Mailer's Postmodern Armies: The Political 'Postmodernization' of American Nonfiction

Abstract

It would be extremely difficult to say whether Norman Mailer's first allegiance, throughout his career, has been to romance or to reality. Mailer seemed to sense from the time of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, that the reality he wanted to express could not be communicated except through romance, and that romance would lose much of its meaning without its realistic content. It was this same conviction, uniting art and reality, that drove Mailer as a young writer into politics. More than a decade before Eisenhower would coin the term 'military-industrial complex,' Malier's The Naked and the Dead (hereafter N & D) warned of a permanently militarized America. In a 1948 interview, Malier said of N & D that. An important character in N & D, General Cummings, predicted that the massive orga-nization of Americans. Sociologists such as Riseman (The Lonely Growd),White (The Organization Man), and C.