A Flight from Ideology and Transits to Narcissus in The Deer Park

Abstract

Only on the surface does The Deer Park ¹ belong to the genre of the Hollywood novel. The book makes no attempt to explain how Hollywood society fits together. The contention that Mailer ‘explores the media’² is therefore misguided. At the deeper levels of the novel lie the interrelated political themes of self, sexuality and ideology. Hollywood plays a special role in the evocation of these matters because, as Norman Podhoretz realizes, Mailer sees in it

The image of a society that has reached the end of its historical term, a society caught between the values of an age not quite dead and those of a new era that may never crawl its way out of the womb. The defining characteristic of such a society is a blatant discrepancy between the realities of experience and the categories by which experience is still being interpreted — a discrepancy that can make simultaneously for comedy and horror.³