Harlot's ghost and the rise of the American-Jewish novel in the fiction of Norman Mailer

Abstract

In Harlot’s Ghost (1991), a curious yet subtle change takes place in Mailer’s fiction, a change that in some way may be compared to a tentative return to his early artistic and emotional roots. Harlot’s Ghost may be many novels cohabiting the same book or a curious hybrid of novelistic forms or even a collection of text redolent of different authors and different historical time periods. Amid this narrative exuberance, one text particular emerges in a somewhat veiled form – the American-Jewish novel. Mailer regarded Hasidism as a source of mystical inspiration, an alternative to the rationalistic-positivistic worldview that was threatening to undermine the richness of American culture. In the case of the latter a new text exerts its influence in Mailer’s work, vestiges of the American-Jewish anti-hero that in itself had become an established cultural symbol and which had been almost exorcised from his work in favor of the American Adam myth. If the American Adam was the primary myth and motif in Mailer’s work, the schlemiel steals its way into his work, adding a new textual variety to an achievement which, while adventurous in its choice of literary forms, has tended to become perhaps fixated on certain themes and figures.

Keywords

• Mailer, Norman
• Fiction
• American literature -- Jewish authors
• Authors, American
• Jewish literature
• Symbolism in literature