I just read Norman Mailer’s novel on Hitler’s childhood, The Castle in the Forest. It says fairly little about Hitler, who doesn’t appear much. There’s more on Hitler’s dad, who fascinated the author, but the figure I found intriguing was the narrator, an assistant devil assigned to facilitate development of the future führer.

Yet how much do you explain about Hitler by saying the devil made him do it, literally? (Norman Mailer says he wanted to do a better job than a 1998 book he had read called Explaining Hitler.)

Writers like to see themselves as independent minds, but they, like everyone, slide into what Harold Innis called the intellectual grooves of motion of their times. Evil has been a widely used term in public discussion since 9/11. George Bush explained that by saying: “They are evil.” In The Globe and Mail, Marcus Gee wrote: “Bin Laden is the nearest to an embodiment of pure evil I’ve come across in my lifetime.” Now, Norman Mailer.

What I find interesting about the book’s narrator is that he doesn’t really explain Hitler. He only enters Hitler’s life occasionally and he admits there’s a lot he doesn’t know about why things happen.

True, he’s just an assistant devil, and he isn’t even sure his boss (the Maestro) is the real guy in charge. So Norman Mailer’s use of the devil as a way to explain Hitler isn’t so much a metaphor as a way of saying he doesn’t have a real explanation. It’s a question, not an answer.

My own view, if you care to know, is that there is no explanation for Hitler, and the search for one is a waste of time since human events don’t have causes the way events in the natural sciences do. There are circumstances in which social or historical events occur, but they always might or might not have happened; will enters into it and so does chance.

No one could know what Hitler would do, only what he might do. It looks ordained afterward. Hitler could or could not have been the Hitler of history, just as Norman Mailer could or could not have become a “major” novelist. There may have been greater — however you define that — novelists than he who never published, or whose novels vanished, or who didn’t even write.

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do to affect history; it means the opposite. We can affect the circumstances in which individuals operate, and make outcomes less or more likely. Take Osama bin Laden. Whatever he “is,” metaphysically, 9/11 would have been less likely without a century of harsh interference in the Arab and Muslim worlds. And if you want to affect the chances of future bin Ladens, it wouldn’t hurt to start by making a real attempt to lance the awful boil of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Perhaps the Mailer premise about Hitler was meant to seem shocking and radical, by invoking the devil, or an intractable realm of evil. But that would have been more daring back in the mid-20th century, during Norman Mailer’s youth, when there was far more optimism: Hitler had been defeated, the UN was created, hopes were bright. Despairing over radical evil then might have seemed audacious. Now, it’s a trope.

Far more challenging and iconoclastic today, I’d argue, would be claiming that utopias can still be built, and goals such as peace, equality and abundance for all can be achieved. That sounds more like intellectual risk-taking than intoning that evil is loose in the world.

What about the Pickton trial? That pig farm (as depicted in the Crown’s case) has a satanic quality. Canadians are said to be “turning off” the case. The media are starting to shun it, weirdly, because it’s a “media circus.” Prime Minister Stephen Harper voiced “revulsion” over the “gruesome trial details,” though he wouldn’t consider legalizing prostitution as a step to preventing such events. Too hopeful, perhaps, or the wrong kind of Christian response.

The Mailer narrator says Hitler was “the most mysterious human being of the century.” But you can choose the mysteries that befuddle you. Poet Milton Acorn wrote that he was “less struck by gunfights in the Avenue than by the newsie with his chapped face calling a shabby poet back for his change.” That, too, calls for explanation, even if it doesn’t have one.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.