One of the major obstacles to a proper understanding of Norman Mailer's work is his series of pronouncements on the nature of his ambitions. If these remarks are taken quite literally then Mailer's achievements can easily be distorted. Dotted throughout his writing since 1959, when Advertisements for Myself was published, is a thinly veiled longing to embody the conflicting currents of thought in the twentieth century just as Melville did in the nineteenth. The response to this has often been to regard Mailer's novels as noble but failed efforts and to settle for his journalism as a frequently brilliant but comparatively second-class literary activity. His forays into politics, poetry, biography, literary criticism, the theatre and filmmaking are then relegated to the amateur efforts of a versatile man. This kind of pigeonholing tends to miss the essentially innovatory nature of Mailer's talent.

In The Armies of the Night (1968), Robert Lowell makes the same mistake when he assures Mailer, '"I really think you are the best journalist in America".' Mailer irritably replies, '"Well, Cal,… there are days when I think of myself as being the best writer in America".' The point is that throughout his career, Mailer has attempted to transgress and transform the boundaries between literary genres in order to realise and maintain a major premise first defined in Advertisements for Myself: 'one may even attempt to reshape reality in some small way with the "fiction" as a guide'.

In order to see how a writer like Mailer engages with these polarities, it is useful to turn to the analysis by Richard Poirier, in his book A World Elsewhere, of the relationship between self and environment in the American imagination. Poirier considers that the categorisation of American writing into genres tends to obscure the more important issues. 'The crucial problem for the best American writers is to evade all such categorizations and to find a language that will at once express and protect states of consciousness that cannot adequately be defined by conventional formulations….' By means of a richly metaphorical language, Mailer has maintained the premise, formulated in Advertisements for Myself, that 'There is finally no way one can try to apprehend complex reality without a "fiction".' (pp. 1-2)

Mailer declares his aesthetic artifice even as it is reaching for a reality that threatens it. But he also wants to demonstrably exercise a control over that reality—to 'reshape' it. The development of Mailer's use of metaphorical oppositions in his writing reflects a movement towards an effective appropriation of the external world in his radical 'fictions'. In his early novels, Mailer opposes politics and history in order to distinguish between collective and individual power. But as yet, this individual power is seen to be impotent, even though General Cummings in The Naked and the Dead (1948) hints at its subversive possibilities: '"politics have no more relation to history than moral codes have to the needs of any particular man".' Mickey Lovett, the narrator of Barbary Shore (1951) puts this notion into a literary context. His projected novel must give the duplicitous social reality a historical meaning. Yet this historical meaning is, as yet, uncertainly defined. In 'The White Negro' (1957), civilised history is opposed to the personal history, or the new nervous system of the existential hipster. The essay defends the individual's independent choice to act against a society of 'conformity and depression'…. To stress the force of this radical rebellion, the act is always described as violent in a murderous or sexual sense. Because these actions are socially subversive, the hipster is entering an unknown realm and creating a causality to his actions that is distinct from the causality of impersonal 'civilized history …'…. (p. 2)

The status of the hipster's personal time or new nervous system, which is the precondition of this subversive action, is uncertainly figurative in the context of the essay. But in suggesting that the psychopath (and Mailer argues that the hipster possesses a psychopathic personality) seeks love that is 'Not love as the search for a mate, but love as the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it …'…, Mailer first develops a metaphor which describes the method by which the individual searches for an independent and therefore creative means of self-expression. By employing the sexual metaphor, Mailer can relinquish the term history as representing everything beyond the individual's control. The forces that threaten the creative act are found within a metaphor that is restricted to the creative life of one individual and by extension to Mailer himself. He is not forced to oscillate confusedly between literal and figurative terms of reference in order to incorporate the world into his writing. Any sexual activity that prevents conception undermines the individual's selfhood. Masturbation, buggery and contraception are therefore condemned. Mailer reiterates his views from the publication of The Presidential Papers (1963) onwards, while the sexual activities of Sergius O'Shaugnessy in 'The Time of Her Time' and Stephen Rojack in An American Dream (1965) demonstrate these principles.

Mailer simultaneously developed another metaphorical opposition which similarly described the struggling precariousness of the individual's creativity. Although the notion of the hipster was the source of this opposition, Mailer only amplified it in a subsequent interview with Richard Stern, given in 1958 (reprinted in Advertisements for Myself):

And I think there is one single burning pinpoint of the vision in Hip: it's that God is in danger of dying. In my very limited knowledge of theology, this never really has been expressed be fore. I believe Hip conceives of Man's fate being tied up with God's fate. God is no longer all-powerful….

This enables Mailer to go on to suggest that when the hipster takes drugs, for example, 'in draining the substance of God he's exhausting Him, so that the drug-taker may be indulging an extraordinarily evil act at the instant he is filled with the feeling that he is full of God and good and a beautiful mystic'…. As with his sexual metaphor, Mailer is trying to define metaphysical entities within the individual in order that oppressive external forces can be incorporated into his fiction.

Until Advertisements for Myself, Mailer confined these metaphysical metaphors to the context of the rebellious hipster. But in a speech delivered on Vietnam Day in 1965 and reprinted in Cannibals and Christians (1966), Mailer argues that anyone is 'a member of a minority group if he contains two opposed notions of himself at the same time … as both exceptional and insignificant, marvellous and awful, good and evil'. The advantage of giving his metaphors a universal psychological relevance is that Mailer can successfully employ them in his works of fictional reporting as well as in his two novels written at this time: An American Dream and Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967). An image in the anti-Vietnam speech of 'the ego in perpetual transit from the tower to the dungeon and back again' … describes the satirised archetypal quest form of An American Dream, but it also leads Mailer towards the kind of oppositions he defines in his work at the end of the 1960s.

If Mailer's metaphorical oppositions attempt to stress the precariousness of artistic creativity, then the greatest threat will come from literal and therefore uncontrolled reality. In his sexual and metaphysical metaphors, Mailer transforms this literal and almost always oppressive reality into a dialectical entity within the individual. The Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968) and Mailer's film Maidstone (1970), successfully incorporate non-fictional realms without there being any threat to their aesthetic structure. In The Armies of the Night, Mailer reintroduces the term 'history' to signify the collective reality that modifies the individual vision of his protagonist. In the essay written about his film, Maidstone: A Mystery (1971), this collective reality is the force that ambiguously blurs the acted fiction of the film. But Miami and the Siege of Chicago is narrated by a reporter who is professionally obliged to observe and record the events he witnesses.

The function of Mailer's metaphors, however, is not just to extend the boundaries of fiction, but also explicitly to demonstrate that it can interpret the world in a social, political and cultural sense. Mailer's writing begins successfully to fulfil that claim when he controls the form of his fiction which records the struggling dialectical activity of his protagonist. Norman Mailer is, in this sense, an artist whose formal control distinguishes him from the vulnerable artist figures in his fiction.

Ihab Hassan's theory of radical irony, which he introduces and defines in the prologue to his book, The Literature of Silence, illuminates the nature of Mailer's achievement. Hassan initially advances the proposition that certain contemporary writers acknowledge what critics tend to ignore by providing the mirror images of outrage and apocalypse 'that contain something vital and dangerous in our experience'. At the centre of these extreme responses is a silence which Hassan describes 'as the metaphor of a new attitude that literature has chosen to adopt toward itself'. This new attitude is one which 'compels the author to deprecate and even to spurn his activity'. Hassan's description of the silence which is achieved in this kind of literature through radical irony describes the function of Mailer's protagonists in his work after Advertisements for Myself. Hassan explains that radical irony is 'a term I apply to any statement that contains its own ironic denial'. When this technique is practised by fiction writers, the result is 'the paradox of art employing art to deny itself [which] is rooted in the power of human consciousness to view itself both as subject and object.' All of Mailer's protagonists after 1959 possess this power, so that the impulse to create is always fought for because it can only be expressed in the context of those forces that threaten it.

It is possible, however, to trace the development of these ideas in Mailer's fiction written before Advertisements for Myself. In his first three novels—The Naked and the Dead, Barbary Shore and The Deer Park (1955)—Mailer explores the discrepancy that seems to exist between the individual and the world; the discrepancy between moral choice and political expediency or between the artist and corrupt oppressive external forces. Mailer tries to resolve this dilemma by developing the idea that identity is always a fiction in so far as it depends upon a constantly changing milieu for its definition. He wanted, though, to explore the practical connotations of this theory, to synthesise fictional and literal frames of reference. Yet no matter how much the writer may want his fictional world to reflect the real one, it remains a created object. Advertisements for Myself was a breakthrough in that Mailer made himself a protagonist whose identity is a composite of roles that are triggered off by a variety of contexts both autobiographical and cultural. He simultaneously discovered that the reactions of a public audience was a necessary prerequisite for this form of writing. It was not an established literary reputation that he wanted, but a notoriety. (pp. 2-5)

Mailer consolidated his achievements when he discovered that the nature of improvised acting was analogous to his radical ideas on fiction. John Kennedy in 'The Superman Comes to the Supermarket' is defined by Mailer as both a serious politician and a great box-office actor. Since Mailer characterises himself as an appreciative if bewildered spectator, his shifting perceptions dictate the actor's series of roles on the stage (in this case, a literal one, since the occasion is the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles). In so doing, Mailer presents Kennedy as the personification of an ambiguous social reality.

From this, it was a short step to Mailer being both actor and audience in the performances of his personae which dominate his fictional reporting published in the late 1960s. The characters in An American Dream and Why Are We in Vietnam? are conceived in the same way as these personae. They shift roles, voices and points of view with the same rapidity and possess only the most conventional of physical embodiments in order that they might be mockingly dismembered by one of their many roles. Mailer has previously been underrated or ignored as a film director, yet the process of filming and the theories that he evolved from this process illuminate a period of prodigious activity.

Although it may now be possible to detect an impending creative impasse in Mailer's fiction of the shifting identity, this kind of radical fictionalising, first defined in Advertisements for Myself, still constitutes the foundation on which his unique talent rests. (pp. 5-6)