From: rhogan@phakt.usc.edu (Ron Hogan)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Thoughts on _Harlot's_Ghost_
Date: 6 Jan 1993 16:26:15 -0800
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: phakt.usc.edu


All of this, of course, is merely MHO.

This is the single best paragraph of fiction I read in 1992:

     He was scouting, his boots six inches from the lip.
     He strode along, frown and cluckin, weighing one
     ascent against another while I sat beside his pile
     of climbing gear, nerveless, and for all I knew,
     limbless.  The stone on which I perched was pale
     pink and friendly, but the straight rock-fall below
     was dark gray, and black at the bottom.  Years later,
     in the Department Store in Saigon, I was to have an
     outrageous attack of anxiety one night while staring
     at a Vietnamese prostitute's outspread legs.  Her open
     vagina looked as sinister to me as an exotic orchid.
     Only then did I realize that the constraint of her pink
     petals and near-black overleaves had brought me back to
     the fearful minutes I waited for Harlot to take the measure
     of where to commence my instruction

(page 132-- all page numbers refer to the Ballantine paperback)

A recent LA WEEKLY review of Glengarry Glen Ross referred to David
Mamet as a "goombah Pinter."  If that's the case, then I think it
would be fair play to say that Norman Mailer, in this novel, is
near attaining, if he has not already, the state of being the "goombah
Proust"  What is a label like that supposed to mean?  It means that
in _Harlot's_Ghost_, Norman Mailer displays a power over fictional
time and memory comparable to _In_Remembrance_of_Things_Past_. The
paragraph above is the clearest example I've found so far (I've got
300 pages to go yet-- but that means I have nearly 900 down).

It's a sprawling, epic "memoir" of Harry Hubbard, a man whose family
has been connected to the CIA since before the beginning, in the days
of the OSS.  In 1984, he's going over his memories-- the way he
remembers things happening ("I offer a false memory, then, but it is
imprinted")-- of a career that takes him from Washington to Berlin to
Uruguay to Miami to Cuba and beyond.  He seems to take part in all the
major activities of the CIA during this period, from the Bay of Pigs
to the investigation of the Kennedy-Giancana-Sinatra connection.

As far as memories/sensory input, that Proust thing, check this
passage on 195 about learning to use cover stories:

     Each detail in my imaginary life upon which I failed
     to meditate sufficiently now became an added weight.
     For I could recall certain details only by an act of
     will.  In contrast, every item I had been able to
     meditate upon in advance became alive to me.  My cover
     story had put me in the vocational school at Mannernburg
     near Leipzig right after the Second World War, and I had
     been able to imagine the pervasive stench the came
     through the school windows from the rubble of charred
     humans, dead rats, crumbled stone, and garbage-- my
     voice sounded good to me when I talked about my studies there.

Eventually, this 'history' of the CIA becomes more than a blow by
blow account of events-- it details how the founding members saw
its "real duty is to become the mind of America" (210)  And "not
a mind that merely verifies what is true and not true.  The aim is
to develop teleological mind.  Mind that dwells above the facts;
mind that leads us to larger purposes" (355)  In other words, not
only the consciousness of America, but the preserver of that
consciousness.  And that consciousness is seen as both very
righteous (save the world from the horrors of Communism) and very
depraved (projects such as MKULTRA, Mongoose, etc).  Dualism is an
essential part of this novel, but not just us vs. them.  This
novel has a lot to say about us vs. ourselves.  One character goes
so far as to say that every person has two complete personalities
in their psyche, struggling for dominance over each other.

I believe it would be useful, and I will probably follow up on this
in a later posting, to look at this in terms of Mailer's classic
essay "The White Negro"-- the character type he describes in that
essay seems to have something in common with the CIA, or at least
some of its agents, of the novel.

If I were looking for any other novel to compare this to, oddly
enough i would say Umberto Eco's _Foucault's_Pendulum_.  Both
novels describe an institutionalized perception of reality as a
'conspiracy theory' of one degree or another, and position a
narrating figure within that conspiracy.  One is quasimystical
and the other is political with traces of mysticism, but they appear
to grow from common roots.  I'd like to hear other people's comments
on this idea in particular.

All in all, I'd say this is a bloody brilliant book so far.

Ron Hogan
Xref: sparky rec.arts.books:23770 rec.arts.sf.written:16927