‘A Revolution in the Consciousness of Our Time’

Abstract

Mailer has consistently defined himself as a radical of one sort or another, and I think that this view of himself, and of his work, is essentially correct. At first sight, only his first two novels are political as such; in his third the focus on social relationships and revolution seems to give way to cultural and philosophical problems—the individual dilemmas of a tragic ‘bourgeois’ hero and his first ‘existentialist’ hero. But despite the Marxist emphasis on history and social relationships and the Trotskyist treatment of the Russian Revolution, both The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore contain in embryo the political ideas which he later developed into his criticisms of totalitarianism and mass culture on the one hand, and his hopes for changes in consciousness, a psychic revolution on the other. This chapter is an attempt to give a critical description of the political and ideological movement in his writing and to establish that although there is ‘an ideological break’ between The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore and his later work, there is also a continuity in the pattern of his political thinking.