The carnival world of texts: intertextuality in Norman Mailer's biographical works

Confronting the representational crisis in postmodern technological society, Norman Mailer, the contemporary American writer, actively tries some new literary techniques and creates biographies of some special historical figures. The most prominent ones are those of Marilyn Monroe, Gary Gilmore and Lee Harvey Oswald. In these biographies Mailer breaks through the confining conventions of biographical narrative and incorporate newspaper clippings, other pre-existent biographies, his own published novel, photographs, private letters and diaries into his own writings, and therefore to form a carnival world of texts. This makes the readers realize that history exists empirically. But in epistemological terms, we can only know them through textual traces, which challenges even subverts the official version of history as grand-narrative and makes history textualized and diversified.