Talk:Why Are We in Vietnam?

Annotated Bibliography
Fall 2018. Try to find at least one review from 1967 and one critical article. —Grlucas (talk) 11:43, 9 October 2018 (UTC)


 * - I plan to count this as my 1967 review, unless I am able to obtain another contemporaneous assessment. Wilander2244 (talk) 15:33, 10 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Robert Begiebing first describes WWVN as Mailer's most economic narrative that is told through narrative consciousness of a complexity that is unlike any of his other fictional work. He mentions that this is Mailer's first fictional story that has a defeated hero,which in this case is DJ,"The narrator-hero's defeat expresses in turn the triumph of death over life"(pg.89). Begiebing goes on to talk about the main misunderstandings of the novel. He says that the most obvious misunderstanding of the novel is its use of profane language but mainly people didn't recognize the significance of the setting in the novel and "the nature of the hero's guilt"(pg.89). The significance of the setting being Alaska is that it is being portrayed in the novel as a force field by using the fact of electromagnetic force of the earth's poles. This makes Alaska become "A heightened battleground for God and Devil, a place of extreme possibilities of contagion and beatitude"(pg.90). The last misunderstanding the Begiebing mentions in his article is the narrator-hero's guilt. DJ feels this guilt of being a failure of a son to his father during the safari experience. This guilt and waste that DJ feels is mirrored by his obscene language as he see's his waste as "shit","he is marooned in the shit or on the 'balmy tropical isle of Anal Referent Metaphor'(p.150)"(pg.91).MGray96 (talk) 21:49, 8 November 2018 (UTC)


 * In Boyard's review, he states Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam? to be just as "fashionable" as the writing one were to find on the wall of an "underpass". The article's name inherently is used to describe the book just as Boyard also applies it to Mailer's last novel An American Dream. He observes that "in 208" pages he could not directly quote from it as it was inappropriate for a family newspaper. One could summarize the novel as being "a sexual obstacle course in the basic training camp of contemporary life." Sex used to be meaningful, and since censorship has been lifted, it is often placed in areas that have zero context. Recently, the "sexual hero" has been brought forth in American literature: an insignificant hero. DJ's speech and thoughts are described as both a "hippie teen-ager" and a "middle-aged avant-garde writer". His thoughts are filled with "portmanteau puns" in one moment, and in the next moment "he slips . . . into Negro dialect". As Boyard explains how the novel is divided into "Intro Beeps" and "Chaps", he admits that the offensive and obscene writing Mailer presents "usually has a message wrapped around it". He concludes his article by stating that Mailer's novel is a "third-rate work of art" but a "first-rate outrage to our sensibilities". Sarahqbentley (talk) 01:54, 16 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Bufithis gives a not to lengthy yet informative summary of Mailer's "Why are we in Vietnam?" He points out DJ's apparent ambiguity throughout the novel. He specified one of DJ's own lines from the story to fuel his confusion on page 77 which went " I'm the center of it and I don't comprehend, not necessarily, I could be traducing myself." He also gives his own opinion to the question of why are we in Vietnam derived from his views from the books. He alludes to the use of the helicopter for hunting buy Rusty and compared it to the U.S soldiers looking down on the Vietnamese. " The parable is clear. The hunting party is the American  military in miniature, replete with Commanders and  their  GI  subordinates. The crazed animals being annihilated by aerial machines are the people of Vietnam napalmed by the Air Force." Thoug Bufithis says this doesn't give a full and concise overview of the book but gives a direct answer to the many answers as to why we are in Vietnam.Torioneason (talk) 15:44, 30 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Denis Donoghue’s review focuses on Norman Mailer’s writing style in Why Are We in Vietnam compared to his previous works as well as the likes of Hemingway, William Faulkner, and William Burroughs (209). Donoghue looks past the obvious language of Mailer’s story to the voice and style of D.J. and other characters to explain the deeper meaning: insanity is pure energy once the harm it’s is removed (209). Through focusing on the voice of the story and Mailer’s style of writing, only then can readers understand the significance of D.J.’s words and actions as more than a Texas boy on an Alaskan hunt for big game. Although the true message of Why Are We in Vietnam may resonate with Mailer’s previous messages of embracing animalistic natures and escaping from society, Donoghue points out that this new book has “little or nothing in common” (210) with previous works such as An American Dream with Mailer’s value of his own nonsense “at its proper worth” (210). --Aswieter (talk) 18:50, 2 November 2018 (UTC)


 * In his positive review, Fremont-Smith calls WWVN "the most original, courageous and provocative novel so far this year" that's likely to be "mistakenly reviled". Even though Vietnam is not mentioned until the novel's final page, WWVN is Mailer's attempt to show how American got into this bad war — that "violence is as American as cherry pie". It's an archetypal tale of the mythic American male on a mythic bear hunt in Alaska that will be a proving ground for the narrator D.J. who seems inured in scatological language. Fremont-Smith: "The rhetoric reflects the distortion of the image of masculinity; more, it exposes the unrealized self-disgust of those who lust, or think they should lust, to verify virility in violence". This rhetoric is an antidote to love for the American male masculinity: he reacts with violence rather than be sodomized. This version not only leaves many animals dead by the end, but conquers a tender passivity that D.J. might have had for Tex. These fleeting moments of connection are laid waste by the country's "darkest urges that, in [Mailer's] vision, are goading it to spiritual numbness and destruction, and to the obsessive language by which it now listens to itself". —Grlucas (talk) 11:43, 9 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Fulgham argues that WWVN might be "Mailer's most profoundly pessimistic book" (345) in that it suggests D.J. (and by implication, America) is unable to overcome its basest animal drives that connect sexuality and violence — the need to dominate or "bully" other nations with our technological superiority (343). The novel portrays the "animal instinct" that drives "corporate minded fathers" to use superior technology to "to reaffirm its dominancy amoung its global peers" (342). Rusty and D.J.'s killing of the bear is metaphor that shows America's willingness to bring to bear the "virulent, malignant evil" that allows cowards to dominate with superior technology (341–342). D.J. seems to exemplify Mailer's White Negro, and differs from his father by showing a self-awareness and sensitivity to dread (338). However, his potential is not enough to allow him to overcome his violent and sexual urges, and he misinterprets his experiences as the voice of God — "Go out and kill—fulfill my will, go and kill" (WWVN 219) — when it's really the beast (345). —Grlucas (talk) 13:41, 18 October 2018 (UTC)


 * John Hellmann says in his review that the plot of the novel drives towards answering the question of the novel "by addressing what a contemporary frontier means for a society that has given itself over to corporation and machine"(pg.79). The combination of characters, the plot, and the setting help create "a clearly perverse activity to the mythic imagery of the American frontier myth and to the disturbing contemporary images of Vietnam"(pg.80). The hunting trip that transforms into a slaughter by the use of helicopters and several high viscosity machine weapons is an example of this imagery of the disturbing images of the Vietnam War. DJ finding the exposed organs of a dying bear draws the imagery of the myth of America,"embodying its deepest values and heroic concept"(pg.80).MGray96 (talk) 21:54, 8 November 2018 (UTC)


 * {{cite magazine |date=1967 |title=Hot Damn. |magazine=Time Magazine |page=126 |issn=0040781X.| A Wide Critique of Mailer's "Why are we in Vietnam" Alludes to the fact that he not once mentioned the war in Vietnam, and that the Diction and Dialogue is overwhelmingly graphic. They say he compares Wild Hunting Texans and comparing them to all Americans is a huge Generalization. Torioneason (talk) 15:48, 30 October 2018 (UTC)


 * {{cite news |last=Glenn |first=Eugene |date=September 28, 1967 |title=Review of Why Are We in Vietnam? |url= |work=Village Voice |pages=6–7, 41 |ref=harv }} Eugene Glenn praises Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam, calling it "a triumph, powerful, original, brilliant in substance and in formal means." Glenn sees D.J. as just the right type of person to be qualified to "[perform] an autopsy on the American scene," presumably getting to the heart of America's issues via his ability to "[see] right through shit." He says that Mailer "view[s] Vietnam purely as an action resulting of moral disease," demonstrating Glenn's view of WWVN as a moral criticism of 1967's America. Glenn writes that Mailer's "violence and extremity of his novels are meant as experiences to urge us" toward right moral actions. He says also that Rusty serves as the novel's stand-in for evil, calling him "a Dallas Nazi undertaker with a little peeny dick." Glenn later decides that if "the fathers are rotten, the sons can take no shape" referencing Rusty and D.J.'s relationship as a source of contention for D.J. He says that in the face of this difficulty, after D.J. "wants only to blast his gun into Rusty," that the only remaining solution is homosexuality. This refers then to the excursion that D.J. and his friend Tex take into nature during the hunting trip. Glenn interprets this excursion by saying: "Immersion in nature is meant to purge them." This immersion does not purge them, however, and Glenn later writes, "the sons are as rotten as the fathers." He ends his review saying that "Why Are We in Vietnam works splendidly as a metaphor for the way things are now." RLSenter (talk) 16:42, 18 October 2018 (UTC)


 * {{cite journal |last1=Kaufmann |first1=Donald L. |date=2008 |title=Norman Mailer in 'God's Attic' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2 |issue=1 |pages=298–312 |oclc=86175502 |ref=harv }} Kaufmann recalls the time when, as an assistant professor of English at the State University of Alaska, he convinced "a reluctant Mailer to visit Alaska" thus inspiring Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam. Mailer was enchanted by Alaska, calling it "God's attic" and choosing it for the setting of D.J.'s hunting trip in WWVN. Kaufmann says that he was surprised when Mailer's WWVN "took place in Alaska and mostly in remote, stark wilderness." Later, Kaufmann says he believes "that twenty minutes over Denali was the genesis of Mailer's Vietnam novel." He discusses how Mailer uses the Alaskan wilderness to contrast with Rusty and company's "hi-tech slaughter of the wildlife," saying that Rusty's company friends are "reincarnations of 'Big Oil' and 'Big Greed' in the guise of yahoo Texan hunters." The five day trip in Alaska with Kaufmann was the one and only time that Mailer went to Alaska, making the setting of Why Are We in Vietnam an insight into the depth of Mailer's experience there. Much of Mailer's trip to Alaska consisted of political activities such as speeches and debates, (Kaufmann writes that "late 1964 was the onset of Mailer’s more distinct political phase") and Mailer's longest contact with the Alaskan wilderness consisted mainly of him flying above it. RLSenter (talk) 16:44, 18 October 2018 (UTC)


 * {{cite news |last=Lehmann-Haupt |first=Christopher |date=December 8, 1967 |title=Norman Mailer as Joycean Punster and Manipulator of Language |url= |work=Commonweal |pages=338–339 |ref=harv }} I will enter bibliography entry here. Wilander2244 (talk) 16:22, 17 October 2018 (UTC)


 * {{cite book |last=Oates |first=Joyce Carol |date=1972 |chapter=The Teleology of the Unconscious: The Art of Norman Mailer |title=New Heaven, New Earth: the Visionary Experience in Literature |chapter-url=https://normanmailer.us/the-teleology-of-the-unconscious-the-art-of-norman-mailer-b4ef69705f12 |location=New York |publisher=Vanguard Press |page=170–192 |isbn=4653035121 |author-link=Joyce Carol Oates |ref=harv }} - Joyce Carol Oates...On Mailer... Wilander2244 (talk) 14:55, 10 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Poirier, Richard (1972). "The Minority Within". Norman Mailer. Modern Masters. New York: Viking Press. pp. 111–155. OCLC 473033417. In a broader analysis of Norman Mailer, Poirier advertises Mailer as an author focused on the realization that sex is equivalent to violence, every side has more than one opposition, and that all men are members of minority groups if they look inward to themselves. By pointing out the lack of discussion on Vietnam, Poirier states that Mailer poses the human race as one large, interconnected being, so the realization that D.J., Rusty, and others exist in the barren lands of Alaska is to realize that Vietnam exists as well (129). “We are all of one another” (129), claims Poirier, creating a Segway into his understanding that D.J. takes on the mentality of Mailer as the “theorist of multiple identity” (129), leaving D.J.’s identity as a minority exposed with each internal argument. With this realization, Poirier explains that through the deeper, multiple identities inside each of us and their constant opposition to each other, we are all connected on a deeper, yet more basic level of being (129). --Aswieter (talk) 17:45, 1 November 2018 (UTC)


 * {{cite journal |last1=Plath |first1=James |date=2010|title=Jive - Ass Aficionado: Why Are We in Vietnam? And Hemingway's Moral Code |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |pages=164-207 |oclc=86175502 | ref=harv}} - James Plath analyzes Mailer's writing an Why Are We In Vietnam and compares it to Ernest Hemingway's modernist writing style. He mentions interviews where Mailer says that one of his ambitions is to write a novel that Hemingway might read one day. Plath goes on to say that Mailer borrowed Hemingway's narrative structure, his "iceberg theory" in omission, the attempt to make the reader actually experience the fiction in his "gut", a thematic element that reflects the code and the code heroes. Mailer's way of detailing and personalizing his characters is similar to the way Hemingway writes his short stories and personalize them "in his time". For instance, in Why Are We In Vietnam, Mailer writes intro beeps that gives D.J the opportunity to get out of the narrative and to also get the readers out of the hunting narrative and rant about whatever he wants. Basically giving the readers an opportunity to connect with D.J outside of the story itself. Bridgetterobb (talk) 17:24, 30 October 2018 (UTC)


 * {{cite journal |last1=Rabinovitz|first1=Rubin|date=October 1974 |title=Myth and Animism in Why Are We in Vietnam?|url=https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.mga.edu/stable/440648?seq=2#metadata_info_tab_contents|journal= Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal|volume= 20|issue= 4|pages=pp. 298-305|doi= |access-date= October 16, 2018}} In the western world, people do not think of animism to be rational in any way; it is often thought as "superstitious" (298). Because of this, Mailer masks his intentions behind "distracting elements": "obscene and scientific language". The narrative of D.J. is played back through a "psychic tape recorder" which can retain a lot of information. Mailer explains the recorder's function by simplifying it to make it easier to understand through the use of scientific terms. Jean Piaget believed that "we all retain remnants of animistic belief from childhood" such as magic or the supernatural; this is what makes Why Are We in Vietnam able to work alongside the "mythic themes". The supernatural runs parallel to the events in the novel, and Mailer simultaneously provides the "technological explanations" so they are not entirely deemed as irrational (301). The world is set up with "antipodal relationships". One can see this in the instance of D.J. explaining that "the real author of his autobiographical . . . may be a black man in Harlem". This juxtaposition shows the opposing relationship is still connected though they are "dissimilar" (301). The hunting grounds in the novel take place in Alaska where one of the "central receivers" are located (302). As Text and D.J. leave behind their equipment or their traces of "civilization and technology", they go through a "purification ceremony" in which they acquire a form of "psychic awareness". They are now able to sense nearby wildlife and the wildlife also become aware of the two boys (300). One evening, D.J. and Text fall victim to the corruption of the "charged atmosphere" between the Northern Lights and the "psychic smog" (302); dread was found within it or the "fear [of] being killed by his fellow man". This ultimately turns them into the "soldiers who look forward" to the horrific scenes of war (303). Sarahqbentley (talk) 02:15, 16 October 2018 (UTC)


 * {{cite news |last= Spike |first=Paul|date=October 30, 1967 |title=Norman Mailer's "Why Are We in Vietnam" |work=Columbia Daily Spectator|pages=208 |ref=harv }} Paul Spike writes about the importance of Norman Mailer. He states that Mailer's novel is showcasing the spirit of '67 and the urgent message he is sending to the readers to listen to what he has to say. The tone in which Mailer is writing is significant to the message and the atmosphere of 1967. Quoting D.J's vulgar language, Spike goes on to say that D.J is "the pitiful maniac who knows too much and what he knows ain't nothing yet." He writes about D.J's ego and his eager for manhood. He says that they are hunting for certainty and the power that comes once they are certain. Also, D.J is searching for a "new system" that is not his father's. A new life and knowledge outside of what he is expected have. So, while Rusty is searching for the bear, D.J is searching for his wants in life. He is still struggling to find his way. Spike ended his article questioning why were actually they in Vietnam. Was it for bear trophies or manhood, certainty and authority because the spirit of '67 makes Vietnam unavoidable. Bridgetterobb (talk) 20:22, 2 November 2018 (UTC)