The use of such symbolical grotesques by the sage to provide the climax of argument and satiric attack continues in the twentieth century. Mailer brilliantly creates a modem grotesque in "Some Origins of the Fire" when he describes how he stood in line for almost an hour while waiting for a cold drink in the Florida heat. As he proceeds to describe the inadequacies of mechanical solutions to creature comforts, he indicts his society, for, a true descendant of Carlyle, Ruskin, and Arnold, he perceives and fears the extent to which modem society has become mechanical. He fears this domination of the machine particularly because he perceives that such domination has rendered man himself mechanical and inhumane. Since the main purpose of his history of the first voyage to the moon is to explore the possibilities of human heroism and the human ideal in an age of technology, such a set piece reverberates throughout the volume. Mailer begins by setting the scene: "In back of the Press Site,
more than a hundred radio and TV trailers were now arrayed behind one another in ranks and rows of huge white ruminants, the very sacred cows of American technology. Yet there was only one trailer reserved for food" (91). Admitting that it "was next to heartwarming" to discover a piece of poor planning amid the "icy efficiencies" of NASA, he describes the grotesque results of placing one's faith in machines when it should be placed in men.
The trailer was inadequate to the needs of the Press — over a hundred waited in line, more than a hundred walked away in disgust. The line drifted forward about as fast as a tide works up a beach. The trailer interior consisted of a set of vending machines for chiliburgers, hamburgers, pastries — all people wanted were cold drinks. So the line crawled, while everyone waited for the same machine. Nobody was about to have machine-vended chiliburgers at halfpast eight in the morning.
But so many demands on the iced-drink machine caused malfunctions. Soon, two vending machine workers were helping to service the machine. Still it took forever. Coins had to go into their slot, change be made, cups filled, tot of cracked ice dropped, syrup poured, then soda. Just one machine. It was pure American lunacy. Shoddy technology, the worst kind of American shoddy, was replacing men with machines which did not do the work as well as the men. This crowd of a hundred thirsty reporters could have been handled in three minutes by a couple of countermen at a refreshment stand in a ball park. But there was an insidious desire to replace men everywhere with absurd machines poorly designed and abominably put together; yes, this abominable food vending trailer was the proper opposite number to those smug and complacent VlPs in their stands a half mile away; this was the world they had created, not the spaceship. (91-92)
Thus, what begins as a small-minded complaint about some trivial personal discomfort that the writer has experienced soon metamorphoses into a type, a representative example of underlying laws and rules that can serve as a door to greater understanding. The comical situation quickly changes before our eyes into an emblem of what is wrong with our society. Like Carlyle and his many nineteenth-century heirs, Mailer draws his reader's attention to an apparent triviality which he first reveals to be one 102 of the Signs of the Times and then proceeds to explain. The very metamorphosis of the event into something worthy of consideration and interpretation makes it a device characteristic of the sage. Mailer demonstrates to the reader not only that such apparent trivialities contain essential truths but also that he, Mailer as exegete and bearer of wisdom, is the only one who can perceive them.
Furthermore, Mailer demonstrates that the phenomenon he chooses to present to the reader in all its grotesque significance proves not merely meaningful, not merely something that bears significance. but rather something that stands as a synecdoche of the society as a whole, for according to him the absurd scene, in which two men who could easily serve the one hundred reporters far better and more humanely than any machine, instead serve as acolytes to an inefficient machine, reveals a flaw of American society. It reveals, in other words, the way Americans (or at least Americans in authority) have placed their faith in machines rather than in human beings when such allegiance turns out to be particularly, absurdly, grotesquely inappropriate.
Such an emblem of American reliance upon shoddy technology threatens to demonstrate that the entire attempt to voyage to the moon is equally absurd since it obviously embodies American faith in technology. But Mailer, perhaps to our surprise, given the opening of this book, does not elect to make the soft-drink machine represent the forces that have created the moon shot. No, instead he distinguishes between good and bad technology — between that technology which fails to improve the lives of people and that which serves them. What makes the technology behind the moon voyage so privileged for Mailer, so different from that embodied in the soft-drink machine's grotesque inappropriateness, is simply that it permits people to test themselves, to search for the limits of human capacity — in a phrase, to explore the nature and limits of humanity.
Near the opening of Of a Fire on the Moon, he posed one of the problems the book would survey when he admitted "that he hardly knew whether the Space Program was the noblest expression of the Twentieth Century or the quintessential statement of our fundamental insanity" (15). When presenting the soft-drink trailer as what I have termed a symbolical grotesque, Mailer aligns the "lunacy" that created this inefficient way to serve human needs with what he finds wrong with America and the modem world but, pointedly, he does not align it with the space program.
Considering this instance of the symbolical grotesque within the context of the entire book, we perceive that Mailer has managed to distinguish two basic forms of American technology and assign value to each. In so doing he also manages to convince us that he has perceived a central fact about America — that he has, in fact, properly perceived and read the Signs of the Times. Further, he convinces us that whatever value he may finally discover in the moon voyage itself will not turn out to be the same as that embodied in shoddy technology. The machine, in other words, takes various forms, not all of which threaten human life.
Last modified 19 March 2008