From Egypt to Provincetown, By Trump Air: Modernist History and the Return of the Repressed in Ancient Evenings and Tough Guys Don’t Dance

Abstract

Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings (1983) is among the most ambitious, perplexing, and radically imaginative novels of the postwar period. Set during the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties of ancient Egyptian civilization, the novel is a slow, detailed meditation on civilization and its discontents, a project animated by Mailer’s predominant obsessions with death, magic, violence, and power. Following the restless activity of his work of the 1960s, in the early 1970s Mailer rededicated himself to novel-writing as an ambitious, epic enterprise with his Egypt book. At the end of Ancient Evenings’ 700 pages, Mailer includes its dates of composition, 1972–1982, a clear assertion of the labor expended on the novel, and a mark of modernist authorship reminiscent of the Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914–1921 at the conclusion of Joyce’s Ulysses (732). Mailer’s Egypt is reconstructed entirely through the consciousness of his “Proustian"1 narrator Menenhetet II (or rather his Ka, or double) on its journey through the Land of the Dead. While it has major flaws, the novel is a serious and obsessive stylistic achievement in the lineage of other modern exotica of its kind such as Flaubert’s Salammbo and Thomas Mann’s Joseph tetralogy. Mailer sought to surpass Mann (Conversations 300-301) in his utter immersion in the otherness of Egypt’s ritualistic premodernity, and, as Nigel Leigh observes, went to great pains to “avoid unconsciously modernizing the material” (155).