A Literary Analysis Of Mailer's The Armies

The crisis of the novel of the mid-sixties of the twentieth century was due to the fact that “talented novelists had abandoned the richest terrain of the novel; namely, society, the social tableau, manners and morals, the whole business of the 'the way we live now'” (Wolfe 43). Therefore, it was an opportunity for both journalists and novelists to come closer and to play a shared role in establishing the hybrid genre of literary journalism. In this regard, David Lodge states that the recourse of the journalists to this hybrid genre “implies no disillusionment on the author's part with the novel as a literary form: on the contrary, it reaffirms the primacy of that form as a mode of exploring and interpreting experience” (12). Rather than seeing

It models itself on the tradition of the more experimental fiction of the time. In this novel, Mailer does not abandon reality like fabulists but rather he extends the literary range to make reality relevant and meaningful in this multi-faceted and complex world. In this novel, Mailer attacks traditional reporting that rarely gets at the truth of a situation such as the march on the Pentagon. As critic Kathy Smith points out, “Mailer's strategy [...] is to question the authority of the newspaper text and to discover the limits of the reporter's narrative practices” (Smith 179). For Mailer, these limits exist because reporters do not simply list facts, but retell stories and thereby insert, consciously or not, their own bias and subjective view into their reports. As Mailer explains, “Journalistic information available from both sides is so incoherent, inaccurate, contradictory, malicious, even based on error that no accurate history is conceivable” (The Armies 284). Journalistic objectivity, then, is simply a myth that Mailer earnestly seeks to uncover and to

According to John Hollowell, the emerging genre of literary journalism foregrounds the subjective over the objective in an attempt to report “stories hidden beneath the surface facts" (23). Moreover, literary journalists not only write the news stories from their own point of view but also become the story by involving themselves into it. By so doing, they manage to depict a vivid picture of life that could never have been achieved through standard objective reporting. Ironically, this subjective journalism “strives for a higher kind of 'objectivity'” (22). This higher type of objectivity is achieved through the treatment of the subject of the stories. The use of the subjective style in treating ‘objective’ subjects results in a far deeper and more meaningful story than could ever be told through the conventions of traditional journalism that fails to “offer the individual a meaningful relation to” the story (Hellmann, Fables of Fact