Whalen-Bridge, John

Mailer’s favorite religious idea, one that he usually incorporated into his literary characters’ speech and into his own, is that “there is a God and a Devil at war with one another, neither of whom is invincible” (Time 1223). Mailer found this Manichean doctrine attractive for at least three reasons. Given the “philosophical vertigo” (1224) induced by the concept of a benevolent deity, “capable of doing everything and anything at any given moment” (Conversations 29), but continuously allowing war, genocide, torture, rape, disease, poverty, and starvation to occur, Manicheanism dissolves theodicy’s cognitive dissonance. Based on the premise that God cannot be omnipotent, Manicheanism “diminishes the absurdity,” in Camus’ words, “of an intimate relationship between suffering humanity and an implacable god’” (qtd. in Smith 545). Another reason that Mailer was drawn to this Manichean doctrine is that it restores substance to evil; that is, evil is not the perversion or absence of the good but an active force embodied by the world’s Archon and his minions. Third, Manicheanism, inherently existentialist, grants free will to human beings, whom Mailer regarded as microagents of benevolence or malevolence, existing on “some mediating level” (Time 1224) between “a Creator” and “an opposite Presence (to be called Satan, for short)” (qtd. in Levenda 1). --From publisher description.

This essay offers a Jungian reading of Ancient Evenings. Inspiring it is the fact that the novel’s central character, Menenhetet, corresponds to Jung’s description of the aimlessly peripatetic heroes of Egyptian mythology, who figuratively resemble “the wandering sun” (Aspects 22), a symbol of the ego, moving in repetitive cycles toward and away from the dark, primordial waters of the unconscious. Specifically, the tendencies and traits definitive of the ego inhabiting the second of three stages of the Hero archetype are similar to the features of Ancient Evenings that have resulted in its main critiques. Literalism, egotism, projection, narcissism, and sadomasochistic violence - interestingly, these terms itemize both the “unfortunate results” (Beebe, Aspects 14) of the ego’s “rejection of the unconscious” in the second stage of heroic-archetypal development, and the reasons that Ancient Evenings is commonly disparaged. For instance, the result of Mailer’s intention “to treat mythology as if it were real” (Whalen-Bridge, “Karma” 4) is its “outrageous literalism” (Bloom 33). Another criticism centers on the fact that the novel is set in ancient Egypt and based on the Egyptian Book of the Dead, but patently reflects the author’s fascination with his own ego (De Mott 3). A third involves the ways in which Ancient Evenings blurs distinctions between Egypt’s ancient culture and concepts about the United States that can be found throughout Mailer’s oeuvre (Olster 63). --From publisher description.