American novelist and self-styled "existential hero," introduced in Dialogue 25 as the one figure in the Theall–Barthelme–John Cage circle whose refusal to give up value judgments set him against McLuhan. Where the crowd that "ignited McLuhan around 1960" liked his neutral, amoral stance, Mailer kept the moralizing — and so became McLuhan's standing debater and, in Bob's reading, the man who "redid the hot image" of Wyndham Lewis.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the crowd's lone dissenter — the value-judgment holdout against the amoral cool that ignited McLuhan around 1960, the "existential hero" whose fixed point of view is McLuhan's structural opposite
Amid the neutral, amoral cool that "ignited McLuhan around 1960," Mailer alone kept his value judgments — the holdout who became "a debater of McLuhan from that point on."
"the only one of that crowd who stuck with value judgments was Norman Mailer."
Mailer's "existential hero" is the structural inverse of McLuhan's stance — for the hero a fixed point of view "on everything, including things that you need to be moral about" is the load-bearing trait, the very thing McLuhan's cool refused; Bob adds that Mailer "redid the hot image of Lewis," the aggressive public "enemy" people once took Lewis to be.
"Mailer was sort of considered himself an existential hero."
The 1967 debate reweighed by time — Mailer’s hot confrontation once looked like the champion’s, but a cool culture forty years on finds him "an idiot," McLuhan’s stillness the winner
The 1967 debate reweighed by a cool culture — where 1960s audiences wanted Mailer’s hot confrontation, a viewer forty years later calls him "an idiot," and McLuhan’s stillness reads as the win.
"Norman Mailer is an idiot. He was so uncool."
Connections
The "existential hero" whose fixed point of view is the structural opposite of McLuhan's amoral, value-free cool.
Bob says Mailer "redid the hot image of Lewis" — becoming the aggressive public "enemy" people once took Lewis to be.