represents masculinity as a...