Intertextual Literary Journalistic Discourse In Mailer's The Armies

Literary journalistic discourse is “perhaps the most intertextual of all texts, referring to other texts” in terms of transforming prior historical stories and restructuring conventional literary and journalistic genres and discourses in an attempt to generate a new one, that is, literary journalism (Mills 65-66). Thus, the journalistic discourse cannot be but dialogic and intertextual because its raw material is a news story that can be manipulated, adapted, and adopted by the literary journalist in order to compete other versions of the story. It “assimilates a variety of discourses” that “always to some extent question and relativize each other’s authority” (Waugh 6). Literary journalists, thus, are actively engaged in interpreting and scrutinizing

It narrates the story of October 1967 March to the Pentagon from the point of view of Mailer as a participant and as an eyewitness. In The Armies, Mailer attempts to put all the intertexts and their worlds in an interplay subverting any priori narrative based on political agendas. Therefore, the story of the March has many divergent intertexts each of which, “in [its] own separate way” represents a voice or a counterpoint to the main story. According to Mailer, “The Old Left,” has its own intertext of the story of the March that reads it as a “brickwork-logic-of-the-next-step”. The Old Left has to adapt this version of story to get political benefits. The Old Left “would always find a new step – the Left never left itself unemployed” (The Armies 102). Another inter-text of the same story can be provided by “The New Left” that draws “its political esthetic from Cuba”. This version of story is characterized by its revolutionary spirit that “existed in the nerves and cells of the people who created it and lived with it, rather than in the sanctity of the original idea” (The Armies 104). A third intertext is adopted by The Negroes or “The Black Militants,” who read the event as “a White War” of the “White Left” and announce “their reluctance to use their bodies in a White War” (The Armies 120). The White House officials interweave the thread of their own intertext for the main story of the march.

In accordance with the intertextual trope of literary journalism, no intertext can claim dominance, authority, or privilege over other intertexts in this discursive play on a real event. This discursive play urges Mailer, the narrator, to provide his own intertext of the story from the point of view of “an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan... ambiguous in his own proportions”— “a comic hero” (The Armies 67). Mailer, the author-narrator, chooses for his own intertext, a character named Norman Mailer as the protagonist and “the narrative vehicle for the March on the Pentagon” (The Armies 68). Mailer’s intertext differs from other interrelated intertexts because of its being ideologically and politically free of interest. All the intertexts of the event are historically dependent since the raw material of the story is the historical fact of the October 1967 March of the Pentagon. While the other intertexts are politically induced, the author-narrator’s intertext alone are esthetically induced. The focus, in Mailer’s intertext, is not on the political ends, but on the construction of the narrative of the intertext