R.I.P. Norman Mailer

"Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit." -Norman Mailer

From an artistic standpoint, today was quite jarring for me. I had Q2Q for the UT play I'm directing, Look Back in Anger. What it meant is that I effectively handed the reins to my stage manager, and that my work on what is easily one of the biggest creative projects of my life, is just about over. This evening, I saw No Country for Old Men, quite possibly the best movie of the year, and one of the most chilling depictions of evil you will ever see on film. I sat in the theater for a good 5 minutes afterwards motionless.

But the biggest story in the arts world today is, without a doubt, the passing of Norman Mailer at the age of 84. I have not read all of his works, but when I read The Naked and The Dead this summer, it affected me like few books I have ever read. The fact that anyone could write a novel that mature at the age of 25 is simply staggering, but at the same time, it was the type of project that needed someone young like Mailer to dare to write. And that was the first of his many accomplishments. He would go on to win two Pulitzers, found the Village Voice and thereby pioneer the alternative weekly, and would become one of the elder statesmen of the Counterculture movement despite being twice the age of most of his contemporaries.

I feel people of my generation really don't understand just how essential Mailer is to our culture. When I talk about him with my peers, most focus on his chauvinism, his machismo, and his battling with contemporary writers. To me, disqualifying him for this has the same level of intelligence as disqualifying Huck Finn for using the word "nigger" or disqualifying Chinatown or Annie Hall because of personal lives of their respective directors.

Mailer is as essential to the American identity as the likes of John Dewey or Alexander de Tocqueville. He's pioneered our definitions of masculinity, of the interaction of political and personal identity, the outsider identity and the nature of rebelliousness in American life. While other works may be more iconic than Mailer's in these regards, they all owe more than a little to Mailer, and have rarely been stated quite as elegantly as Mailer did on such a repeated basis. It's a sad day for our literary world, and leaves one less of the current handful of writers who have defined our contemporary fiction. I think only Phillip Roth and Thomas Pynchon remain with the same level of accomplishment, and while there are a load of promising youngish writers in America right now, none have come even close to reaching the level of accomplishment Mailer established.