Plexed Artistry: The Formal Case for Mailer's Harlot's Ghost

Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost has been read as a virulent critique of American democracy, a misunderstanding made possible by the novel's complexity and its author's uncertain status in academia. It is much more carefully crafted than reviewers and the few critics who have written about it have allowed. The structural principles that organize Harlot's Ghost are suggested by its three epigraphs and born out by the book's divisions. The questions it raises, the ambiguities it hints at, and the mysteries it evokes are inextricably bound up with the material the novel explores. The tortuous plots and counterplots it chronicles assiduously form the self-reflexive heart of Mailer's fictional experiment and of his meditation on America's role in the Cold War era.