Aquarius
Aquarius is the third-person persona through which Mailer narrates the Apollo 11 moon shot in Of a Fire on the Moon (71.1). Where The Armies of the Night had cast its narrator as “Mailer,” a comic-heroic protagonist, Aquarius is deliberately deflated — a watcher “detached this season from the imperial demands of his ego,” “a spirit of some just-consumed essence of the past,” who takes “the liberty to christen himself Aquarius.” The name registers both the astrological “Age of Aquarius” of the late 1960s and Mailer’s sense of himself as diminished before the impersonal, technological grandeur of the space program.
The persona is elaborated across the 1971 moon coverage — Mailer discusses it directly in the Digby Diehl interviews (“71.6,” “71.7”) and in Leticia Kent’s “The Rape of the Moon” (71.4) — and it shades into the self-naming play of The Prisoner of Sex (71.20), where the narrator weighs “Prisoner” against “Prizewinner.” In St. George and the Godfather (72.17) Mailer revives the mask explicitly, “obliged to call himself Aquarius again” at the 1972 conventions despite a Voltairean reluctance to repeat a technique. Aquarius belongs to the sequence of distancing third-person masks (“Mailer,” “Aquarius,” later “the Prisoner”) by which Mailer made his own subjectivity an instrument of nonfiction narrative.
Related pages
- Of a Fire on the Moon (71.1) | The Prisoner of Sex (71.20)
- A Fire on the Moon (69.81) | 1971
- The Rape of the Moon: Norman Mailer Talks about Sexual Lunacy and the WASP (71.4) | St. George and the Godfather (72.17)