The Home Front: Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night

: This paper aims to analyze the novel The Armies of the Night , by Norman Mailer, as a record of a march on the Pentagon held on October 1967 in a great protest against the Vietnam War. But, before approaching the novel itself, it is important to present some social and historical data in order to contextualize Mailer’s narrative within the historical frame. It is relevant to stress that some facts quoted in the beginning of this paper are cited in the novel.

Mailer was regarded by Malcolm Bradbury (1994, p. 197 to Bradbury and Ruland (1991, p. 382) "confronted the way realities are constructed by questioning the basic relation of historical actuality and fiction".
The mixture of literary genres aims to provide a view of history devoid of the scientific methodology that permeates historical data. In fact, a record of the multifaceted details about the historical event could only be made by a novelist like Mailer, who created a narrative in which he is both a character and a narrator at the same time. If we take into consideration the needs of historiography conceived in accordance with a method that proposes objectivity, controlled predictions, etc., few historians and social scientists could give a record of those events with the richness of details and accuracy in the voices of the non-central characters as a writer like Norman Mailer. I justify this argument based upon the fact that a writer has more freedom to express his points of view as he/she has not to follow the rigor of the scientific method.
Mailer is one of the first writers of our time to manage the problem of historical narrative. If the historical event, like the march on the Pentagon, could be neither subject to experimental control nor observed in retrospect, it could be transformed into a narrative through the process that Hayden White called "emplotment" (ed.1978, p. 399), which was exactly what Mailer did.
The incompleteness and provisional nature of the event became the raw material through which Mailer structured the non-fictional novel that, in turn, became the most important reference of that historical event, overwhelming even the official historical accounts. The Armies of the Night was written to deconstruct the dichotomy form and content from a hybrid perspective, which interweaves historical event, journalistic reportage and literary techniques. Its aim is to provide a unique view of the march on the Pentagon and the protest against the American war in Vietnam that took place in Washington and Virginia in October of 1967.
Besides the experimentalism in the literary field, it is important to stress the discredit the intelligentsia attributed to the official sources of information. Mailer, therefore, went to the demonstration on the Vietnam War as a participant, witness, and narrator of that remarkable historical event. The march on the Pentagon turned into material for the narrative Mailer wrote, alternating the first and third persons in order to shape and contrast the conventions that guided the historical text as well as the literary composition.
Another meaningful aspect of Mailer's novel that contrasts with the official historical narrative is that the latter is usually made out Mailer, the narrator, looks at the other characters with a mixture of surprise and strangeness. For the other members of the march, he is also a character, if we take into account his unfamiliar look when he sees the young men burning their draft cards, a scene already mentioned, but that shocks Mailer (ed. 1994, p. 10).
In fact, no one but Goodman and Lowell could be regarded as his peers. Even Robert Lowell seems to be a little bit odd as his mode of representing reality differs from Mailer's in form.  (ed. 1994, p. 10). The contradiction of a postmodern citizen and writer manifests in the dependence he has in relation to the object that has been contested, i.e. the war in Vietnam. Anyway, the act of burning the draft cards is not enough to destroy the causes of the cards, which turns the action into a symbol of resistance rather than an act that could force the authorities to stop sending the cards to American youth.

Mailer wrote
Mailer believed that the best way he could oppose the war in Vietnam was through literature. He points out (ed. 1994, p. 9): "One's own literary work was the only answer to the war in Vietnam". And literary tradition is at the heart of his protest, as we can see through intertextual process in order to portray his political message. As a means to justify his literary "weapon" against the war, he searched in romantic poetry the appropriate argument to make his deal, in other words, Edward Litton's verse "the pen is mightier than the sword" (ed. 1994, p. 22), from the play Richelieu; or The Conspiracy is the motto he chose to carry his message. Here, Mailer's discursive operation is a means to enter another sphere, the poetic one, and to return to his updated world, which is not the one of reality but the world of textuality through which he constructs his opposition to both realities, the internal world represented by the American capitalist system and its institutions that surround Mailer's life and his fellow Americans, and the other, external but linked to the former, which is stood for the Vietnam War. "Mailer", the character, goes to The Ambassador Theater leading his internal conflicts. It is decided that he would be speaker and master of ceremonies, but he feels that "the two would conflict, but interestingly" (ed. 1994, p. 29). As the history of protests in Thoreau, the fathers of protest in American culture, and whose ghosts were brought to the stage by Mailer himself who was "illumined by these first stages of Emersonian transcendence…" On Saturday during the march on the Pentagon, Mailer regards it as an ambiguous event, whose "… essential value or absurdity may not be established for ten or twenty years, or indeed ever" (1994, p. 53). The ambiguity he observes is based on a divided society in relation to its own principles and to the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War. Thomas Burns, in an analysis of The Armies of the Night (2005, p. 260), argues that Mailer summarizes in three pages (1968: 193-196)  If the Communism prevailed in Asia…Divisions, schisms and sects would appear…Therefore, to leave Asia would be precisely to gain the balance of power…For the more Communism expanded, the more monumental would become its problems, the more flaccid its preoccupations with world conquest. In the expansion of Communism was its own containment. The only force which could ever defeat Communism, was Communism itself.

Kissinger, who has no trace of a literary critic, comments in his
Diplomacy (1994, p. 710) that in maintaining that communism could best, and perhaps only, be defeated by its victories rather than by American opposition, the new radicalism preached the exact opposite of containment. In the sequence, Kissinger attests that Mailer's paradox is outlined in the idea that the collapse of the Communist regime would come with its expansionism, a policy that would expose its weakness and that America's position should be "an abstention from resistance to communism" (1994, p. 710). Kissinger believed that Mailer was wrong but history proved otherwise; in other words, the writer was correct as the advance of Soviet Communism to the Balkans, the Caucasian areas, and Afghanistan turned the artificial Soviet confederacy into a weak empire. In fact, the former U.S.S.R. And speaking of historians, Hayden White compares, in The Historical Text as Literary Artifact, the "reemplotment" of the historical data with a situation of a patient who must "reemplot" his own history in something meaningful "for the economy of the whole set of events that make up his life" (WHITE, 1978, p. 399). "I was arrested for transgressing a police line." (Of course, he was misquoted," said Mailer's sister later. "He wouldn't use a word like transgress." She did not anticipate the solemnity men bring to these matters.) "I am guilty," Mailer went on. "It was done as an act of protest to the war in Vietnam." "Are you hurt in any way?" asked the reporter. "No. The arrest was correct".
All of these conjectures allow me to say a word on the role of the media in the record of the historical events of that time.
If in previous centuries, the official chronicles and the annals constituted the sources or bases for the writing of history, from the twenty century onwards, the role of media became paramount.
The same criticism imputed to the objectivity of the historians may be extended to the media, being it visual or written. In the 1960s America, for example, aesthetic politics acquired new shape.
Thus, I agree with Tom Burns' arguments (2007/9, p. 272) when he stresses that "Mailer is at least being true to the new (i.e. the Sixties) form of aesthetic politics he himself had described, where style is more important than substance, and the "happening" replaces the Old Left logic".
In After the Great Divide (1986, p. 191), Andreas Huyssen points out that The historical constellation in which the Postmodernism of the 1960s played itself out (from the Bay of Pigs and the civil rights movement to the campus revolts, the anti-war movement and the counter-culture) makes this avant-garde specifically American, even where its vocabulary of aesthetic forms and techniques was not radically new.
So, it is appropriate and opportune to point out that all these features are presented in Mailer's The Armies of the Night, a nonfictional novel that is an x-ray of the cultural manifestations that took place in the 1960s America and whose legacy is ours to share. At the same time that the postmodern novels, like The Armies of the Night, depend on the historical event, the opposite is also true, i.e., the postmodern literature brings history back to the contents of fictional and non-fictional narratives. Consequently, we can conclude that the divorce between these two humanistic areas did not prevail. It is not only a criticism against the modernist avant-garde, which obliterated the past, but a certainty that the relationship between literature and history is a double-edged road in which the historical events provide raw material for the literary contents and literature turns into an appropriate vehicle to record the historical fact.
All in all, The Armies of the Night is much more than a nonfictional novel that embodies a new literary genre, New Journalism.
It is also more than a historical record of an important event of the recent American history. It is not only one more landmark in the remarkable literary career of Norman Mailer. It is, indeed, a literary and historical monument whose legacy will demand studies from the current and future generations.