Seeds of Promise
Norman Mailer’s Early Short Fiction
Keywords:
short fiction, American short story, literary experimentation, masculinity, narrative form, violence, artistic development, twentieth-century American literatureAbstract
The titles of Norman Mailer’s stories reveal his interest in word play early on, and they lend themselves to a range of literal interpretations, not an insignificant issue if we think of titles as strategic synecdoches for a work as a whole and, with an open mind, we may then be better prepared for the complexities and ambiguities that inform these narratives. “Love-Buds,” for example, may represent two buddies in pursuit of love/sex for the first time or it may suggest that male devirgination is inherently the essential “budding” of a natural growth process. And there are, of course, other referential possibilities. Explicitly metaphoric titles sweeten narratives because they enrich interpretive resonance. Further, Mailer clearly employs some similar compositional techniques in his early and late short fiction and there are reasonable inferences to be drawn from Mailer’s personal life, as J. Michael Lennon has observed on the spectrum of his subject matter. As Merleau-Ponty has poignantly articulated, “The ‘there’ is said to be a wall between us and others, but it is a wall we build together, each putting a stone in the niche left by the other (Signs 19).” Literary bricolage is never a solitary experience and, brick by brick, characters reveal dimensions of their natures and values, thus informing the work product of a master bricoleur, Norman Mailer.
