going there

The best art lingers awhile before connecting. The best infotainment packs a fierce, quick punch. Both deliver the goods, however: they take you there. Of course art, having taken you “there,” delivers catharsis, which is a somewhat different experience than the “Ouch!” after “Ouch!” after “Ouch!” delivered by infotainment. But I digress.

What’s “there”?

“There” is the place you want to go because you’re curious but also don’t want to go because it makes you feel unbearably sad or unbearably excited or unbearably fearful or unbearably regretful or unbearably vulnerable or unbearably angry or unbearably alone at the edge of the abyss.

“There” is where Oprah said she would go before asking abducted teen Shawn Hornbeck’s parents whether they thought he was sexually abused by the man who held him captive for more than four years.

And while no one asked Shawn if he’d been sexually abused by The Monster, Oprah did, in fact, ask his parents, saying, “OK, I’m going to go there and ask you, what do you think happened? Do you think he was sexually abused?”

They indicated that they thought he had been.

“There” (the heart of darkness) is also where the often courageous, sometimes nutty, and always honest work of Norman Mailer has taken us many times during his sixty-year writing career, as Lee Siegel writes in today’s New York Times Book Review.

FOR Mailer, a novelist fanatically committed to the truth, the problem of the ego’s relation to other people has been for many years now the problem of the narrator’s relation to his material. In his eyes, writing must be an authentic presentation of the self.

As Mailer sees it, great writing puts before the reader life’s harshest enigmas with clarity and compassion. “The novelist is out there early with a particular necessity that may become the necessity of us all,” he has written. “It is to deal with life as something God did not offer us as eternal and immutable. Rather, it is our human destiny to enlarge what we were given. Perhaps we are meant to clarify a world which is always different in one manner or another from the way we have seen it on the day before.”

And once you have authentically presented yourself in your writing, you can no longer practice the expedience of concealing yourself as a person. So Mailer the man has — sometimes not happily — transgressed social norms, just as his books have crashed through the boundaries of alien identity and literary genre. Yet for all the cross-pollination between his art and his life, Mailer has always insisted on true art as a form of honest living. The writer, as he once put it, “can grow as a person or he can shrink. … His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.”

Mailer has never, like the dandy, tried to live aesthetically. When he stabbed his wife at a party in 1960 and when he helped get released from prison a literarily gifted killer who then stabbed an aspiring young playwright to death, it was because he followed the wrong impulses, not the wrong ideas. He never committed the ugliness of insinuating that he screwed up for art’s sake. He let the ugliness and the imprudence of his actions speak for themselves.

They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.