Literature and Psychology. XIX, No. 3-4, 1969: The Naked and the Dead: The Triumph of Impotence. Andrew Gordon. Pp. 3-13.

Identifying the psychic pattern of all of Mailer's work as anal-phallic, Gordon notes the obsession with feces and the development of an 'eschatology of scatology' in his novels. The family trinity of son, father, and mother is repeated in all of his fiction. The son is the hero—innocent, tormented, and blameless—who must achieve masculinity in an ugly, anal world. The father (or father-figure) is either brutal and reactionary or kind and weak, but in either case the son must best him. Finally, there is the mother-figure, usually the center of the action, aggressive, dominating, belittling, and castrating to men. Mailer's hero is not only genitally inhibited (often impotent, always full of castration anxiety) but also, having fixated on or regressed to the anal stage, he is anally inhibited because of the fear of feces instilled in him by his mother. Mailer's characters thus show either an extreme anal-phallic restraint or an extreme letting go, but nothing in between. They are fearful of impotence and castration, anally regressed, and latently homosexual. Although this essay deals mainly with The Naked and the Dead, Gordon believes the same pattern may be found in all of Mailer's works.