Jan Freeman writes The Word column for Ideas.
Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
producer.
Christopher Shea writes the Critical Faculties column for Ideas.
 Send the Brainiac bloggers a
comment on a post.
  Week of:
November 11
Week of:
November 4
Week of:
October 28
Week of:
October 21
Week of:
October 14
Week of:
October 7
Mind the gap
Shop talk What he learned in the newsroom Mr. Boffo lays an eggcorn Curse of the mummy's tummy More in Word Watch  |
« Cleaning up Chinglish | Main | The Mooninites again » Monday, February 5, 2007Mailer and ArendtThe new issue of the New York Review of Books carries a typically fascinating review by former Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee. Coetzee writes on Norman Mailer's new novel based on the early life of Adolph Hitler, "The Castle in the Forest," the first of a planned trilogy, which has been reviewed widely and in widely varying ways. (Lee Siegel's cover review in the Times Book Review was exemplary.) Coetzee says Mailer's prose is "no longer ... as electrically vivid as it was forty years ago, but he has lost none of his immoralist daring," and calls the book a "very considerable contribution to historical fiction." His most interesting point is that Mailer, in this book and elsewhere in his oeuvre, argues against Hannah Arendt's famous formulation in "Eichmann in Jerusalem," "the banality of evil." As Coetzee writes, Mailer has said outright, "'If Hannah Arendt is correct and evil is banal, then that is vastly worse than the opposed possibility that evil is satanic' -- worse in the sense that there is no struggle between god and evil and therefore no meaning to existence." Coetzee posits that Mailer mischaracterizes Arendt's argument, but more interesting is his contention that Mailer's devil-driven notion of evil robs this novel of some of his moral force. Great sentences ahead: "The Devil made him do it" appeals not to the understanding, only to a certain kind of faith. If one takes seriously Mailer's reading of world history as a war between good and evil in which human beings act as proxies for supernatural agents -- that is to say, if one takes this reading at face value rather than as an extended and not very original metaphor for unresolved and irresoluble conflict within individual human psyches -- then the principle that human beings are responsible for their actions is subverted, and with that the ambition of the novel to search out and speak the truth of our moral life. Posted by Evan Hughes at 07:48 PM
|
