Between Mailer and DeLillo: The “affectless person” in Robert Stone’s A Hall of Mirrors

As Joseph Epstein has rightly observed, “Whether his scene be Central America or New Orleans, Vietnam or Los Angeles, [Robert] Stone makes of violence an elemental part of life” (43). In this sense, Stone is closely aligned with his near contemporary, Norman Mailer, with whom he has long shared an interest in the fate of the cultural rebel. Mailer’s robust and reckless endorsement in the 1950s and ’60s of so-called regenerative violence is, however, implicitly revised by Stone in his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors (1967). We discover here, I suggest, an important (and overlooked) moment in American fiction, marking a transition point between Mailer’s faith in the potential of violent individualism as a sustaining part of the national ethos, and the work of later American novelists, chief among them Don DeLillo, who emphasize the destructive, self-defeating implications of that ethos in the present age. Mailer’s contention in 1961 that America’s essential myth, “that each of us was born to be free, to wander, to have adventure and to grow on the waves of the violent, the perfumed, and the unexpected” (“Superman” 39–40), is revised by Stone in the character Rheinhardt, who wanders into violence but cannot grow. Where Mailer endorsed a turn backwards to the existential vigor of frontier mythology in an urban environment, Stone proffers in Rheinhardt (and in a related character, Farley) only a moribund perversion of national myth, a supposed return to “evolutionary beginnings” that combines violence with a constriction of affect and growth. Mailer’s “white negro,” who might reclaim some of the mythical frontiersman’s rugged power in the contemporary city, becomes in Stone an empty and impotent rebel, dangerous but unregenerative, while national myths of self-reliance, rugged individualism and forever youthful “innocence” emerge as coopted and perverted by vicious institutional forces.

My argument here examines A Hall of Mirrors in relation to the legacy of American frontier mythology, emphasizing the novel’s critique of the sort of regenerative violence famously defined by Richard Slotkin as “the structuring metaphor of the American experience”(Regeneration 5) and celebrated by Mailer in numerous essays and fictional works. I focus in particular on the climactic scene in which Rheinhardt, offering himself as the puppet of a racist radio station, helps incite a crowd to riot, then go on to contend that we find here a proleptic instance of a now all-too-familiar type: the antisocial individualist who is ultimately able to achieve no regenerative or liberatory end through violence, and whose efforts seem critically implicated in—even solicited and ratified by—de-individualizing forms of mass media. Stone’s Rheinhardt might be thought of, I suggest, as the antecedent of many of the failed individualists in the work of DeLillo, our leading revisionist of the mythology of the American outlaw. I conclude by juxtaposing Rheinhardt with Richard Henry Gilkey, the serial killer in DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) whose grotesquely inane shootings on Texas highways, and reduction to a synthesized voice put on hold by a television station, are bathetic parodies of regenerative violence. For Gilkey and Rheinhardt—as for so many doomed rebels in American fiction of the last several decades—violent transgression is always critically aided and abetted by the technological and simulative, and succeeds not in establishing the individual but in obliterating him; regenerative promise yields, that is, to the merely repetitive. In this milieu—postmodern, or, at least, post-Mailerian—the Frontier is closed and the disembodied voice of the type reverberates, metallically, within an echo chamber of reduced possibilities.

The affectless person is a person that fascinates me. . . . There are people like that always with us. There’s an American way of being like that, which I presume differs from the French or German or English way of being like that. Is it too much to say that there’s a little bit of that person in everybody? I think it is too much to say that, but maybe there’s a little in me. . . . Because of the lack...