Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Destroy time, and chaos may be ordered
Norman Mailer’s short story about a comic writer with an ambition to transcend his middle-class existence is at times funny and at times tragic. The snippet of information offered in the ever-useful footnotes of Norton Anthology which tells the reader that Mailer himself planned to use the story as the prologue to a mammoth eight-part novel about the adventures of a mythical hero, Sergius O’Shaughnessy, also casts a comical light over the autobiographical aspects of the story’s main character’s sloppy attempts at starting the ”Great American Novel”.
Mailer’s planned hero, Sergius O’Shaughnessy, is present in The Man Who Studied Yoga in several separate fragments. The protagonist, Sam Slovoda, goes regularly to a psychoterapist called Dr. Sergius, and two O’Shaugnessys appear in the story: Cassius, a near-mythical mixture of Corto Maltese, Gandhi and Hunter S. Thompson, and Jerry, a fallen radical leader of the 30s who has become an alcoholic.
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