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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

2025-04-21T01:13:15Z

CVinson: /* HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY */

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the “disturbing” by “going to the root of what is written about” and capturing life “as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which “is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’ perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’ vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (98). Mailer writes,
{{quote|It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, ''Cannibals'' 98). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, self-developed philosophy of writing and art.

Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (''Advertisements'' 17). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions, see self and world more clearly, get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354).The catalyst for this perceptual shift, according to existentialists, is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 2, 9) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it, of making “something of his own,” of creating “art” and becoming “artist” (100) or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom 8–9). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death 278) and the importance of“creating their lives as ‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 3)—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work (63).It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art. This existential focus on the study of death, the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.

===='''HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY'''====

Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always” (''Death'' 2), Mailer envisions as “the existential state, of the novel writer” in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards” 393). Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the “genuinely disturbing”and “the bad and ugly” in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John” 354; qtd. in Foster 40; qtd. in Baker 153). If they write “purely enough”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to. Importantly, imbedded in both authors’ philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, ''Sun'' 152).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday 86). “Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found ''Death in the Afternoon'' marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (243). Mailer was frustrated by critics of ''An American Dream'', who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke 98).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
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Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, . Print.
Broer, Lawrence R. Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy. University, AL: U of Alabama P, . Print.
de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
: . Print.
Finkelstein, Sidney. Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. New York: International Publishers, . Print.
Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
Paul, MN: North Central Publishing Co., . Print.
Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
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Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
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Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
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Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., . Print.
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the “disturbing” by “going to the root of what is written about” and capturing life “as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which “is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’ perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’ vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (98). Mailer writes,
{{quote|It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, ''Cannibals'' 98). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, self-developed philosophy of writing and art.

Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (''Advertisements'' 17). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions, see self and world more clearly, get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354).The catalyst for this perceptual shift, according to existentialists, is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 2, 9) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it, of making “something of his own,” of creating “art” and becoming “artist” (100) or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom 8–9). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death 278) and the importance of“creating their lives as ‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 3)—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work (63).It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art. This existential focus on the study of death, the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.

===='''HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY'''====

Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always” (''Death'' 2), Mailer envisions as “the existential state, of the novel writer” in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards” 393). Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the “genuinely disturbing”and “the bad and ugly” in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John” 354; qtd. in Foster 40; qtd. in Baker 153). If they write “purely enough”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to. Importantly, imbedded in both authors’ philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, ''Sun'' 152).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday 86).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found ''Death in the Afternoon'' marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of ''An American Dream'', who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
Adams, Laura. Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer. Athens: Ohio UP, . Print.
Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, . Print.
Broer, Lawrence R. Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy. University, AL: U of Alabama P, . Print.
de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
: . Print.
Finkelstein, Sidney. Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. New York: International Publishers, . Print.
Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
Paul, MN: North Central Publishing Co., . Print.
Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
Killinger, John. Hemingway and the Dead Gods. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, . Print.
Kvam, Wayne E. Hemingway in Germany: The Fiction, the Legend, and the Critics. Athens: Ohio UP,
. Print.
Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. “The Hazards and Sources of Writing.” Michigan Quarterly Review . (): –.
Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
———. Interview by Steven Marcus.“The Art of Fiction: No.  Norman Mailer.”The Paris Review
 (): –. Print.
Mailer, Norman and John Buffalo Mailer. The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and Bad Conscience in America. New York: Nation Books, . Print.
Mills, Jon. “The False Dasein: From Heidegger to Sartre and Pyschoanalysis.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology . (): –. EBSCOhost. Web.  Aug. .
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., . Print.
Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
Yalom, Irvin. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, . Print.

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the “disturbing” by “going to the root of what is written about” and capturing life “as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which “is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’ perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’ vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (98). Mailer writes,
{{quote|It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, ''Cannibals'' 98). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, self-developed philosophy of writing and art.

Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (''Advertisements'' 17). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions, see self and world more clearly, get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354).The catalyst for this perceptual shift, according to existentialists, is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 2, 9) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it, of making “something of his own,” of creating “art” and becoming “artist” (100) or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom 8–9). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death 278) and the importance of“creating their lives as ‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 3)—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work (63).It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art. This existential focus on the study of death, the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.

===='''HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY'''====

Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always” (''Death'' 2), Mailer envisions as “the existential state, of the novel writer” in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards” 393). Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the “genuinely disturbing”and “the bad and ugly” in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John” 354; qtd. in Foster 40; qtd. in Baker 153). If they write “purely enough”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to. Importantly, imbedded in both authors’ philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
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———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the “disturbing” by “going to the root of what is written about” and capturing life “as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which “is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’ perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’ vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (98). Mailer writes,
{{quote|It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, ''Cannibals'' 98). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, self-developed philosophy of writing and art.

Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (''Advertisements'' 17). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions, see self and world more clearly, get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354).The catalyst for this perceptual shift, according to existentialists, is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 2, 9) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it, of making “something of his own,” of creating “art” and becoming “artist” (100) or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom 8–9). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death 278) and the importance of“creating their lives as ‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 3)—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work (63).It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art. This existential focus on the study of death, the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.

===='''HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY'''====

Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always” (''Death'' 2), Mailer envisions as “the existential state, of the novel writer” in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards” 393). Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the “genuinely disturbing”and “the bad and ugly” in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John” 354; qtd. in Foster 40; qtd. in Baker 153).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
Adams, Laura. Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer. Athens: Ohio UP, . Print.
Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, . Print.
Broer, Lawrence R. Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy. University, AL: U of Alabama P, . Print.
de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
: . Print.
Finkelstein, Sidney. Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. New York: International Publishers, . Print.
Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
Paul, MN: North Central Publishing Co., . Print.
Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
Killinger, John. Hemingway and the Dead Gods. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, . Print.
Kvam, Wayne E. Hemingway in Germany: The Fiction, the Legend, and the Critics. Athens: Ohio UP,
. Print.
Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. “The Hazards and Sources of Writing.” Michigan Quarterly Review . (): –.
Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
———. Interview by Steven Marcus.“The Art of Fiction: No.  Norman Mailer.”The Paris Review
 (): –. Print.
Mailer, Norman and John Buffalo Mailer. The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and Bad Conscience in America. New York: Nation Books, . Print.
Mills, Jon. “The False Dasein: From Heidegger to Sartre and Pyschoanalysis.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology . (): –. EBSCOhost. Web.  Aug. .
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., . Print.
Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
Yalom, Irvin. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, . Print.

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the “disturbing” by “going to the root of what is written about” and capturing life “as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which “is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’ perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’ vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (98). Mailer writes,
{{quote|It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, ''Cannibals'' 98). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, self-developed philosophy of writing and art.

Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (''Advertisements'' 17). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions, see self and world more clearly, get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354).The catalyst for this perceptual shift, according to existentialists, is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 2, 9) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it, of making “something of his own,” of creating “art” and becoming “artist” (100) or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom 8–9). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death 278) and the importance of“creating their lives as ‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 3)—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work (63).It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art. This existential focus on the study of death, the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.

===='''HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY'''====

Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(''Death'' 2),Mailer envisions as“the existential state, of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards” 393).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the “genuinely disturbing”and “the bad and ugly” in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John” 354; qtd. in Foster 40; qtd. in Baker 153).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
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Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, . Print.
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de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
: . Print.
Finkelstein, Sidney. Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. New York: International Publishers, . Print.
Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
Paul, MN: North Central Publishing Co., . Print.
Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
Killinger, John. Hemingway and the Dead Gods. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, . Print.
Kvam, Wayne E. Hemingway in Germany: The Fiction, the Legend, and the Critics. Athens: Ohio UP,
. Print.
Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. “The Hazards and Sources of Writing.” Michigan Quarterly Review . (): –.
Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
———. Interview by Steven Marcus.“The Art of Fiction: No.  Norman Mailer.”The Paris Review
 (): –. Print.
Mailer, Norman and John Buffalo Mailer. The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and Bad Conscience in America. New York: Nation Books, . Print.
Mills, Jon. “The False Dasein: From Heidegger to Sartre and Pyschoanalysis.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology . (): –. EBSCOhost. Web.  Aug. .
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., . Print.
Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
Yalom, Irvin. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, . Print.

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the “disturbing” by “going to the root of what is written about” and capturing life “as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which “is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’ perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’ vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (98). Mailer writes,
{{quote|It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, ''Cannibals'' 98). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, self-developed philosophy of writing and art.

Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (''Advertisements'' 17). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions, see self and world more clearly, get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354).The catalyst for this perceptual shift, according to existentialists, is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 2, 9) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it, of making “something of his own,” of creating “art” and becoming “artist” (100) or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom 8–9). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death 278) and the importance of“creating their lives as ‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 3)—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work (63).It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art. This existential focus on the study of death, the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.

===='''HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY'''====

Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(''Death'' 2),Mailer envisions as“the existential state, of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards” 393).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John” 354; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
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: . Print.
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Paul, MN: North Central Publishing Co., . Print.
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Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the “disturbing” by “going to the root of what is written about” and capturing life “as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which “is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’ perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’ vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (98). Mailer writes,
{{quote|It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, ''Cannibals'' 98). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, self-developed philosophy of writing and art.

Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (''Advertisements'' 17). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions, see self and world more clearly, get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354).The catalyst for this perceptual shift, according to existentialists, is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 2, 9) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it, of making “something of his own,” of creating “art” and becoming “artist” (100) or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom 8–9). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death 278) and the importance of“creating their lives as ‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 3)—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work (63).It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art. This existential focus on the study of death, the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.

===='''HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY'''====

Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(''Death'' 2),Mailer envisions as“the existential state, of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards” 393).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
Adams, Laura. Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer. Athens: Ohio UP, . Print.
Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, . Print.
Broer, Lawrence R. Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy. University, AL: U of Alabama P, . Print.
de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
: . Print.
Finkelstein, Sidney. Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. New York: International Publishers, . Print.
Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
Paul, MN: North Central Publishing Co., . Print.
Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
Killinger, John. Hemingway and the Dead Gods. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, . Print.
Kvam, Wayne E. Hemingway in Germany: The Fiction, the Legend, and the Critics. Athens: Ohio UP,
. Print.
Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. “The Hazards and Sources of Writing.” Michigan Quarterly Review . (): –.
Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
———. Interview by Steven Marcus.“The Art of Fiction: No.  Norman Mailer.”The Paris Review
 (): –. Print.
Mailer, Norman and John Buffalo Mailer. The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and Bad Conscience in America. New York: Nation Books, . Print.
Mills, Jon. “The False Dasein: From Heidegger to Sartre and Pyschoanalysis.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology . (): –. EBSCOhost. Web.  Aug. .
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., . Print.
Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
Yalom, Irvin. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, . Print.

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the “disturbing” by “going to the root of what is written about” and capturing life “as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which “is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’ perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’ vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (98). Mailer writes,
{{quote|It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, ''Cannibals'' 98). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, self-developed philosophy of writing and art.

Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (''Advertisements'' 17). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions, see self and world more clearly, get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354).The catalyst for this perceptual shift, according to existentialists, is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 2, 9) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it, of making “something of his own,” of creating “art” and becoming “artist” (100) or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom 8–9). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death 278) and the importance of“creating their lives as ‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 3)—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work (63).It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art. This existential focus on the study of death, the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.

===='''HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY'''====

Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
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de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
: . Print.
Finkelstein, Sidney. Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. New York: International Publishers, . Print.
Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
Paul, MN: North Central Publishing Co., . Print.
Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
Killinger, John. Hemingway and the Dead Gods. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, . Print.
Kvam, Wayne E. Hemingway in Germany: The Fiction, the Legend, and the Critics. Athens: Ohio UP,
. Print.
Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. “The Hazards and Sources of Writing.” Michigan Quarterly Review . (): –.
Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
———. Interview by Steven Marcus.“The Art of Fiction: No.  Norman Mailer.”The Paris Review
 (): –. Print.
Mailer, Norman and John Buffalo Mailer. The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and Bad Conscience in America. New York: Nation Books, . Print.
Mills, Jon. “The False Dasein: From Heidegger to Sartre and Pyschoanalysis.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology . (): –. EBSCOhost. Web.  Aug. .
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., . Print.
Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
Yalom, Irvin. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, . Print.

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the “disturbing” by “going to the root of what is written about” and capturing life “as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which “is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’ perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’ vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (98). Mailer writes,
{{quote|It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, ''Cannibals'' 98). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, self-developed philosophy of writing and art.

Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (''Advertisements'' 17). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions, see self and world more clearly, get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354).The catalyst for this perceptual shift, according to existentialists, is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 2, 9) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it, of making “something of his own,” of creating “art” and becoming “artist” (100) or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom 8–9). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death 278) and the importance of“creating their lives as ‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 3)—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work (63).It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art. This existential focus on the study of death, the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.

===="HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY"====

Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
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: . Print.
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Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the “disturbing” by “going to the root of what is written about” and capturing life “as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which “is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’ perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’ vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (98). Mailer writes,
{{quote|It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, ''Cannibals'' 98). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, self-developed philosophy of writing and art.

Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (''Advertisements'' 17). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions, see self and world more clearly, get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354).The catalyst for this perceptual shift, according to existentialists, is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 2, 9) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it, of making “something of his own,” of creating “art” and becoming “artist” (100) or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom 8–9). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death 278) and the importance of“creating their lives as ‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 3)—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work (63).It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art. This existential focus on the study of death, the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.

=HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY=

Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
Adams, Laura. Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer. Athens: Ohio UP, . Print.
Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, . Print.
Broer, Lawrence R. Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy. University, AL: U of Alabama P, . Print.
de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
: . Print.
Finkelstein, Sidney. Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. New York: International Publishers, . Print.
Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
Paul, MN: North Central Publishing Co., . Print.
Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
Killinger, John. Hemingway and the Dead Gods. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, . Print.
Kvam, Wayne E. Hemingway in Germany: The Fiction, the Legend, and the Critics. Athens: Ohio UP,
. Print.
Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. “The Hazards and Sources of Writing.” Michigan Quarterly Review . (): –.
Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
———. Interview by Steven Marcus.“The Art of Fiction: No.  Norman Mailer.”The Paris Review
 (): –. Print.
Mailer, Norman and John Buffalo Mailer. The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and Bad Conscience in America. New York: Nation Books, . Print.
Mills, Jon. “The False Dasein: From Heidegger to Sartre and Pyschoanalysis.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology . (): –. EBSCOhost. Web.  Aug. .
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., . Print.
Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
Yalom, Irvin. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, . Print.

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the “disturbing” by “going to the root of what is written about” and capturing life “as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which “is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’ perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’ vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (98). Mailer writes,
{{quote|It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, ''Cannibals'' 98). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, self-developed philosophy of writing and art.

Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (''Advertisements'' 17). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions, see self and world more clearly, get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354).The catalyst for this perceptual shift, according to existentialists, is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 2, 9) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it, of making “something of his own,” of creating “art” and becoming “artist” (100) or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom 8–9). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death 278) and the importance of“creating their lives as ‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 3)—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work (63).It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art. This existential focus on the study of death, the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.

==HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY==

Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
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Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, . Print.
Broer, Lawrence R. Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy. University, AL: U of Alabama P, . Print.
de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
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Finkelstein, Sidney. Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. New York: International Publishers, . Print.
Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
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Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
Killinger, John. Hemingway and the Dead Gods. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, . Print.
Kvam, Wayne E. Hemingway in Germany: The Fiction, the Legend, and the Critics. Athens: Ohio UP,
. Print.
Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. “The Hazards and Sources of Writing.” Michigan Quarterly Review . (): –.
Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
———. Interview by Steven Marcus.“The Art of Fiction: No.  Norman Mailer.”The Paris Review
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Mailer, Norman and John Buffalo Mailer. The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and Bad Conscience in America. New York: Nation Books, . Print.
Mills, Jon. “The False Dasein: From Heidegger to Sartre and Pyschoanalysis.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology . (): –. EBSCOhost. Web.  Aug. .
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., . Print.
Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
Yalom, Irvin. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, . Print.

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the “disturbing” by “going to the root of what is written about” and capturing life “as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which “is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’ perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’ vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (98). Mailer writes,
{{quote|It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, ''Cannibals'' 98). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, self-developed philosophy of writing and art.

Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (''Advertisements'' 17). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions, see self and world more clearly, get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354).The catalyst for this perceptual shift, according to existentialists, is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 2, 9) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it, of making “something of his own,” of creating “art” and becoming “artist” (100) or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom 8–9). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death 278) and the importance of“creating their lives as ‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 3)—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work (63).It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
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Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the “disturbing” by “going to the root of what is written about” and capturing life “as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which “is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’ perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’ vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (98). Mailer writes,
{{quote|It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, ''Cannibals'' 98). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, self-developed philosophy of writing and art.

Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (''Advertisements'' 17). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions, see self and world more clearly, get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354).The catalyst for this perceptual shift, according to existentialists, is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 2, 9) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it, of making “something of his own,” of creating “art” and becoming “artist” (100) or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom 8–9). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death 278) and the importance of“creating their lives as ‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
Adams, Laura. Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer. Athens: Ohio UP, . Print.
Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, . Print.
Broer, Lawrence R. Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy. University, AL: U of Alabama P, . Print.
de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
: . Print.
Finkelstein, Sidney. Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. New York: International Publishers, . Print.
Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
Paul, MN: North Central Publishing Co., . Print.
Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
Killinger, John. Hemingway and the Dead Gods. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, . Print.
Kvam, Wayne E. Hemingway in Germany: The Fiction, the Legend, and the Critics. Athens: Ohio UP,
. Print.
Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. “The Hazards and Sources of Writing.” Michigan Quarterly Review . (): –.
Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
———. Interview by Steven Marcus.“The Art of Fiction: No.  Norman Mailer.”The Paris Review
 (): –. Print.
Mailer, Norman and John Buffalo Mailer. The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and Bad Conscience in America. New York: Nation Books, . Print.
Mills, Jon. “The False Dasein: From Heidegger to Sartre and Pyschoanalysis.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology . (): –. EBSCOhost. Web.  Aug. .
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., . Print.
Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
Yalom, Irvin. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, . Print.

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the “disturbing” by “going to the root of what is written about” and capturing life “as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which “is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’ perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’ vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (98). Mailer writes,
{{quote|It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, ''Cannibals'' 98). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, self-developed philosophy of writing and art.

Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (''Advertisements'' 17). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions, see self and world more clearly, get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354).The catalyst for this perceptual shift, according to existentialists, is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 2, 9) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it, of making “something of his own,” of creating “art” and becoming “artist” (100) or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
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de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
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Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
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Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
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Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
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Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., . Print.
Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’ vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (98). Mailer writes,
{{quote|It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, ''Cannibals'' 98). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, self-developed philosophy of writing and art.

Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (''Advertisements'' 17). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions, see self and world more clearly, get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354).The catalyst for this perceptual shift, according to existentialists, is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 2, 9) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it, of making “something of his own,” of creating “art” and becoming “artist” (100) or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
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Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’ vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (98). Mailer writes,
{{quote|It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, ''Cannibals'' 98). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, self-developed philosophy of writing and art.

Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (''Advertisements'' 17). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions, see self and world more clearly, get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” 354).The catalyst for this perceptual shift, according to existentialists, is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death , ) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it,of making“something of his own,”of creating“art”and becoming “artist” () or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
Adams, Laura. Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer. Athens: Ohio UP, . Print.
Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, . Print.
Broer, Lawrence R. Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy. University, AL: U of Alabama P, . Print.
de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
: . Print.
Finkelstein, Sidney. Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. New York: International Publishers, . Print.
Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
Paul, MN: North Central Publishing Co., . Print.
Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
Killinger, John. Hemingway and the Dead Gods. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, . Print.
Kvam, Wayne E. Hemingway in Germany: The Fiction, the Legend, and the Critics. Athens: Ohio UP,
. Print.
Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. “The Hazards and Sources of Writing.” Michigan Quarterly Review . (): –.
Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
———. Interview by Steven Marcus.“The Art of Fiction: No.  Norman Mailer.”The Paris Review
 (): –. Print.
Mailer, Norman and John Buffalo Mailer. The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and Bad Conscience in America. New York: Nation Books, . Print.
Mills, Jon. “The False Dasein: From Heidegger to Sartre and Pyschoanalysis.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology . (): –. EBSCOhost. Web.  Aug. .
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., . Print.
Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
Yalom, Irvin. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, . Print.

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’ vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (98). Mailer writes,
{{quote|It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, ''Cannibals'' 98). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” 354), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, self-developed philosophy of writing and art.

Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (''Advertisements'' 17). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions, see self and world more clearly, get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” ).The catalyst for this perceptual shift, according to existentialists, is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death , ) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it,of making“something of his own,”of creating“art”and becoming “artist” () or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
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de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
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Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
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Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
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Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
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Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
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Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., . Print.
Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’ vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In ''Cannibals and Christians'', Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (98). Mailer writes,
{{quote|It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, Cannibals ). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John”), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, selfdeveloped philosophy of writing and art.
Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (Advertisements ). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions,see self and world more clearly,get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” ).The catalyst for this perceptual shift,according to existentialists,is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death , ) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it,of making“something of his own,”of creating“art”and becoming “artist” () or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
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Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (5, 10), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (2), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more “clearly” and as a “whole”(4, 8–9). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (). Mailer writes,
It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster )
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, Cannibals ). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John”), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, selfdeveloped philosophy of writing and art.
Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (Advertisements ). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions,see self and world more clearly,get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” ).The catalyst for this perceptual shift,according to existentialists,is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death , ) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it,of making“something of his own,”of creating“art”and becoming “artist” () or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
Adams, Laura. Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer. Athens: Ohio UP, . Print.
Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, . Print.
Broer, Lawrence R. Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy. University, AL: U of Alabama P, . Print.
de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
: . Print.
Finkelstein, Sidney. Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. New York: International Publishers, . Print.
Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
Paul, MN: North Central Publishing Co., . Print.
Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
Killinger, John. Hemingway and the Dead Gods. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, . Print.
Kvam, Wayne E. Hemingway in Germany: The Fiction, the Legend, and the Critics. Athens: Ohio UP,
. Print.
Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. “The Hazards and Sources of Writing.” Michigan Quarterly Review . (): –.
Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
———. Interview by Steven Marcus.“The Art of Fiction: No.  Norman Mailer.”The Paris Review
 (): –. Print.
Mailer, Norman and John Buffalo Mailer. The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and Bad Conscience in America. New York: Nation Books, . Print.
Mills, Jon. “The False Dasein: From Heidegger to Sartre and Pyschoanalysis.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology . (): –. EBSCOhost. Web.  Aug. .
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., . Print.
Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
Yalom, Irvin. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, . Print.

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (, ), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more“clearly”and as a“whole”(, –). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (). Mailer writes,
It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster )
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, Cannibals ). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John”), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, selfdeveloped philosophy of writing and art.
Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (Advertisements ). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions,see self and world more clearly,get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” ).The catalyst for this perceptual shift,according to existentialists,is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death , ) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it,of making“something of his own,”of creating“art”and becoming “artist” () or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
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Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, . Print.
Broer, Lawrence R. Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy. University, AL: U of Alabama P, . Print.
de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
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Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
Paul, MN: North Central Publishing Co., . Print.
Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
Killinger, John. Hemingway and the Dead Gods. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, . Print.
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. Print.
Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
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Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
———. Interview by Steven Marcus.“The Art of Fiction: No.  Norman Mailer.”The Paris Review
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Mailer, Norman and John Buffalo Mailer. The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and Bad Conscience in America. New York: Nation Books, . Print.
Mills, Jon. “The False Dasein: From Heidegger to Sartre and Pyschoanalysis.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology . (): –. EBSCOhost. Web.  Aug. .
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., . Print.
Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.

According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,”“the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).

Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” ). In fact,in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon,Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (, ), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more“clearly”and as a“whole”(, –). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (). Mailer writes,
It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster )
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, Cannibals ). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John”), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, selfdeveloped philosophy of writing and art.
Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (Advertisements ). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions,see self and world more clearly,get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” ).The catalyst for this perceptual shift,according to existentialists,is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death , ) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it,of making“something of his own,”of creating“art”and becoming “artist” () or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
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Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.
According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,”“the purity,”“the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, Death ) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (–).
Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” ). In fact,in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon,Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (, ), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more“clearly”and as a“whole”(, –). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (). Mailer writes,
It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster )
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, Cannibals ). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John”), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, selfdeveloped philosophy of writing and art.
Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (Advertisements ). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions,see self and world more clearly,get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” ).The catalyst for this perceptual shift,according to existentialists,is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death , ) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it,of making“something of his own,”of creating“art”and becoming “artist” () or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
Adams, Laura. Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer. Athens: Ohio UP, . Print.
Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, . Print.
Broer, Lawrence R. Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy. University, AL: U of Alabama P, . Print.
de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
: . Print.
Finkelstein, Sidney. Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. New York: International Publishers, . Print.
Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
Paul, MN: North Central Publishing Co., . Print.
Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
Killinger, John. Hemingway and the Dead Gods. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, . Print.
Kvam, Wayne E. Hemingway in Germany: The Fiction, the Legend, and the Critics. Athens: Ohio UP,
. Print.
Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. “The Hazards and Sources of Writing.” Michigan Quarterly Review . (): –.
Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
———. Interview by Steven Marcus.“The Art of Fiction: No.  Norman Mailer.”The Paris Review
 (): –. Print.
Mailer, Norman and John Buffalo Mailer. The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and Bad Conscience in America. New York: Nation Books, . Print.
Mills, Jon. “The False Dasein: From Heidegger to Sartre and Pyschoanalysis.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology . (): –. EBSCOhost. Web.  Aug. .
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., . Print.
Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
Yalom, Irvin. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, . Print.

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L. |abstract=An exploration of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s existentialism and his philosophy of art, focusing on the aspects of their commensurate interest in the violent and disturbing as it relates to their philosophies of writing and art, and reveals how both writers put their existentially founded philosophies in motion in order to teach readers how to live in the highly modern and post-modernized consumer culture both authors question and reject throughout their canon of works. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04san}}

{{dc|dc=I|n a 1964 interview published in ''The Paris Review''}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to “try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique “affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.{{pg|351|352}}

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true.”(Death 1) Echoing Hemingway’s standards, Mailer believes a writer must write “to the limit of one’s honesty.”(“Hazards” 399) But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes, “Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good.” (354) According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is.” (354) Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,

{{quote|how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)}}

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to, this “point of purity,” the author succeeds in showing life “as it really is.”(“Letter to John” 354) Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity” when he defines what he calls “the real thing”in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon''. (2) Hemingway writes,

{{quote|In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. (2)}}

Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely{{pg|352|353}}

enough,” captures the “motion and fact” of life as it really happens, then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader. (2) Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that “we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest.” (“Hazards” 399) Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and, correlatively, art and writing, life and death, and the violence, brutality, and cruelty of the bullfight and life. (2)

Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards, yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”

{{quote|You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—3 dimensions and if possible 4 that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker 135)}}

The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer: “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing.” (qtd. in Baker 153) Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,

{{quote|I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself, but rather effects which come from being truly radical, from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always}}{{pg|353|354}}

{{quote|disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster 40)}}

Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death –). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster ). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.
According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,”“the purity,”“the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, Death ) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves,and thus bring readers to see life,themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (–).
Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” ). In fact,in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon,Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (, ), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more“clearly”and as a“whole”(, –). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (). Mailer writes,
It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster )
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, Cannibals ). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John”), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, selfdeveloped philosophy of writing and art.
Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (Advertisements ). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions,see self and world more clearly,get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” ).The catalyst for this perceptual shift,according to existentialists,is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death , ) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it,of making“something of his own,”of creating“art”and becoming “artist” () or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
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Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, . Print.
Broer, Lawrence R. Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy. University, AL: U of Alabama P, . Print.
de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
: . Print.
Finkelstein, Sidney. Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. New York: International Publishers, . Print.
Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
Paul, MN: North Central Publishing Co., . Print.
Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
Killinger, John. Hemingway and the Dead Gods. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, . Print.
Kvam, Wayne E. Hemingway in Germany: The Fiction, the Legend, and the Critics. Athens: Ohio UP,
. Print.
Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. “The Hazards and Sources of Writing.” Michigan Quarterly Review . (): –.
Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
———. Interview by Steven Marcus.“The Art of Fiction: No.  Norman Mailer.”The Paris Review
 (): –. Print.
Mailer, Norman and John Buffalo Mailer. The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and Bad Conscience in America. New York: Nation Books, . Print.
Mills, Jon. “The False Dasein: From Heidegger to Sartre and Pyschoanalysis.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology . (): –. EBSCOhost. Web.  Aug. .
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., . Print.
Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
Yalom, Irvin. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, . Print.

User talk:CVinson/sandbox

2025-04-16T00:19:08Z

CVinson: /* Individual Wikipedia Project - Edith Elizabeth House */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{Byline|last=Leeds|first=Barry H.|}}

{{dc|dc=B|Y NOW IT IS MOUTHING A TRUISM TO POINT OUT THAT FIREARMS—}} have played
an iconic role in American history. Starting with this axiomatic assumption, one finds that guns are virtually ubiquitous in the works of those two peculiarly American authors, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer. Sometimes mere accoutrements or plot devices, they are more often significant thematically and symbolically.

Occasionally, serendipitous connections between the two authors present themselves. The best example of these may be the case of the 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. At the outset of ''A Farewell to Arms,'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1929|}} Hemingway describes how

<blockquote>
the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child. (4)
</blockquote>

This crucial passage foreshadows the thematic connection of rain, pregnancy, war and death in the novel, notably that of Catherine Barkley, which
makes ''Farewell'' so clearly a naturalistic work.

The 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano, standard issue for the Italian army throughout the first half of the twentieth century, was subsequently sold cheaply in large numbers through mail-order houses worldwide. One of these rifles, equipped with a 4-power scope, was ordered by Lee Harvey Oswald in
{{pg|157|158}}
1963, forty-five years after the 1918 setting of Hemingway’s ''Farewell'', and used to assassinate John F. Kennedy, as elaborated upon in Mailer’s ''Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery.'' {{sfn|Mailer|1995|}} This death of monumental, tragic proportions was brought about by the use of a $10 gun. Also in ''A Farewell to Arms,'' Frederick Henry feels faintly ridiculous in obeying the regulation that a uniformed officer be armed with a pistol even when out of combat (148).Yet after his
convalescence in Milan he uses his pistol (of unspecified caliber, but described
as “regulation”) during the next campaign to shoot one of two sergeants for disobedience and desertion (204). The point of the passage, one of many emphasizing the anti-heroic message of the novel, is that Henry and the enlisted man Bonello (who administers the ''coup de grâce'') are so inured to death in war that they are entirely dispassionate about it.

Most clearly parallel to this scene is the opening of ''An American Dream'' (1965) in which Stephen Richards Rojack kills four German machine-gunners with his .30 caliber M1 carbine. Portentously set under a full moon, the episode illustrates Rojack’s capacity for lethal violence and his perception
that murder has a sexual aspect to it.{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=3-6}} Yet, in a later
passage in the New England woods with his wife Deborah, he is shamed by her superior ability to hunt small animals with a .22 rifle, another of the
scenes that illuminates the constant competition in their intense love/hate relationship: “And in fact she was an exceptional hunter. She had gone on safari with her first husband and killed a wounded lion charging ten feet from her throat, she dropped an Alaskan bear with two shots to the heart (30/06
Winchester)” (35).

Moving to the beginning of Mailer’s career, it is obvious that every character in ''The Naked and the Dead''{{sfn|Mailer|1948|}} is issued regulation small arms: the officers with caliber .45 ACP Model 1911A1 pistols, the enlisted men with 30-06 M1 Garand rifles (as distinguished from Rojack’s smaller M1 carbine) or .45 Thompson submachine guns. Perhaps the most crucial episode in which one of these weapons figures is late in the book, during the abortive attempt by I & R platoon to climb Mt. Anaka, when Red Valsen rebels against Staff Sgt. Croft’s leadership and is forced to obey at gunpoint: “Croft . . . unslung his rifle, cocked the bolt leisurely. . . . It was worthless to temporize. Croft wanted to shoot him” (695-6).When Red capitulates, it signals the end of all resistance to Croft, which is emblematic of the allegorical conclusion by Mailer that reactionaries would dominate post-war America and which emphasizes the novel’s pessimistic message, its naturalistic bias.
{{pg|158|159}}
If war is the most obvious arena in which guns figure, it is not hard to find the others: hunting and, in urban civilian life, criminal pursuits. The
most striking of the latter occurs in Hemingway’s great story, “The Killers,” and Mailer’s 1984 murder mystery, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance''. In the former,
the two hit men, almost robotic in their mindless, inexorable commitment to a job that must be done, pursue their prey, ex-boxer Ole Anderson, with
a chilling, leisurely assurance and sawed-off 12 gauge shotguns. In the first cinematic version of the story,{{sfn|Hemingway|1946|}} a classic ''film noir'' with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner in their first starring roles, the killers (one of whom is William Conrad, later of TV“Cannon” fame) use more pedestrian Smith &
Wesson Model 10 .38 Special revolvers. As in Hemingway’s story, Ole Anderson, in true naturalistic fashion, passively awaits his death.

In ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', several of the seven violent deaths are carried out by the three matching .22 automatic pistols bought by Meeks Wardley
Hilby III, including his own suicide and that of his doppelgänger Lonnie Pangborn. These parallels in death echo the sexual parallels in the lives of
these characters and the novel presents a sexual nexus in which virtually every character is attached carnally to several others.

In a more significant book, ''The Executioner’s Song''{{sfn|Mailer|1979|}}, the career criminal Gary Gilmore traffics in guns and murders with one. He is inept with the .32 automatic he uses in his two cold-blooded assassinations, for he shoots
himself in the hand after the second murder, and the bleeding wound casts immediate suspicion upon him and leads to his quick capture by the police.
This episode is in line with Gary’s failures throughout the book and his entire life.

In ''Why Are We in Vietnam?,''{{sfn|Mailer|1967|}} the metaphorical juxtaposition of over-armed Texans hunting in Alaska, and the parallel depredations of the U.S. Army upon the population of Vietnam is best expressed in the passage where DJ lists at length the battery of guns brought on the hunt, especially by his father, Rusty:

<blockquote>
Which brings up Rusty, who travels like a big-ass hunter. . . . yeah, he got for instance a .404 Jeffrey on a Mauser Magnum action with a Circassian walnut stock, one love of a custom job by Biesen with Zeiss Zielklein 2 on Griffin & Howe side mount for Gun #1. Gun #2 is Model 70 Winchester rechambered to .300 Weatherly Magnum, Stith Bear Cub scope, birds’-eye maple
</blockquote>

{{pg|159|160}}

<blockquote>
stock, etcetera. . . . Gun #3 is Winslow Regimental Grade 7 mm. Remington Magnum with FN Supreme 400 action and Premium Grade Douglas barrel, ivory and ebony inlays in the stock, basket weave carving on both sides of the forearm and pistol grip, Redfield Jr. mounts, Redfield 2X-7X (79-80)
</blockquote>

Despite this impressive array of weaponry, Rusty selfishly fails his son by his lack of a sportsmanlike hunter’s ethics. Later in the novel, it is only by divesting themselves of all weapons and other equipment that DJ and his best friend Tex Hyde are able to experience a transcendent oneness with nature.

In a similar situation but without the devastating irony, Hemingway equips the title character in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” with a 30-06 rifle and 220 grain solid slugs for lion and Cape buffalo. The professional hunter, Robert Wilson, based on the famous Philip Percival with whom Hemingway had hunted in Africa, carries a “shockingly big-bored".505 Gibbs “with a muzzle velocity of two tons” (138). Here, Hemingway makes an error in nomenclature and physics, since muzzle ''velocity'' is measured in feet per second, and muzzle ''energy'' in foot pounds.Yet the .505 Gibbs, a highly specialized big game hunting rifle of which only eighty were ever manufactured, presents a very impressive picture in the mind’s eye. Finally, in one of the greatest examples of controlled ambiguity in literature, Macomber’s wife Margot, “shot at the buffalo with the 6.5 Mannlicher” (153), killing her husband. This 6.5 mm Mannlicher (a fine sporting arm quite different from the rough, mass produced Mannlicher Carcano of ''Farewell'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'') is the instrument of a death which lives forever in the shadowy ambiguity of Margot Macomber’s true intent, and which brings to a close the short, happy, existential life of the protagonist.

Part One of Hemingway’s ''To Have and Have Not'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1937|}} opens with an action sequence in which two politically opposed groups of Cubans kill each other with, among other guns, a 9 mm. Luger, a 12 gauge shotgun, and a .45 Thompson submachine gun. Later in the same section of the book, the protagonist Harry Morgan, a modern pirate like his namesake Henry Morgan (1635?–1688: a Welsh buccaneer in the Caribbean, later acting governor of Jamaica, 1680-82) carries out the dangerous mission of transporting (and double-crossing) illegal Chinese immigrants with the aid of a fairly standard but versatile battery consisting of a Winchester 30-30 lever action carbine, a
{{pg|160|161}}
12 gauge pump shotgun, and“the Smith and Wesson thirty-eight special I had when I was on the police force up in Miami“ {{sfn|Hemingway|1937|p=44}}

In Part Two, Harry is badly wounded in his right arm, which he subsequently loses, by the gunfire of law enforcement agents while smuggling liquor from Cuba. But in Part Three, the longest and most intense section of the book, he (literally) single-handedly kills, with his Thompson submachine gun, four Cuban revolutionaries escaping from a bank robbery. And yet, a true existential character trapped in a naturalistic world, he mutters with his dying breath this credo: “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance” (225).

Many guns figure prominently in the 1940 novel ''For Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|}} perhaps most significantly the Smith and Wesson .32 revolver handed down by Robert Jordan’s grandfather, a veteran of the American Civil War:

<blockquote>
It was a single action officer’s model .32 caliber and there was no trigger. It had the softest, sweetest trigger pull you had ever felt and it was always well oiled and the bore was clean although the finish was all worn off and the brown metal of the barrel and the cylinder was worn smooth from the leather of the holster. (Hemingway, ''For Whom'' ''336'')
</blockquote>

After Robert’s father commits suicide with this gun (like the author’s own father), although the revolver is lovingly described, Robert Jordan disposes of it in a memorable flashback by dropping it into an eight hundred feet deep lake (337). In the main action of the novel, Jordan is armed with an automatic pistol and a submachine gun, both unspecified as to caliber or manufacture. But other guns are more clearly defined: the Lewis gun of which the guerrilla band is so proud but whose obsolescence disappoints Jordan, and the 9mm Star pistol with which El Sordo carries out his “suicide” ruse on the fascists surrounding him in his last stand. Finally, Robert Jordan, waiting to make ''his'' last stand at the novel’s conclusion, grasps his submachine gun and thinks, “I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it” (467). Here, as with Harry Morgan, the firearm is an extension of the individual’s capacity to resist evil forces and fight with existential heroism for the good.
{{pg|161|162}}
Firearms play minor roles in other Hemingway novels and stories: the shotguns Col. Cantwell uses in the opening duck-hunting sequence of ''Across the River and into the Trees;''{{sfn|Hemingway|1950|}} the .357 Magnum carried by Thomas Hudson in ''Islands in the Stream''{{sfn|Hemingway|1970|}} and the Thompson gun used to shoot sharks in that novel; the shotgun used by the father in “A Day’s Wait” to dispense death to quail while his beloved son is lying in bed at home mistakenly expecting his own death. Finally, the last gun for Hemingway was the “double-barreled Boss shotgun with a tight choke” with which he took his own life.{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=563}}

What, finally, can we say about the role of guns in the works of Hemingway and Mailer? They are virtually ubiquitous, sometimes mere everyday equipment, more often objects of profound symbolic and thematic significance. But always, as in life, they loom as instruments that amplify the individual’s influence on the world around him. Whether used to hunt game, commit murder, or fight for a political ideal, every gun is a tool that extends the power of the existential human will in a world that would attempt to render it impotent.

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
*{{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1969 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1950 |title=Across the River and into the Trees |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1936 |title=A Day's Wait |chapter=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=34-36 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1940 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1970 |title=Islands in the Stream |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1936 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |chapter=The Killers |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=71-81 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1936 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |chapter=The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=121-154 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1937 |title=To Have and Have Not |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite AV media | people= Siodmak, Robert (Dir.), Lancaster, Burt (Perf.) | title=The Killers | medium=Film | publisher=Universal Pictures | location= | date=1946 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |location=New York |publisher=Dial Press |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1979 |title=The Executioner’s Song |location=Boston |publisher=Litte, Brown and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1995 |title=Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1984 |title=Tough Guys Don’t Dance |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=Why Are We in Vietnam? |location=New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam’s Sons |pages= |ref=harv}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

==Discussion Post - Week 3==

===Creating Better Headlines===

I learned a lot during this week's reading about crafting a headline that stands out to our readers, and how important a headline can be for the information you are writing about. I feel like the reading this week goes well with me learning more about how headers work and how to incorporate them. It is extremely important to have headers that draw your readers in, and it helps encourage them to read your article. According to Carroll, "research tells us that about 70% [of readers] will read at least your headline, so what you put in it is of paramount importance." {{sfn|Carroll|p=64}}

70% is a huge percentage of readers that are at least reading your header. This shows just how important it is to ensure that your header is a good one and creates a sense of curiosity that makes the reader want to know more. I was also able to read throughout this chapter different guidelines to follow that make headlines even better. I am thrilled to have been able to learn so much about how to create the best headlines, especially after I learned exactly how important they are.

===Content Gaps===

Based on the questions from the Wikipedia training this week, I also wanted to share some insight into my thoughts about content gaps. To me, a content gap is when a topic being discussed/written about is missing vital information to help the reader understanding what is being discussed. If there are pieces of information missing, then the reader will have a hard time understanding what they are supposed to be gaining from the information being shared with them. I think content gaps arise many times due to the lack of knowledge or history about these topics. Normally, we see content gaps occur with diverse topics and information about minority groups. We can see this happen due to the types of people that are contributing information to Wikipedia pages. Content gaps like these can make it difficult for topics to stay relevant in the world and will eventually cease to exist. What happens if we just stop discussing topics like a minority group in a small village in Africa. Those people just don't stop existing. Therefore, how do we ensure that there are groups out there that don't get forgotten?

===Feeling More Prepared===

This week definitely had lots of moving parts going on, however, I enjoyed getting to work on my sandbox and taking the time to learn a lot during the remediation project. I still have my moments where I get nervous that I have done something incorrectly, or forgotten a step, but overall I have enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I still believe I have a lot to learn, but it is becoming more enjoyable for me to learn about. I am looking forward to seeing what is coming up next week.

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* Carroll, Brian. *Writing and Editing for Digital Media*. New York: Routledge, 2023. 63-92 Print.

== Bibliography ==

For Wikipedia Project:

Allen, Leah Claire. “From New Criticism to Postcritique: Kate Millett’s Method in The History of The Present.” Criticism, vol. 63, no. 4, Oct. 2021, pp. 1–28. EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=65a6e2ce-d7d6-3a34-b449-432b3bd1aa9b.

Fishel, Elizabeth R. “The Prisoner of Sexism Jail and Roses: News: The Harvard Crimson.” News | The Harvard Crimson, The University Daily, www.thecrimson.com/article/1971/3/18/the-prisoner-of-sexism-jail-and/. Accessed 8 Apr. 2025.

== Individual Wikipedia Project - Edith Elizabeth House ==

"Edith Elizabeth House was born in 1903 in Winder, GA. She went on to become one of the first female graduates of the University of Georgia School of Law in 1925. Technically she was the second female graduate, since alphabetically her name came after classmate Gussie Brooks."

"She graduated in 1925 and was co-valedictorian of her class."

"While studying at the University of Georgia she was a member of Chi Omega sorority. Following graduation she began law practice with the firm of Baskin and Jordan in Clearwater, Florida. In 1929 House became chief clerk for U.S. District Attorney Wilburn P. Hughes in Jacksonville, Florida. She was notified she passed the Florida bar exam in 1930 and in 1931 was appointed Assistant U.S. Attorney, serving in Jacksonville."

"She received citation for 25 years of outstanding service in 1955, and in 1960 was appointed chief administrative aide to U.S. Attorney Coleman Madsen in Miami. Later, in 1963, she was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, becoming the first woman to hold that post in the state. She retired eight months later. In 1983 she was honored with the Edith House named lecture series establishment at the University of Georgia School of Law, featuring Professor Nadine Taub, of Rutgers Law School as the inaugural speaker."

At the University of Georgia, Edith held the title of President for the Student Government Association for Women.

" In December of 1987 House passed away, and was buried at Rose Hill Cemetery in Winder, GA."

"The [https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/indorgs%20wlsa/ Women Law Students Association] compiled a scrapbook in remembrance of House. The scrapbook ends with a news announcement of House's death and Gwen Wood's memorial tribute delivered on April 6, 1988. A second portrait of House painted by her sister-in-law Frankie House is also on display on the second floor of the Law Library Annex, gifted to the school by the House family in 1989."

[https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/1795409 Interactive Timeline of her life accomplishments].

User talk:CVinson/sandbox

2025-04-16T00:17:41Z

CVinson: /* Individual Wikipedia Project - Edith Elizabeth House */

User talk:CVinson/sandbox

2025-04-16T00:16:17Z

CVinson: /* Individual Wikipedia Project - Edith Elizabeth House */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{Byline|last=Leeds|first=Barry H.|}}

{{dc|dc=B|Y NOW IT IS MOUTHING A TRUISM TO POINT OUT THAT FIREARMS—}} have played
an iconic role in American history. Starting with this axiomatic assumption, one finds that guns are virtually ubiquitous in the works of those two peculiarly American authors, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer. Sometimes mere accoutrements or plot devices, they are more often significant thematically and symbolically.

Occasionally, serendipitous connections between the two authors present themselves. The best example of these may be the case of the 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. At the outset of ''A Farewell to Arms,'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1929|}} Hemingway describes how

<blockquote>
the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child. (4)
</blockquote>

This crucial passage foreshadows the thematic connection of rain, pregnancy, war and death in the novel, notably that of Catherine Barkley, which
makes ''Farewell'' so clearly a naturalistic work.

The 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano, standard issue for the Italian army throughout the first half of the twentieth century, was subsequently sold cheaply in large numbers through mail-order houses worldwide. One of these rifles, equipped with a 4-power scope, was ordered by Lee Harvey Oswald in
{{pg|157|158}}
1963, forty-five years after the 1918 setting of Hemingway’s ''Farewell'', and used to assassinate John F. Kennedy, as elaborated upon in Mailer’s ''Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery.'' {{sfn|Mailer|1995|}} This death of monumental, tragic proportions was brought about by the use of a $10 gun. Also in ''A Farewell to Arms,'' Frederick Henry feels faintly ridiculous in obeying the regulation that a uniformed officer be armed with a pistol even when out of combat (148).Yet after his
convalescence in Milan he uses his pistol (of unspecified caliber, but described
as “regulation”) during the next campaign to shoot one of two sergeants for disobedience and desertion (204). The point of the passage, one of many emphasizing the anti-heroic message of the novel, is that Henry and the enlisted man Bonello (who administers the ''coup de grâce'') are so inured to death in war that they are entirely dispassionate about it.

Most clearly parallel to this scene is the opening of ''An American Dream'' (1965) in which Stephen Richards Rojack kills four German machine-gunners with his .30 caliber M1 carbine. Portentously set under a full moon, the episode illustrates Rojack’s capacity for lethal violence and his perception
that murder has a sexual aspect to it.{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=3-6}} Yet, in a later
passage in the New England woods with his wife Deborah, he is shamed by her superior ability to hunt small animals with a .22 rifle, another of the
scenes that illuminates the constant competition in their intense love/hate relationship: “And in fact she was an exceptional hunter. She had gone on safari with her first husband and killed a wounded lion charging ten feet from her throat, she dropped an Alaskan bear with two shots to the heart (30/06
Winchester)” (35).

Moving to the beginning of Mailer’s career, it is obvious that every character in ''The Naked and the Dead''{{sfn|Mailer|1948|}} is issued regulation small arms: the officers with caliber .45 ACP Model 1911A1 pistols, the enlisted men with 30-06 M1 Garand rifles (as distinguished from Rojack’s smaller M1 carbine) or .45 Thompson submachine guns. Perhaps the most crucial episode in which one of these weapons figures is late in the book, during the abortive attempt by I & R platoon to climb Mt. Anaka, when Red Valsen rebels against Staff Sgt. Croft’s leadership and is forced to obey at gunpoint: “Croft . . . unslung his rifle, cocked the bolt leisurely. . . . It was worthless to temporize. Croft wanted to shoot him” (695-6).When Red capitulates, it signals the end of all resistance to Croft, which is emblematic of the allegorical conclusion by Mailer that reactionaries would dominate post-war America and which emphasizes the novel’s pessimistic message, its naturalistic bias.
{{pg|158|159}}
If war is the most obvious arena in which guns figure, it is not hard to find the others: hunting and, in urban civilian life, criminal pursuits. The
most striking of the latter occurs in Hemingway’s great story, “The Killers,” and Mailer’s 1984 murder mystery, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance''. In the former,
the two hit men, almost robotic in their mindless, inexorable commitment to a job that must be done, pursue their prey, ex-boxer Ole Anderson, with
a chilling, leisurely assurance and sawed-off 12 gauge shotguns. In the first cinematic version of the story,{{sfn|Hemingway|1946|}} a classic ''film noir'' with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner in their first starring roles, the killers (one of whom is William Conrad, later of TV“Cannon” fame) use more pedestrian Smith &
Wesson Model 10 .38 Special revolvers. As in Hemingway’s story, Ole Anderson, in true naturalistic fashion, passively awaits his death.

In ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', several of the seven violent deaths are carried out by the three matching .22 automatic pistols bought by Meeks Wardley
Hilby III, including his own suicide and that of his doppelgänger Lonnie Pangborn. These parallels in death echo the sexual parallels in the lives of
these characters and the novel presents a sexual nexus in which virtually every character is attached carnally to several others.

In a more significant book, ''The Executioner’s Song''{{sfn|Mailer|1979|}}, the career criminal Gary Gilmore traffics in guns and murders with one. He is inept with the .32 automatic he uses in his two cold-blooded assassinations, for he shoots
himself in the hand after the second murder, and the bleeding wound casts immediate suspicion upon him and leads to his quick capture by the police.
This episode is in line with Gary’s failures throughout the book and his entire life.

In ''Why Are We in Vietnam?,''{{sfn|Mailer|1967|}} the metaphorical juxtaposition of over-armed Texans hunting in Alaska, and the parallel depredations of the U.S. Army upon the population of Vietnam is best expressed in the passage where DJ lists at length the battery of guns brought on the hunt, especially by his father, Rusty:

<blockquote>
Which brings up Rusty, who travels like a big-ass hunter. . . . yeah, he got for instance a .404 Jeffrey on a Mauser Magnum action with a Circassian walnut stock, one love of a custom job by Biesen with Zeiss Zielklein 2 on Griffin & Howe side mount for Gun #1. Gun #2 is Model 70 Winchester rechambered to .300 Weatherly Magnum, Stith Bear Cub scope, birds’-eye maple
</blockquote>

{{pg|159|160}}

<blockquote>
stock, etcetera. . . . Gun #3 is Winslow Regimental Grade 7 mm. Remington Magnum with FN Supreme 400 action and Premium Grade Douglas barrel, ivory and ebony inlays in the stock, basket weave carving on both sides of the forearm and pistol grip, Redfield Jr. mounts, Redfield 2X-7X (79-80)
</blockquote>

Despite this impressive array of weaponry, Rusty selfishly fails his son by his lack of a sportsmanlike hunter’s ethics. Later in the novel, it is only by divesting themselves of all weapons and other equipment that DJ and his best friend Tex Hyde are able to experience a transcendent oneness with nature.

In a similar situation but without the devastating irony, Hemingway equips the title character in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” with a 30-06 rifle and 220 grain solid slugs for lion and Cape buffalo. The professional hunter, Robert Wilson, based on the famous Philip Percival with whom Hemingway had hunted in Africa, carries a “shockingly big-bored".505 Gibbs “with a muzzle velocity of two tons” (138). Here, Hemingway makes an error in nomenclature and physics, since muzzle ''velocity'' is measured in feet per second, and muzzle ''energy'' in foot pounds.Yet the .505 Gibbs, a highly specialized big game hunting rifle of which only eighty were ever manufactured, presents a very impressive picture in the mind’s eye. Finally, in one of the greatest examples of controlled ambiguity in literature, Macomber’s wife Margot, “shot at the buffalo with the 6.5 Mannlicher” (153), killing her husband. This 6.5 mm Mannlicher (a fine sporting arm quite different from the rough, mass produced Mannlicher Carcano of ''Farewell'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'') is the instrument of a death which lives forever in the shadowy ambiguity of Margot Macomber’s true intent, and which brings to a close the short, happy, existential life of the protagonist.

Part One of Hemingway’s ''To Have and Have Not'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1937|}} opens with an action sequence in which two politically opposed groups of Cubans kill each other with, among other guns, a 9 mm. Luger, a 12 gauge shotgun, and a .45 Thompson submachine gun. Later in the same section of the book, the protagonist Harry Morgan, a modern pirate like his namesake Henry Morgan (1635?–1688: a Welsh buccaneer in the Caribbean, later acting governor of Jamaica, 1680-82) carries out the dangerous mission of transporting (and double-crossing) illegal Chinese immigrants with the aid of a fairly standard but versatile battery consisting of a Winchester 30-30 lever action carbine, a
{{pg|160|161}}
12 gauge pump shotgun, and“the Smith and Wesson thirty-eight special I had when I was on the police force up in Miami“ {{sfn|Hemingway|1937|p=44}}

In Part Two, Harry is badly wounded in his right arm, which he subsequently loses, by the gunfire of law enforcement agents while smuggling liquor from Cuba. But in Part Three, the longest and most intense section of the book, he (literally) single-handedly kills, with his Thompson submachine gun, four Cuban revolutionaries escaping from a bank robbery. And yet, a true existential character trapped in a naturalistic world, he mutters with his dying breath this credo: “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance” (225).

Many guns figure prominently in the 1940 novel ''For Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|}} perhaps most significantly the Smith and Wesson .32 revolver handed down by Robert Jordan’s grandfather, a veteran of the American Civil War:

<blockquote>
It was a single action officer’s model .32 caliber and there was no trigger. It had the softest, sweetest trigger pull you had ever felt and it was always well oiled and the bore was clean although the finish was all worn off and the brown metal of the barrel and the cylinder was worn smooth from the leather of the holster. (Hemingway, ''For Whom'' ''336'')
</blockquote>

After Robert’s father commits suicide with this gun (like the author’s own father), although the revolver is lovingly described, Robert Jordan disposes of it in a memorable flashback by dropping it into an eight hundred feet deep lake (337). In the main action of the novel, Jordan is armed with an automatic pistol and a submachine gun, both unspecified as to caliber or manufacture. But other guns are more clearly defined: the Lewis gun of which the guerrilla band is so proud but whose obsolescence disappoints Jordan, and the 9mm Star pistol with which El Sordo carries out his “suicide” ruse on the fascists surrounding him in his last stand. Finally, Robert Jordan, waiting to make ''his'' last stand at the novel’s conclusion, grasps his submachine gun and thinks, “I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it” (467). Here, as with Harry Morgan, the firearm is an extension of the individual’s capacity to resist evil forces and fight with existential heroism for the good.
{{pg|161|162}}
Firearms play minor roles in other Hemingway novels and stories: the shotguns Col. Cantwell uses in the opening duck-hunting sequence of ''Across the River and into the Trees;''{{sfn|Hemingway|1950|}} the .357 Magnum carried by Thomas Hudson in ''Islands in the Stream''{{sfn|Hemingway|1970|}} and the Thompson gun used to shoot sharks in that novel; the shotgun used by the father in “A Day’s Wait” to dispense death to quail while his beloved son is lying in bed at home mistakenly expecting his own death. Finally, the last gun for Hemingway was the “double-barreled Boss shotgun with a tight choke” with which he took his own life.{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=563}}

What, finally, can we say about the role of guns in the works of Hemingway and Mailer? They are virtually ubiquitous, sometimes mere everyday equipment, more often objects of profound symbolic and thematic significance. But always, as in life, they loom as instruments that amplify the individual’s influence on the world around him. Whether used to hunt game, commit murder, or fight for a political ideal, every gun is a tool that extends the power of the existential human will in a world that would attempt to render it impotent.

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
*{{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1969 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1950 |title=Across the River and into the Trees |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1936 |title=A Day's Wait |chapter=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=34-36 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1940 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1970 |title=Islands in the Stream |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1936 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |chapter=The Killers |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=71-81 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1936 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |chapter=The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=121-154 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1937 |title=To Have and Have Not |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite AV media | people= Siodmak, Robert (Dir.), Lancaster, Burt (Perf.) | title=The Killers | medium=Film | publisher=Universal Pictures | location= | date=1946 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |location=New York |publisher=Dial Press |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1979 |title=The Executioner’s Song |location=Boston |publisher=Litte, Brown and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1995 |title=Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1984 |title=Tough Guys Don’t Dance |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=Why Are We in Vietnam? |location=New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam’s Sons |pages= |ref=harv}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

==Discussion Post - Week 3==

===Creating Better Headlines===

I learned a lot during this week's reading about crafting a headline that stands out to our readers, and how important a headline can be for the information you are writing about. I feel like the reading this week goes well with me learning more about how headers work and how to incorporate them. It is extremely important to have headers that draw your readers in, and it helps encourage them to read your article. According to Carroll, "research tells us that about 70% [of readers] will read at least your headline, so what you put in it is of paramount importance." {{sfn|Carroll|p=64}}

70% is a huge percentage of readers that are at least reading your header. This shows just how important it is to ensure that your header is a good one and creates a sense of curiosity that makes the reader want to know more. I was also able to read throughout this chapter different guidelines to follow that make headlines even better. I am thrilled to have been able to learn so much about how to create the best headlines, especially after I learned exactly how important they are.

===Content Gaps===

Based on the questions from the Wikipedia training this week, I also wanted to share some insight into my thoughts about content gaps. To me, a content gap is when a topic being discussed/written about is missing vital information to help the reader understanding what is being discussed. If there are pieces of information missing, then the reader will have a hard time understanding what they are supposed to be gaining from the information being shared with them. I think content gaps arise many times due to the lack of knowledge or history about these topics. Normally, we see content gaps occur with diverse topics and information about minority groups. We can see this happen due to the types of people that are contributing information to Wikipedia pages. Content gaps like these can make it difficult for topics to stay relevant in the world and will eventually cease to exist. What happens if we just stop discussing topics like a minority group in a small village in Africa. Those people just don't stop existing. Therefore, how do we ensure that there are groups out there that don't get forgotten?

===Feeling More Prepared===

This week definitely had lots of moving parts going on, however, I enjoyed getting to work on my sandbox and taking the time to learn a lot during the remediation project. I still have my moments where I get nervous that I have done something incorrectly, or forgotten a step, but overall I have enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I still believe I have a lot to learn, but it is becoming more enjoyable for me to learn about. I am looking forward to seeing what is coming up next week.

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* Carroll, Brian. *Writing and Editing for Digital Media*. New York: Routledge, 2023. 63-92 Print.

== Bibliography ==

For Wikipedia Project:

Allen, Leah Claire. “From New Criticism to Postcritique: Kate Millett’s Method in The History of The Present.” Criticism, vol. 63, no. 4, Oct. 2021, pp. 1–28. EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=65a6e2ce-d7d6-3a34-b449-432b3bd1aa9b.

Fishel, Elizabeth R. “The Prisoner of Sexism Jail and Roses: News: The Harvard Crimson.” News | The Harvard Crimson, The University Daily, www.thecrimson.com/article/1971/3/18/the-prisoner-of-sexism-jail-and/. Accessed 8 Apr. 2025.

== Individual Wikipedia Project - Edith Elizabeth House ==

"Edith Elizabeth House was born in 1903 in Winder, GA. She went on to become one of the first female graduates of the University of Georgia School of Law in 1925. Technically she was the second female graduate, since alphabetically her name came after classmate Gussie Brooks."

"While studying at the University of Georgia she was a member of Chi Omega sorority. Following graduation she began law practice with the firm of Baskin and Jordan in Clearwater, Florida. In 1929 House became chief clerk for U.S. District Attorney Wilburn P. Hughes in Jacksonville, Florida. She was notified she passed the Florida bar exam in 1930 and in 1931 was appointed Assistant U.S. Attorney, serving in Jacksonville."

"She received citation for 25 years of outstanding service in 1955, and in 1960 was appointed chief administrative aide to U.S. Attorney Coleman Madsen in Miami. Later, in 1963, she was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, becoming the first woman to hold that post in the state. She retired eight months later. In 1983 she was honored with the Edith House named lecture series establishment at the University of Georgia School of Law, featuring Professor Nadine Taub, of Rutgers Law School as the inaugural speaker."

At the University of Georgia, Edith held the title of President for the Student Government Association for Women.

" In December of 1987 House passed away, and was buried at Rose Hill Cemetery in Winder, GA."

"The [https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/indorgs%20wlsa/ Women Law Students Association] compiled a scrapbook in remembrance of House. The scrapbook ends with a news announcement of House's death and Gwen Wood's memorial tribute delivered on April 6, 1988. A second portrait of House painted by her sister-in-law Frankie House is also on display on the second floor of the Law Library Annex, gifted to the school by the House family in 1989."

User talk:CVinson/sandbox

2025-04-16T00:15:23Z

CVinson: /* Individual Wikipedia Project - Edith Elizabeth House */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{Byline|last=Leeds|first=Barry H.|}}

{{dc|dc=B|Y NOW IT IS MOUTHING A TRUISM TO POINT OUT THAT FIREARMS—}} have played
an iconic role in American history. Starting with this axiomatic assumption, one finds that guns are virtually ubiquitous in the works of those two peculiarly American authors, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer. Sometimes mere accoutrements or plot devices, they are more often significant thematically and symbolically.

Occasionally, serendipitous connections between the two authors present themselves. The best example of these may be the case of the 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. At the outset of ''A Farewell to Arms,'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1929|}} Hemingway describes how

<blockquote>
the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child. (4)
</blockquote>

This crucial passage foreshadows the thematic connection of rain, pregnancy, war and death in the novel, notably that of Catherine Barkley, which
makes ''Farewell'' so clearly a naturalistic work.

The 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano, standard issue for the Italian army throughout the first half of the twentieth century, was subsequently sold cheaply in large numbers through mail-order houses worldwide. One of these rifles, equipped with a 4-power scope, was ordered by Lee Harvey Oswald in
{{pg|157|158}}
1963, forty-five years after the 1918 setting of Hemingway’s ''Farewell'', and used to assassinate John F. Kennedy, as elaborated upon in Mailer’s ''Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery.'' {{sfn|Mailer|1995|}} This death of monumental, tragic proportions was brought about by the use of a $10 gun. Also in ''A Farewell to Arms,'' Frederick Henry feels faintly ridiculous in obeying the regulation that a uniformed officer be armed with a pistol even when out of combat (148).Yet after his
convalescence in Milan he uses his pistol (of unspecified caliber, but described
as “regulation”) during the next campaign to shoot one of two sergeants for disobedience and desertion (204). The point of the passage, one of many emphasizing the anti-heroic message of the novel, is that Henry and the enlisted man Bonello (who administers the ''coup de grâce'') are so inured to death in war that they are entirely dispassionate about it.

Most clearly parallel to this scene is the opening of ''An American Dream'' (1965) in which Stephen Richards Rojack kills four German machine-gunners with his .30 caliber M1 carbine. Portentously set under a full moon, the episode illustrates Rojack’s capacity for lethal violence and his perception
that murder has a sexual aspect to it.{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=3-6}} Yet, in a later
passage in the New England woods with his wife Deborah, he is shamed by her superior ability to hunt small animals with a .22 rifle, another of the
scenes that illuminates the constant competition in their intense love/hate relationship: “And in fact she was an exceptional hunter. She had gone on safari with her first husband and killed a wounded lion charging ten feet from her throat, she dropped an Alaskan bear with two shots to the heart (30/06
Winchester)” (35).

Moving to the beginning of Mailer’s career, it is obvious that every character in ''The Naked and the Dead''{{sfn|Mailer|1948|}} is issued regulation small arms: the officers with caliber .45 ACP Model 1911A1 pistols, the enlisted men with 30-06 M1 Garand rifles (as distinguished from Rojack’s smaller M1 carbine) or .45 Thompson submachine guns. Perhaps the most crucial episode in which one of these weapons figures is late in the book, during the abortive attempt by I & R platoon to climb Mt. Anaka, when Red Valsen rebels against Staff Sgt. Croft’s leadership and is forced to obey at gunpoint: “Croft . . . unslung his rifle, cocked the bolt leisurely. . . . It was worthless to temporize. Croft wanted to shoot him” (695-6).When Red capitulates, it signals the end of all resistance to Croft, which is emblematic of the allegorical conclusion by Mailer that reactionaries would dominate post-war America and which emphasizes the novel’s pessimistic message, its naturalistic bias.
{{pg|158|159}}
If war is the most obvious arena in which guns figure, it is not hard to find the others: hunting and, in urban civilian life, criminal pursuits. The
most striking of the latter occurs in Hemingway’s great story, “The Killers,” and Mailer’s 1984 murder mystery, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance''. In the former,
the two hit men, almost robotic in their mindless, inexorable commitment to a job that must be done, pursue their prey, ex-boxer Ole Anderson, with
a chilling, leisurely assurance and sawed-off 12 gauge shotguns. In the first cinematic version of the story,{{sfn|Hemingway|1946|}} a classic ''film noir'' with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner in their first starring roles, the killers (one of whom is William Conrad, later of TV“Cannon” fame) use more pedestrian Smith &
Wesson Model 10 .38 Special revolvers. As in Hemingway’s story, Ole Anderson, in true naturalistic fashion, passively awaits his death.

In ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', several of the seven violent deaths are carried out by the three matching .22 automatic pistols bought by Meeks Wardley
Hilby III, including his own suicide and that of his doppelgänger Lonnie Pangborn. These parallels in death echo the sexual parallels in the lives of
these characters and the novel presents a sexual nexus in which virtually every character is attached carnally to several others.

In a more significant book, ''The Executioner’s Song''{{sfn|Mailer|1979|}}, the career criminal Gary Gilmore traffics in guns and murders with one. He is inept with the .32 automatic he uses in his two cold-blooded assassinations, for he shoots
himself in the hand after the second murder, and the bleeding wound casts immediate suspicion upon him and leads to his quick capture by the police.
This episode is in line with Gary’s failures throughout the book and his entire life.

In ''Why Are We in Vietnam?,''{{sfn|Mailer|1967|}} the metaphorical juxtaposition of over-armed Texans hunting in Alaska, and the parallel depredations of the U.S. Army upon the population of Vietnam is best expressed in the passage where DJ lists at length the battery of guns brought on the hunt, especially by his father, Rusty:

<blockquote>
Which brings up Rusty, who travels like a big-ass hunter. . . . yeah, he got for instance a .404 Jeffrey on a Mauser Magnum action with a Circassian walnut stock, one love of a custom job by Biesen with Zeiss Zielklein 2 on Griffin & Howe side mount for Gun #1. Gun #2 is Model 70 Winchester rechambered to .300 Weatherly Magnum, Stith Bear Cub scope, birds’-eye maple
</blockquote>

{{pg|159|160}}

<blockquote>
stock, etcetera. . . . Gun #3 is Winslow Regimental Grade 7 mm. Remington Magnum with FN Supreme 400 action and Premium Grade Douglas barrel, ivory and ebony inlays in the stock, basket weave carving on both sides of the forearm and pistol grip, Redfield Jr. mounts, Redfield 2X-7X (79-80)
</blockquote>

Despite this impressive array of weaponry, Rusty selfishly fails his son by his lack of a sportsmanlike hunter’s ethics. Later in the novel, it is only by divesting themselves of all weapons and other equipment that DJ and his best friend Tex Hyde are able to experience a transcendent oneness with nature.

In a similar situation but without the devastating irony, Hemingway equips the title character in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” with a 30-06 rifle and 220 grain solid slugs for lion and Cape buffalo. The professional hunter, Robert Wilson, based on the famous Philip Percival with whom Hemingway had hunted in Africa, carries a “shockingly big-bored".505 Gibbs “with a muzzle velocity of two tons” (138). Here, Hemingway makes an error in nomenclature and physics, since muzzle ''velocity'' is measured in feet per second, and muzzle ''energy'' in foot pounds.Yet the .505 Gibbs, a highly specialized big game hunting rifle of which only eighty were ever manufactured, presents a very impressive picture in the mind’s eye. Finally, in one of the greatest examples of controlled ambiguity in literature, Macomber’s wife Margot, “shot at the buffalo with the 6.5 Mannlicher” (153), killing her husband. This 6.5 mm Mannlicher (a fine sporting arm quite different from the rough, mass produced Mannlicher Carcano of ''Farewell'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'') is the instrument of a death which lives forever in the shadowy ambiguity of Margot Macomber’s true intent, and which brings to a close the short, happy, existential life of the protagonist.

Part One of Hemingway’s ''To Have and Have Not'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1937|}} opens with an action sequence in which two politically opposed groups of Cubans kill each other with, among other guns, a 9 mm. Luger, a 12 gauge shotgun, and a .45 Thompson submachine gun. Later in the same section of the book, the protagonist Harry Morgan, a modern pirate like his namesake Henry Morgan (1635?–1688: a Welsh buccaneer in the Caribbean, later acting governor of Jamaica, 1680-82) carries out the dangerous mission of transporting (and double-crossing) illegal Chinese immigrants with the aid of a fairly standard but versatile battery consisting of a Winchester 30-30 lever action carbine, a
{{pg|160|161}}
12 gauge pump shotgun, and“the Smith and Wesson thirty-eight special I had when I was on the police force up in Miami“ {{sfn|Hemingway|1937|p=44}}

In Part Two, Harry is badly wounded in his right arm, which he subsequently loses, by the gunfire of law enforcement agents while smuggling liquor from Cuba. But in Part Three, the longest and most intense section of the book, he (literally) single-handedly kills, with his Thompson submachine gun, four Cuban revolutionaries escaping from a bank robbery. And yet, a true existential character trapped in a naturalistic world, he mutters with his dying breath this credo: “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance” (225).

Many guns figure prominently in the 1940 novel ''For Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|}} perhaps most significantly the Smith and Wesson .32 revolver handed down by Robert Jordan’s grandfather, a veteran of the American Civil War:

<blockquote>
It was a single action officer’s model .32 caliber and there was no trigger. It had the softest, sweetest trigger pull you had ever felt and it was always well oiled and the bore was clean although the finish was all worn off and the brown metal of the barrel and the cylinder was worn smooth from the leather of the holster. (Hemingway, ''For Whom'' ''336'')
</blockquote>

After Robert’s father commits suicide with this gun (like the author’s own father), although the revolver is lovingly described, Robert Jordan disposes of it in a memorable flashback by dropping it into an eight hundred feet deep lake (337). In the main action of the novel, Jordan is armed with an automatic pistol and a submachine gun, both unspecified as to caliber or manufacture. But other guns are more clearly defined: the Lewis gun of which the guerrilla band is so proud but whose obsolescence disappoints Jordan, and the 9mm Star pistol with which El Sordo carries out his “suicide” ruse on the fascists surrounding him in his last stand. Finally, Robert Jordan, waiting to make ''his'' last stand at the novel’s conclusion, grasps his submachine gun and thinks, “I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it” (467). Here, as with Harry Morgan, the firearm is an extension of the individual’s capacity to resist evil forces and fight with existential heroism for the good.
{{pg|161|162}}
Firearms play minor roles in other Hemingway novels and stories: the shotguns Col. Cantwell uses in the opening duck-hunting sequence of ''Across the River and into the Trees;''{{sfn|Hemingway|1950|}} the .357 Magnum carried by Thomas Hudson in ''Islands in the Stream''{{sfn|Hemingway|1970|}} and the Thompson gun used to shoot sharks in that novel; the shotgun used by the father in “A Day’s Wait” to dispense death to quail while his beloved son is lying in bed at home mistakenly expecting his own death. Finally, the last gun for Hemingway was the “double-barreled Boss shotgun with a tight choke” with which he took his own life.{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=563}}

What, finally, can we say about the role of guns in the works of Hemingway and Mailer? They are virtually ubiquitous, sometimes mere everyday equipment, more often objects of profound symbolic and thematic significance. But always, as in life, they loom as instruments that amplify the individual’s influence on the world around him. Whether used to hunt game, commit murder, or fight for a political ideal, every gun is a tool that extends the power of the existential human will in a world that would attempt to render it impotent.

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
*{{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1969 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1950 |title=Across the River and into the Trees |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1936 |title=A Day's Wait |chapter=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=34-36 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1940 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1970 |title=Islands in the Stream |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1936 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |chapter=The Killers |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=71-81 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1936 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |chapter=The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=121-154 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1937 |title=To Have and Have Not |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite AV media | people= Siodmak, Robert (Dir.), Lancaster, Burt (Perf.) | title=The Killers | medium=Film | publisher=Universal Pictures | location= | date=1946 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |location=New York |publisher=Dial Press |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1979 |title=The Executioner’s Song |location=Boston |publisher=Litte, Brown and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1995 |title=Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1984 |title=Tough Guys Don’t Dance |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=Why Are We in Vietnam? |location=New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam’s Sons |pages= |ref=harv}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

==Discussion Post - Week 3==

===Creating Better Headlines===

I learned a lot during this week's reading about crafting a headline that stands out to our readers, and how important a headline can be for the information you are writing about. I feel like the reading this week goes well with me learning more about how headers work and how to incorporate them. It is extremely important to have headers that draw your readers in, and it helps encourage them to read your article. According to Carroll, "research tells us that about 70% [of readers] will read at least your headline, so what you put in it is of paramount importance." {{sfn|Carroll|p=64}}

70% is a huge percentage of readers that are at least reading your header. This shows just how important it is to ensure that your header is a good one and creates a sense of curiosity that makes the reader want to know more. I was also able to read throughout this chapter different guidelines to follow that make headlines even better. I am thrilled to have been able to learn so much about how to create the best headlines, especially after I learned exactly how important they are.

===Content Gaps===

Based on the questions from the Wikipedia training this week, I also wanted to share some insight into my thoughts about content gaps. To me, a content gap is when a topic being discussed/written about is missing vital information to help the reader understanding what is being discussed. If there are pieces of information missing, then the reader will have a hard time understanding what they are supposed to be gaining from the information being shared with them. I think content gaps arise many times due to the lack of knowledge or history about these topics. Normally, we see content gaps occur with diverse topics and information about minority groups. We can see this happen due to the types of people that are contributing information to Wikipedia pages. Content gaps like these can make it difficult for topics to stay relevant in the world and will eventually cease to exist. What happens if we just stop discussing topics like a minority group in a small village in Africa. Those people just don't stop existing. Therefore, how do we ensure that there are groups out there that don't get forgotten?

===Feeling More Prepared===

This week definitely had lots of moving parts going on, however, I enjoyed getting to work on my sandbox and taking the time to learn a lot during the remediation project. I still have my moments where I get nervous that I have done something incorrectly, or forgotten a step, but overall I have enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I still believe I have a lot to learn, but it is becoming more enjoyable for me to learn about. I am looking forward to seeing what is coming up next week.

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* Carroll, Brian. *Writing and Editing for Digital Media*. New York: Routledge, 2023. 63-92 Print.

== Bibliography ==

For Wikipedia Project:

Allen, Leah Claire. “From New Criticism to Postcritique: Kate Millett’s Method in The History of The Present.” Criticism, vol. 63, no. 4, Oct. 2021, pp. 1–28. EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=65a6e2ce-d7d6-3a34-b449-432b3bd1aa9b.

Fishel, Elizabeth R. “The Prisoner of Sexism Jail and Roses: News: The Harvard Crimson.” News | The Harvard Crimson, The University Daily, www.thecrimson.com/article/1971/3/18/the-prisoner-of-sexism-jail-and/. Accessed 8 Apr. 2025.

== Individual Wikipedia Project - Edith Elizabeth House ==

"Edith Elizabeth House was born in 1903 in Winder, GA. She went on to become one of the first female graduates of the University of Georgia School of Law in 1925. Technically she was the second female graduate, since alphabetically her name came after classmate Gussie Brooks."

"While studying at the University of Georgia she was a member of Chi Omega sorority. Following graduation she began law practice with the firm of Baskin and Jordan in Clearwater, Florida. In 1929 House became chief clerk for U.S. District Attorney Wilburn P. Hughes in Jacksonville, Florida. She was notified she passed the Florida bar exam in 1930 and in 1931 was appointed Assistant U.S. Attorney, serving in Jacksonville."

"She received citation for 25 years of outstanding service in 1955, and in 1960 was appointed chief administrative aide to U.S. Attorney Coleman Madsen in Miami. Later, in 1963, she was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, becoming the first woman to hold that post in the state. She retired eight months later. In 1983 she was honored with the Edith House named lecture series establishment at the University of Georgia School of Law, featuring Professor Nadine Taub, of Rutgers Law School as the inaugural speaker."

At the University of Georgia, Edith held the title of President for the Student Government Association for Women.

" In December of 1987 House passed away, and was buried at Rose Hill Cemetery in Winder, GA."

"The Women Law Students Association compiled a scrapbook in remembrance of House. The scrapbook ends with a news announcement of House's death and Gwen Wood's memorial tribute delivered on April 6, 1988. A second portrait of House painted by her sister-in-law Frankie House is also on display on the second floor of the Law Library Annex, gifted to the school by the House family in 1989."

User talk:CVinson/sandbox

2025-04-16T00:14:50Z

CVinson: /* Individual Wikipedia Project - Edith Elizabeth House */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{Byline|last=Leeds|first=Barry H.|}}

{{dc|dc=B|Y NOW IT IS MOUTHING A TRUISM TO POINT OUT THAT FIREARMS—}} have played
an iconic role in American history. Starting with this axiomatic assumption, one finds that guns are virtually ubiquitous in the works of those two peculiarly American authors, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer. Sometimes mere accoutrements or plot devices, they are more often significant thematically and symbolically.

Occasionally, serendipitous connections between the two authors present themselves. The best example of these may be the case of the 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. At the outset of ''A Farewell to Arms,'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1929|}} Hemingway describes how

<blockquote>
the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child. (4)
</blockquote>

This crucial passage foreshadows the thematic connection of rain, pregnancy, war and death in the novel, notably that of Catherine Barkley, which
makes ''Farewell'' so clearly a naturalistic work.

The 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano, standard issue for the Italian army throughout the first half of the twentieth century, was subsequently sold cheaply in large numbers through mail-order houses worldwide. One of these rifles, equipped with a 4-power scope, was ordered by Lee Harvey Oswald in
{{pg|157|158}}
1963, forty-five years after the 1918 setting of Hemingway’s ''Farewell'', and used to assassinate John F. Kennedy, as elaborated upon in Mailer’s ''Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery.'' {{sfn|Mailer|1995|}} This death of monumental, tragic proportions was brought about by the use of a $10 gun. Also in ''A Farewell to Arms,'' Frederick Henry feels faintly ridiculous in obeying the regulation that a uniformed officer be armed with a pistol even when out of combat (148).Yet after his
convalescence in Milan he uses his pistol (of unspecified caliber, but described
as “regulation”) during the next campaign to shoot one of two sergeants for disobedience and desertion (204). The point of the passage, one of many emphasizing the anti-heroic message of the novel, is that Henry and the enlisted man Bonello (who administers the ''coup de grâce'') are so inured to death in war that they are entirely dispassionate about it.

Most clearly parallel to this scene is the opening of ''An American Dream'' (1965) in which Stephen Richards Rojack kills four German machine-gunners with his .30 caliber M1 carbine. Portentously set under a full moon, the episode illustrates Rojack’s capacity for lethal violence and his perception
that murder has a sexual aspect to it.{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=3-6}} Yet, in a later
passage in the New England woods with his wife Deborah, he is shamed by her superior ability to hunt small animals with a .22 rifle, another of the
scenes that illuminates the constant competition in their intense love/hate relationship: “And in fact she was an exceptional hunter. She had gone on safari with her first husband and killed a wounded lion charging ten feet from her throat, she dropped an Alaskan bear with two shots to the heart (30/06
Winchester)” (35).

Moving to the beginning of Mailer’s career, it is obvious that every character in ''The Naked and the Dead''{{sfn|Mailer|1948|}} is issued regulation small arms: the officers with caliber .45 ACP Model 1911A1 pistols, the enlisted men with 30-06 M1 Garand rifles (as distinguished from Rojack’s smaller M1 carbine) or .45 Thompson submachine guns. Perhaps the most crucial episode in which one of these weapons figures is late in the book, during the abortive attempt by I & R platoon to climb Mt. Anaka, when Red Valsen rebels against Staff Sgt. Croft’s leadership and is forced to obey at gunpoint: “Croft . . . unslung his rifle, cocked the bolt leisurely. . . . It was worthless to temporize. Croft wanted to shoot him” (695-6).When Red capitulates, it signals the end of all resistance to Croft, which is emblematic of the allegorical conclusion by Mailer that reactionaries would dominate post-war America and which emphasizes the novel’s pessimistic message, its naturalistic bias.
{{pg|158|159}}
If war is the most obvious arena in which guns figure, it is not hard to find the others: hunting and, in urban civilian life, criminal pursuits. The
most striking of the latter occurs in Hemingway’s great story, “The Killers,” and Mailer’s 1984 murder mystery, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance''. In the former,
the two hit men, almost robotic in their mindless, inexorable commitment to a job that must be done, pursue their prey, ex-boxer Ole Anderson, with
a chilling, leisurely assurance and sawed-off 12 gauge shotguns. In the first cinematic version of the story,{{sfn|Hemingway|1946|}} a classic ''film noir'' with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner in their first starring roles, the killers (one of whom is William Conrad, later of TV“Cannon” fame) use more pedestrian Smith &
Wesson Model 10 .38 Special revolvers. As in Hemingway’s story, Ole Anderson, in true naturalistic fashion, passively awaits his death.

In ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', several of the seven violent deaths are carried out by the three matching .22 automatic pistols bought by Meeks Wardley
Hilby III, including his own suicide and that of his doppelgänger Lonnie Pangborn. These parallels in death echo the sexual parallels in the lives of
these characters and the novel presents a sexual nexus in which virtually every character is attached carnally to several others.

In a more significant book, ''The Executioner’s Song''{{sfn|Mailer|1979|}}, the career criminal Gary Gilmore traffics in guns and murders with one. He is inept with the .32 automatic he uses in his two cold-blooded assassinations, for he shoots
himself in the hand after the second murder, and the bleeding wound casts immediate suspicion upon him and leads to his quick capture by the police.
This episode is in line with Gary’s failures throughout the book and his entire life.

In ''Why Are We in Vietnam?,''{{sfn|Mailer|1967|}} the metaphorical juxtaposition of over-armed Texans hunting in Alaska, and the parallel depredations of the U.S. Army upon the population of Vietnam is best expressed in the passage where DJ lists at length the battery of guns brought on the hunt, especially by his father, Rusty:

<blockquote>
Which brings up Rusty, who travels like a big-ass hunter. . . . yeah, he got for instance a .404 Jeffrey on a Mauser Magnum action with a Circassian walnut stock, one love of a custom job by Biesen with Zeiss Zielklein 2 on Griffin & Howe side mount for Gun #1. Gun #2 is Model 70 Winchester rechambered to .300 Weatherly Magnum, Stith Bear Cub scope, birds’-eye maple
</blockquote>

{{pg|159|160}}

<blockquote>
stock, etcetera. . . . Gun #3 is Winslow Regimental Grade 7 mm. Remington Magnum with FN Supreme 400 action and Premium Grade Douglas barrel, ivory and ebony inlays in the stock, basket weave carving on both sides of the forearm and pistol grip, Redfield Jr. mounts, Redfield 2X-7X (79-80)
</blockquote>

Despite this impressive array of weaponry, Rusty selfishly fails his son by his lack of a sportsmanlike hunter’s ethics. Later in the novel, it is only by divesting themselves of all weapons and other equipment that DJ and his best friend Tex Hyde are able to experience a transcendent oneness with nature.

In a similar situation but without the devastating irony, Hemingway equips the title character in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” with a 30-06 rifle and 220 grain solid slugs for lion and Cape buffalo. The professional hunter, Robert Wilson, based on the famous Philip Percival with whom Hemingway had hunted in Africa, carries a “shockingly big-bored".505 Gibbs “with a muzzle velocity of two tons” (138). Here, Hemingway makes an error in nomenclature and physics, since muzzle ''velocity'' is measured in feet per second, and muzzle ''energy'' in foot pounds.Yet the .505 Gibbs, a highly specialized big game hunting rifle of which only eighty were ever manufactured, presents a very impressive picture in the mind’s eye. Finally, in one of the greatest examples of controlled ambiguity in literature, Macomber’s wife Margot, “shot at the buffalo with the 6.5 Mannlicher” (153), killing her husband. This 6.5 mm Mannlicher (a fine sporting arm quite different from the rough, mass produced Mannlicher Carcano of ''Farewell'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'') is the instrument of a death which lives forever in the shadowy ambiguity of Margot Macomber’s true intent, and which brings to a close the short, happy, existential life of the protagonist.

Part One of Hemingway’s ''To Have and Have Not'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1937|}} opens with an action sequence in which two politically opposed groups of Cubans kill each other with, among other guns, a 9 mm. Luger, a 12 gauge shotgun, and a .45 Thompson submachine gun. Later in the same section of the book, the protagonist Harry Morgan, a modern pirate like his namesake Henry Morgan (1635?–1688: a Welsh buccaneer in the Caribbean, later acting governor of Jamaica, 1680-82) carries out the dangerous mission of transporting (and double-crossing) illegal Chinese immigrants with the aid of a fairly standard but versatile battery consisting of a Winchester 30-30 lever action carbine, a
{{pg|160|161}}
12 gauge pump shotgun, and“the Smith and Wesson thirty-eight special I had when I was on the police force up in Miami“ {{sfn|Hemingway|1937|p=44}}

In Part Two, Harry is badly wounded in his right arm, which he subsequently loses, by the gunfire of law enforcement agents while smuggling liquor from Cuba. But in Part Three, the longest and most intense section of the book, he (literally) single-handedly kills, with his Thompson submachine gun, four Cuban revolutionaries escaping from a bank robbery. And yet, a true existential character trapped in a naturalistic world, he mutters with his dying breath this credo: “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance” (225).

Many guns figure prominently in the 1940 novel ''For Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|}} perhaps most significantly the Smith and Wesson .32 revolver handed down by Robert Jordan’s grandfather, a veteran of the American Civil War:

<blockquote>
It was a single action officer’s model .32 caliber and there was no trigger. It had the softest, sweetest trigger pull you had ever felt and it was always well oiled and the bore was clean although the finish was all worn off and the brown metal of the barrel and the cylinder was worn smooth from the leather of the holster. (Hemingway, ''For Whom'' ''336'')
</blockquote>

After Robert’s father commits suicide with this gun (like the author’s own father), although the revolver is lovingly described, Robert Jordan disposes of it in a memorable flashback by dropping it into an eight hundred feet deep lake (337). In the main action of the novel, Jordan is armed with an automatic pistol and a submachine gun, both unspecified as to caliber or manufacture. But other guns are more clearly defined: the Lewis gun of which the guerrilla band is so proud but whose obsolescence disappoints Jordan, and the 9mm Star pistol with which El Sordo carries out his “suicide” ruse on the fascists surrounding him in his last stand. Finally, Robert Jordan, waiting to make ''his'' last stand at the novel’s conclusion, grasps his submachine gun and thinks, “I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it” (467). Here, as with Harry Morgan, the firearm is an extension of the individual’s capacity to resist evil forces and fight with existential heroism for the good.
{{pg|161|162}}
Firearms play minor roles in other Hemingway novels and stories: the shotguns Col. Cantwell uses in the opening duck-hunting sequence of ''Across the River and into the Trees;''{{sfn|Hemingway|1950|}} the .357 Magnum carried by Thomas Hudson in ''Islands in the Stream''{{sfn|Hemingway|1970|}} and the Thompson gun used to shoot sharks in that novel; the shotgun used by the father in “A Day’s Wait” to dispense death to quail while his beloved son is lying in bed at home mistakenly expecting his own death. Finally, the last gun for Hemingway was the “double-barreled Boss shotgun with a tight choke” with which he took his own life.{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=563}}

What, finally, can we say about the role of guns in the works of Hemingway and Mailer? They are virtually ubiquitous, sometimes mere everyday equipment, more often objects of profound symbolic and thematic significance. But always, as in life, they loom as instruments that amplify the individual’s influence on the world around him. Whether used to hunt game, commit murder, or fight for a political ideal, every gun is a tool that extends the power of the existential human will in a world that would attempt to render it impotent.

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
*{{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1969 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1950 |title=Across the River and into the Trees |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1936 |title=A Day's Wait |chapter=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=34-36 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1940 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1970 |title=Islands in the Stream |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1936 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |chapter=The Killers |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=71-81 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1936 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |chapter=The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=121-154 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1937 |title=To Have and Have Not |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite AV media | people= Siodmak, Robert (Dir.), Lancaster, Burt (Perf.) | title=The Killers | medium=Film | publisher=Universal Pictures | location= | date=1946 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |location=New York |publisher=Dial Press |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1979 |title=The Executioner’s Song |location=Boston |publisher=Litte, Brown and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1995 |title=Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1984 |title=Tough Guys Don’t Dance |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=Why Are We in Vietnam? |location=New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam’s Sons |pages= |ref=harv}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

==Discussion Post - Week 3==

===Creating Better Headlines===

I learned a lot during this week's reading about crafting a headline that stands out to our readers, and how important a headline can be for the information you are writing about. I feel like the reading this week goes well with me learning more about how headers work and how to incorporate them. It is extremely important to have headers that draw your readers in, and it helps encourage them to read your article. According to Carroll, "research tells us that about 70% [of readers] will read at least your headline, so what you put in it is of paramount importance." {{sfn|Carroll|p=64}}

70% is a huge percentage of readers that are at least reading your header. This shows just how important it is to ensure that your header is a good one and creates a sense of curiosity that makes the reader want to know more. I was also able to read throughout this chapter different guidelines to follow that make headlines even better. I am thrilled to have been able to learn so much about how to create the best headlines, especially after I learned exactly how important they are.

===Content Gaps===

Based on the questions from the Wikipedia training this week, I also wanted to share some insight into my thoughts about content gaps. To me, a content gap is when a topic being discussed/written about is missing vital information to help the reader understanding what is being discussed. If there are pieces of information missing, then the reader will have a hard time understanding what they are supposed to be gaining from the information being shared with them. I think content gaps arise many times due to the lack of knowledge or history about these topics. Normally, we see content gaps occur with diverse topics and information about minority groups. We can see this happen due to the types of people that are contributing information to Wikipedia pages. Content gaps like these can make it difficult for topics to stay relevant in the world and will eventually cease to exist. What happens if we just stop discussing topics like a minority group in a small village in Africa. Those people just don't stop existing. Therefore, how do we ensure that there are groups out there that don't get forgotten?

===Feeling More Prepared===

This week definitely had lots of moving parts going on, however, I enjoyed getting to work on my sandbox and taking the time to learn a lot during the remediation project. I still have my moments where I get nervous that I have done something incorrectly, or forgotten a step, but overall I have enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I still believe I have a lot to learn, but it is becoming more enjoyable for me to learn about. I am looking forward to seeing what is coming up next week.

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* Carroll, Brian. *Writing and Editing for Digital Media*. New York: Routledge, 2023. 63-92 Print.

== Bibliography ==

For Wikipedia Project:

Allen, Leah Claire. “From New Criticism to Postcritique: Kate Millett’s Method in The History of The Present.” Criticism, vol. 63, no. 4, Oct. 2021, pp. 1–28. EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=65a6e2ce-d7d6-3a34-b449-432b3bd1aa9b.

Fishel, Elizabeth R. “The Prisoner of Sexism Jail and Roses: News: The Harvard Crimson.” News | The Harvard Crimson, The University Daily, www.thecrimson.com/article/1971/3/18/the-prisoner-of-sexism-jail-and/. Accessed 8 Apr. 2025.

== Individual Wikipedia Project - Edith Elizabeth House ==

"Edith Elizabeth House was born in 1903 in Winder, GA. She went on to become one of the first female graduates of the University of Georgia School of Law in 1925. Technically she was the second female graduate, since alphabetically her name came after classmate Gussie Brooks."

"While studying at the University of Georgia she was a member of Chi Omega sorority. Following graduation she began law practice with the firm of Baskin and Jordan in Clearwater, Florida. In 1929 House became chief clerk for U.S. District Attorney Wilburn P. Hughes in Jacksonville, Florida. She was notified she passed the Florida bar exam in 1930 and in 1931 was appointed Assistant U.S. Attorney, serving in Jacksonville."

"She received citation for 25 years of outstanding service in 1955, and in 1960 was appointed chief administrative aide to U.S. Attorney Coleman Madsen in Miami. Later, in 1963, she was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, becoming the first woman to hold that post in the state. She retired eight months later. In 1983 she was honored with the Edith House named lecture series establishment at the University of Georgia School of Law, featuring Professor Nadine Taub, of Rutgers Law School as the inaugural speaker."

At the University of Georgia, Edith held the title of President for the Student Government Association for Women.

" In December of 1987 House passed away, and was buried at Rose Hill Cemetery in Winder, GA."

User talk:CVinson/sandbox

2025-04-16T00:13:45Z

CVinson: /* Individual Wikipedia Project - Edith Elizabeth House */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{Byline|last=Leeds|first=Barry H.|}}

{{dc|dc=B|Y NOW IT IS MOUTHING A TRUISM TO POINT OUT THAT FIREARMS—}} have played
an iconic role in American history. Starting with this axiomatic assumption, one finds that guns are virtually ubiquitous in the works of those two peculiarly American authors, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer. Sometimes mere accoutrements or plot devices, they are more often significant thematically and symbolically.

Occasionally, serendipitous connections between the two authors present themselves. The best example of these may be the case of the 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. At the outset of ''A Farewell to Arms,'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1929|}} Hemingway describes how

<blockquote>
the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child. (4)
</blockquote>

This crucial passage foreshadows the thematic connection of rain, pregnancy, war and death in the novel, notably that of Catherine Barkley, which
makes ''Farewell'' so clearly a naturalistic work.

The 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano, standard issue for the Italian army throughout the first half of the twentieth century, was subsequently sold cheaply in large numbers through mail-order houses worldwide. One of these rifles, equipped with a 4-power scope, was ordered by Lee Harvey Oswald in
{{pg|157|158}}
1963, forty-five years after the 1918 setting of Hemingway’s ''Farewell'', and used to assassinate John F. Kennedy, as elaborated upon in Mailer’s ''Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery.'' {{sfn|Mailer|1995|}} This death of monumental, tragic proportions was brought about by the use of a $10 gun. Also in ''A Farewell to Arms,'' Frederick Henry feels faintly ridiculous in obeying the regulation that a uniformed officer be armed with a pistol even when out of combat (148).Yet after his
convalescence in Milan he uses his pistol (of unspecified caliber, but described
as “regulation”) during the next campaign to shoot one of two sergeants for disobedience and desertion (204). The point of the passage, one of many emphasizing the anti-heroic message of the novel, is that Henry and the enlisted man Bonello (who administers the ''coup de grâce'') are so inured to death in war that they are entirely dispassionate about it.

Most clearly parallel to this scene is the opening of ''An American Dream'' (1965) in which Stephen Richards Rojack kills four German machine-gunners with his .30 caliber M1 carbine. Portentously set under a full moon, the episode illustrates Rojack’s capacity for lethal violence and his perception
that murder has a sexual aspect to it.{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=3-6}} Yet, in a later
passage in the New England woods with his wife Deborah, he is shamed by her superior ability to hunt small animals with a .22 rifle, another of the
scenes that illuminates the constant competition in their intense love/hate relationship: “And in fact she was an exceptional hunter. She had gone on safari with her first husband and killed a wounded lion charging ten feet from her throat, she dropped an Alaskan bear with two shots to the heart (30/06
Winchester)” (35).

Moving to the beginning of Mailer’s career, it is obvious that every character in ''The Naked and the Dead''{{sfn|Mailer|1948|}} is issued regulation small arms: the officers with caliber .45 ACP Model 1911A1 pistols, the enlisted men with 30-06 M1 Garand rifles (as distinguished from Rojack’s smaller M1 carbine) or .45 Thompson submachine guns. Perhaps the most crucial episode in which one of these weapons figures is late in the book, during the abortive attempt by I & R platoon to climb Mt. Anaka, when Red Valsen rebels against Staff Sgt. Croft’s leadership and is forced to obey at gunpoint: “Croft . . . unslung his rifle, cocked the bolt leisurely. . . . It was worthless to temporize. Croft wanted to shoot him” (695-6).When Red capitulates, it signals the end of all resistance to Croft, which is emblematic of the allegorical conclusion by Mailer that reactionaries would dominate post-war America and which emphasizes the novel’s pessimistic message, its naturalistic bias.
{{pg|158|159}}
If war is the most obvious arena in which guns figure, it is not hard to find the others: hunting and, in urban civilian life, criminal pursuits. The
most striking of the latter occurs in Hemingway’s great story, “The Killers,” and Mailer’s 1984 murder mystery, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance''. In the former,
the two hit men, almost robotic in their mindless, inexorable commitment to a job that must be done, pursue their prey, ex-boxer Ole Anderson, with
a chilling, leisurely assurance and sawed-off 12 gauge shotguns. In the first cinematic version of the story,{{sfn|Hemingway|1946|}} a classic ''film noir'' with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner in their first starring roles, the killers (one of whom is William Conrad, later of TV“Cannon” fame) use more pedestrian Smith &
Wesson Model 10 .38 Special revolvers. As in Hemingway’s story, Ole Anderson, in true naturalistic fashion, passively awaits his death.

In ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', several of the seven violent deaths are carried out by the three matching .22 automatic pistols bought by Meeks Wardley
Hilby III, including his own suicide and that of his doppelgänger Lonnie Pangborn. These parallels in death echo the sexual parallels in the lives of
these characters and the novel presents a sexual nexus in which virtually every character is attached carnally to several others.

In a more significant book, ''The Executioner’s Song''{{sfn|Mailer|1979|}}, the career criminal Gary Gilmore traffics in guns and murders with one. He is inept with the .32 automatic he uses in his two cold-blooded assassinations, for he shoots
himself in the hand after the second murder, and the bleeding wound casts immediate suspicion upon him and leads to his quick capture by the police.
This episode is in line with Gary’s failures throughout the book and his entire life.

In ''Why Are We in Vietnam?,''{{sfn|Mailer|1967|}} the metaphorical juxtaposition of over-armed Texans hunting in Alaska, and the parallel depredations of the U.S. Army upon the population of Vietnam is best expressed in the passage where DJ lists at length the battery of guns brought on the hunt, especially by his father, Rusty:

<blockquote>
Which brings up Rusty, who travels like a big-ass hunter. . . . yeah, he got for instance a .404 Jeffrey on a Mauser Magnum action with a Circassian walnut stock, one love of a custom job by Biesen with Zeiss Zielklein 2 on Griffin & Howe side mount for Gun #1. Gun #2 is Model 70 Winchester rechambered to .300 Weatherly Magnum, Stith Bear Cub scope, birds’-eye maple
</blockquote>

{{pg|159|160}}

<blockquote>
stock, etcetera. . . . Gun #3 is Winslow Regimental Grade 7 mm. Remington Magnum with FN Supreme 400 action and Premium Grade Douglas barrel, ivory and ebony inlays in the stock, basket weave carving on both sides of the forearm and pistol grip, Redfield Jr. mounts, Redfield 2X-7X (79-80)
</blockquote>

Despite this impressive array of weaponry, Rusty selfishly fails his son by his lack of a sportsmanlike hunter’s ethics. Later in the novel, it is only by divesting themselves of all weapons and other equipment that DJ and his best friend Tex Hyde are able to experience a transcendent oneness with nature.

In a similar situation but without the devastating irony, Hemingway equips the title character in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” with a 30-06 rifle and 220 grain solid slugs for lion and Cape buffalo. The professional hunter, Robert Wilson, based on the famous Philip Percival with whom Hemingway had hunted in Africa, carries a “shockingly big-bored".505 Gibbs “with a muzzle velocity of two tons” (138). Here, Hemingway makes an error in nomenclature and physics, since muzzle ''velocity'' is measured in feet per second, and muzzle ''energy'' in foot pounds.Yet the .505 Gibbs, a highly specialized big game hunting rifle of which only eighty were ever manufactured, presents a very impressive picture in the mind’s eye. Finally, in one of the greatest examples of controlled ambiguity in literature, Macomber’s wife Margot, “shot at the buffalo with the 6.5 Mannlicher” (153), killing her husband. This 6.5 mm Mannlicher (a fine sporting arm quite different from the rough, mass produced Mannlicher Carcano of ''Farewell'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'') is the instrument of a death which lives forever in the shadowy ambiguity of Margot Macomber’s true intent, and which brings to a close the short, happy, existential life of the protagonist.

Part One of Hemingway’s ''To Have and Have Not'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1937|}} opens with an action sequence in which two politically opposed groups of Cubans kill each other with, among other guns, a 9 mm. Luger, a 12 gauge shotgun, and a .45 Thompson submachine gun. Later in the same section of the book, the protagonist Harry Morgan, a modern pirate like his namesake Henry Morgan (1635?–1688: a Welsh buccaneer in the Caribbean, later acting governor of Jamaica, 1680-82) carries out the dangerous mission of transporting (and double-crossing) illegal Chinese immigrants with the aid of a fairly standard but versatile battery consisting of a Winchester 30-30 lever action carbine, a
{{pg|160|161}}
12 gauge pump shotgun, and“the Smith and Wesson thirty-eight special I had when I was on the police force up in Miami“ {{sfn|Hemingway|1937|p=44}}

In Part Two, Harry is badly wounded in his right arm, which he subsequently loses, by the gunfire of law enforcement agents while smuggling liquor from Cuba. But in Part Three, the longest and most intense section of the book, he (literally) single-handedly kills, with his Thompson submachine gun, four Cuban revolutionaries escaping from a bank robbery. And yet, a true existential character trapped in a naturalistic world, he mutters with his dying breath this credo: “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance” (225).

Many guns figure prominently in the 1940 novel ''For Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|}} perhaps most significantly the Smith and Wesson .32 revolver handed down by Robert Jordan’s grandfather, a veteran of the American Civil War:

<blockquote>
It was a single action officer’s model .32 caliber and there was no trigger. It had the softest, sweetest trigger pull you had ever felt and it was always well oiled and the bore was clean although the finish was all worn off and the brown metal of the barrel and the cylinder was worn smooth from the leather of the holster. (Hemingway, ''For Whom'' ''336'')
</blockquote>

After Robert’s father commits suicide with this gun (like the author’s own father), although the revolver is lovingly described, Robert Jordan disposes of it in a memorable flashback by dropping it into an eight hundred feet deep lake (337). In the main action of the novel, Jordan is armed with an automatic pistol and a submachine gun, both unspecified as to caliber or manufacture. But other guns are more clearly defined: the Lewis gun of which the guerrilla band is so proud but whose obsolescence disappoints Jordan, and the 9mm Star pistol with which El Sordo carries out his “suicide” ruse on the fascists surrounding him in his last stand. Finally, Robert Jordan, waiting to make ''his'' last stand at the novel’s conclusion, grasps his submachine gun and thinks, “I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it” (467). Here, as with Harry Morgan, the firearm is an extension of the individual’s capacity to resist evil forces and fight with existential heroism for the good.
{{pg|161|162}}
Firearms play minor roles in other Hemingway novels and stories: the shotguns Col. Cantwell uses in the opening duck-hunting sequence of ''Across the River and into the Trees;''{{sfn|Hemingway|1950|}} the .357 Magnum carried by Thomas Hudson in ''Islands in the Stream''{{sfn|Hemingway|1970|}} and the Thompson gun used to shoot sharks in that novel; the shotgun used by the father in “A Day’s Wait” to dispense death to quail while his beloved son is lying in bed at home mistakenly expecting his own death. Finally, the last gun for Hemingway was the “double-barreled Boss shotgun with a tight choke” with which he took his own life.{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=563}}

What, finally, can we say about the role of guns in the works of Hemingway and Mailer? They are virtually ubiquitous, sometimes mere everyday equipment, more often objects of profound symbolic and thematic significance. But always, as in life, they loom as instruments that amplify the individual’s influence on the world around him. Whether used to hunt game, commit murder, or fight for a political ideal, every gun is a tool that extends the power of the existential human will in a world that would attempt to render it impotent.

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
*{{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1969 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1950 |title=Across the River and into the Trees |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1936 |title=A Day's Wait |chapter=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=34-36 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1940 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1970 |title=Islands in the Stream |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1936 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |chapter=The Killers |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=71-81 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1936 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |chapter=The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=121-154 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1937 |title=To Have and Have Not |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite AV media | people= Siodmak, Robert (Dir.), Lancaster, Burt (Perf.) | title=The Killers | medium=Film | publisher=Universal Pictures | location= | date=1946 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |location=New York |publisher=Dial Press |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1979 |title=The Executioner’s Song |location=Boston |publisher=Litte, Brown and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1995 |title=Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1984 |title=Tough Guys Don’t Dance |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=Why Are We in Vietnam? |location=New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam’s Sons |pages= |ref=harv}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

==Discussion Post - Week 3==

===Creating Better Headlines===

I learned a lot during this week's reading about crafting a headline that stands out to our readers, and how important a headline can be for the information you are writing about. I feel like the reading this week goes well with me learning more about how headers work and how to incorporate them. It is extremely important to have headers that draw your readers in, and it helps encourage them to read your article. According to Carroll, "research tells us that about 70% [of readers] will read at least your headline, so what you put in it is of paramount importance." {{sfn|Carroll|p=64}}

70% is a huge percentage of readers that are at least reading your header. This shows just how important it is to ensure that your header is a good one and creates a sense of curiosity that makes the reader want to know more. I was also able to read throughout this chapter different guidelines to follow that make headlines even better. I am thrilled to have been able to learn so much about how to create the best headlines, especially after I learned exactly how important they are.

===Content Gaps===

Based on the questions from the Wikipedia training this week, I also wanted to share some insight into my thoughts about content gaps. To me, a content gap is when a topic being discussed/written about is missing vital information to help the reader understanding what is being discussed. If there are pieces of information missing, then the reader will have a hard time understanding what they are supposed to be gaining from the information being shared with them. I think content gaps arise many times due to the lack of knowledge or history about these topics. Normally, we see content gaps occur with diverse topics and information about minority groups. We can see this happen due to the types of people that are contributing information to Wikipedia pages. Content gaps like these can make it difficult for topics to stay relevant in the world and will eventually cease to exist. What happens if we just stop discussing topics like a minority group in a small village in Africa. Those people just don't stop existing. Therefore, how do we ensure that there are groups out there that don't get forgotten?

===Feeling More Prepared===

This week definitely had lots of moving parts going on, however, I enjoyed getting to work on my sandbox and taking the time to learn a lot during the remediation project. I still have my moments where I get nervous that I have done something incorrectly, or forgotten a step, but overall I have enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I still believe I have a lot to learn, but it is becoming more enjoyable for me to learn about. I am looking forward to seeing what is coming up next week.

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* Carroll, Brian. *Writing and Editing for Digital Media*. New York: Routledge, 2023. 63-92 Print.

== Bibliography ==

For Wikipedia Project:

Allen, Leah Claire. “From New Criticism to Postcritique: Kate Millett’s Method in The History of The Present.” Criticism, vol. 63, no. 4, Oct. 2021, pp. 1–28. EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=65a6e2ce-d7d6-3a34-b449-432b3bd1aa9b.

Fishel, Elizabeth R. “The Prisoner of Sexism Jail and Roses: News: The Harvard Crimson.” News | The Harvard Crimson, The University Daily, www.thecrimson.com/article/1971/3/18/the-prisoner-of-sexism-jail-and/. Accessed 8 Apr. 2025.

== Individual Wikipedia Project - Edith Elizabeth House ==

"Edith Elizabeth House was born in 1903 in Winder, GA. She went on to become one of the first female graduates of the University of Georgia School of Law in 1925. Technically she was the second female graduate, since alphabetically her name came after classmate Gussie Brooks."

"While studying at the University of Georgia she was a member of Chi Omega sorority. Following graduation she began law practice with the firm of Baskin and Jordan in Clearwater, Florida. In 1929 House became chief clerk for U.S. District Attorney Wilburn P. Hughes in Jacksonville, Florida. She was notified she passed the Florida bar exam in 1930 and in 1931 was appointed Assistant U.S. Attorney, serving in Jacksonville."

"She received citation for 25 years of outstanding service in 1955, and in 1960 was appointed chief administrative aide to U.S. Attorney Coleman Madsen in Miami. Later, in 1963, she was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, becoming the first woman to hold that post in the state. She retired eight months later. In 1983 she was honored with the Edith House named lecture series establishment at the University of Georgia School of Law, featuring Professor Nadine Taub, of Rutgers Law School as the inaugural speaker."

At the University of Georgia, Edith held the title of President for the Student Government Association for Women.

User talk:CVinson/sandbox

2025-04-16T00:11:43Z

CVinson: /* Individual Wikipedia Project - Edith Elizabeth House */ new section

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{Byline|last=Leeds|first=Barry H.|}}

{{dc|dc=B|Y NOW IT IS MOUTHING A TRUISM TO POINT OUT THAT FIREARMS—}} have played
an iconic role in American history. Starting with this axiomatic assumption, one finds that guns are virtually ubiquitous in the works of those two peculiarly American authors, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer. Sometimes mere accoutrements or plot devices, they are more often significant thematically and symbolically.

Occasionally, serendipitous connections between the two authors present themselves. The best example of these may be the case of the 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. At the outset of ''A Farewell to Arms,'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1929|}} Hemingway describes how

<blockquote>
the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child. (4)
</blockquote>

This crucial passage foreshadows the thematic connection of rain, pregnancy, war and death in the novel, notably that of Catherine Barkley, which
makes ''Farewell'' so clearly a naturalistic work.

The 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano, standard issue for the Italian army throughout the first half of the twentieth century, was subsequently sold cheaply in large numbers through mail-order houses worldwide. One of these rifles, equipped with a 4-power scope, was ordered by Lee Harvey Oswald in
{{pg|157|158}}
1963, forty-five years after the 1918 setting of Hemingway’s ''Farewell'', and used to assassinate John F. Kennedy, as elaborated upon in Mailer’s ''Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery.'' {{sfn|Mailer|1995|}} This death of monumental, tragic proportions was brought about by the use of a $10 gun. Also in ''A Farewell to Arms,'' Frederick Henry feels faintly ridiculous in obeying the regulation that a uniformed officer be armed with a pistol even when out of combat (148).Yet after his
convalescence in Milan he uses his pistol (of unspecified caliber, but described
as “regulation”) during the next campaign to shoot one of two sergeants for disobedience and desertion (204). The point of the passage, one of many emphasizing the anti-heroic message of the novel, is that Henry and the enlisted man Bonello (who administers the ''coup de grâce'') are so inured to death in war that they are entirely dispassionate about it.

Most clearly parallel to this scene is the opening of ''An American Dream'' (1965) in which Stephen Richards Rojack kills four German machine-gunners with his .30 caliber M1 carbine. Portentously set under a full moon, the episode illustrates Rojack’s capacity for lethal violence and his perception
that murder has a sexual aspect to it.{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=3-6}} Yet, in a later
passage in the New England woods with his wife Deborah, he is shamed by her superior ability to hunt small animals with a .22 rifle, another of the
scenes that illuminates the constant competition in their intense love/hate relationship: “And in fact she was an exceptional hunter. She had gone on safari with her first husband and killed a wounded lion charging ten feet from her throat, she dropped an Alaskan bear with two shots to the heart (30/06
Winchester)” (35).

Moving to the beginning of Mailer’s career, it is obvious that every character in ''The Naked and the Dead''{{sfn|Mailer|1948|}} is issued regulation small arms: the officers with caliber .45 ACP Model 1911A1 pistols, the enlisted men with 30-06 M1 Garand rifles (as distinguished from Rojack’s smaller M1 carbine) or .45 Thompson submachine guns. Perhaps the most crucial episode in which one of these weapons figures is late in the book, during the abortive attempt by I & R platoon to climb Mt. Anaka, when Red Valsen rebels against Staff Sgt. Croft’s leadership and is forced to obey at gunpoint: “Croft . . . unslung his rifle, cocked the bolt leisurely. . . . It was worthless to temporize. Croft wanted to shoot him” (695-6).When Red capitulates, it signals the end of all resistance to Croft, which is emblematic of the allegorical conclusion by Mailer that reactionaries would dominate post-war America and which emphasizes the novel’s pessimistic message, its naturalistic bias.
{{pg|158|159}}
If war is the most obvious arena in which guns figure, it is not hard to find the others: hunting and, in urban civilian life, criminal pursuits. The
most striking of the latter occurs in Hemingway’s great story, “The Killers,” and Mailer’s 1984 murder mystery, ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance''. In the former,
the two hit men, almost robotic in their mindless, inexorable commitment to a job that must be done, pursue their prey, ex-boxer Ole Anderson, with
a chilling, leisurely assurance and sawed-off 12 gauge shotguns. In the first cinematic version of the story,{{sfn|Hemingway|1946|}} a classic ''film noir'' with Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner in their first starring roles, the killers (one of whom is William Conrad, later of TV“Cannon” fame) use more pedestrian Smith &
Wesson Model 10 .38 Special revolvers. As in Hemingway’s story, Ole Anderson, in true naturalistic fashion, passively awaits his death.

In ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', several of the seven violent deaths are carried out by the three matching .22 automatic pistols bought by Meeks Wardley
Hilby III, including his own suicide and that of his doppelgänger Lonnie Pangborn. These parallels in death echo the sexual parallels in the lives of
these characters and the novel presents a sexual nexus in which virtually every character is attached carnally to several others.

In a more significant book, ''The Executioner’s Song''{{sfn|Mailer|1979|}}, the career criminal Gary Gilmore traffics in guns and murders with one. He is inept with the .32 automatic he uses in his two cold-blooded assassinations, for he shoots
himself in the hand after the second murder, and the bleeding wound casts immediate suspicion upon him and leads to his quick capture by the police.
This episode is in line with Gary’s failures throughout the book and his entire life.

In ''Why Are We in Vietnam?,''{{sfn|Mailer|1967|}} the metaphorical juxtaposition of over-armed Texans hunting in Alaska, and the parallel depredations of the U.S. Army upon the population of Vietnam is best expressed in the passage where DJ lists at length the battery of guns brought on the hunt, especially by his father, Rusty:

<blockquote>
Which brings up Rusty, who travels like a big-ass hunter. . . . yeah, he got for instance a .404 Jeffrey on a Mauser Magnum action with a Circassian walnut stock, one love of a custom job by Biesen with Zeiss Zielklein 2 on Griffin & Howe side mount for Gun #1. Gun #2 is Model 70 Winchester rechambered to .300 Weatherly Magnum, Stith Bear Cub scope, birds’-eye maple
</blockquote>

{{pg|159|160}}

<blockquote>
stock, etcetera. . . . Gun #3 is Winslow Regimental Grade 7 mm. Remington Magnum with FN Supreme 400 action and Premium Grade Douglas barrel, ivory and ebony inlays in the stock, basket weave carving on both sides of the forearm and pistol grip, Redfield Jr. mounts, Redfield 2X-7X (79-80)
</blockquote>

Despite this impressive array of weaponry, Rusty selfishly fails his son by his lack of a sportsmanlike hunter’s ethics. Later in the novel, it is only by divesting themselves of all weapons and other equipment that DJ and his best friend Tex Hyde are able to experience a transcendent oneness with nature.

In a similar situation but without the devastating irony, Hemingway equips the title character in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” with a 30-06 rifle and 220 grain solid slugs for lion and Cape buffalo. The professional hunter, Robert Wilson, based on the famous Philip Percival with whom Hemingway had hunted in Africa, carries a “shockingly big-bored".505 Gibbs “with a muzzle velocity of two tons” (138). Here, Hemingway makes an error in nomenclature and physics, since muzzle ''velocity'' is measured in feet per second, and muzzle ''energy'' in foot pounds.Yet the .505 Gibbs, a highly specialized big game hunting rifle of which only eighty were ever manufactured, presents a very impressive picture in the mind’s eye. Finally, in one of the greatest examples of controlled ambiguity in literature, Macomber’s wife Margot, “shot at the buffalo with the 6.5 Mannlicher” (153), killing her husband. This 6.5 mm Mannlicher (a fine sporting arm quite different from the rough, mass produced Mannlicher Carcano of ''Farewell'' and ''Oswald’s Tale'') is the instrument of a death which lives forever in the shadowy ambiguity of Margot Macomber’s true intent, and which brings to a close the short, happy, existential life of the protagonist.

Part One of Hemingway’s ''To Have and Have Not'' {{sfn|Hemingway|1937|}} opens with an action sequence in which two politically opposed groups of Cubans kill each other with, among other guns, a 9 mm. Luger, a 12 gauge shotgun, and a .45 Thompson submachine gun. Later in the same section of the book, the protagonist Harry Morgan, a modern pirate like his namesake Henry Morgan (1635?–1688: a Welsh buccaneer in the Caribbean, later acting governor of Jamaica, 1680-82) carries out the dangerous mission of transporting (and double-crossing) illegal Chinese immigrants with the aid of a fairly standard but versatile battery consisting of a Winchester 30-30 lever action carbine, a
{{pg|160|161}}
12 gauge pump shotgun, and“the Smith and Wesson thirty-eight special I had when I was on the police force up in Miami“ {{sfn|Hemingway|1937|p=44}}

In Part Two, Harry is badly wounded in his right arm, which he subsequently loses, by the gunfire of law enforcement agents while smuggling liquor from Cuba. But in Part Three, the longest and most intense section of the book, he (literally) single-handedly kills, with his Thompson submachine gun, four Cuban revolutionaries escaping from a bank robbery. And yet, a true existential character trapped in a naturalistic world, he mutters with his dying breath this credo: “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance” (225).

Many guns figure prominently in the 1940 novel ''For Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|}} perhaps most significantly the Smith and Wesson .32 revolver handed down by Robert Jordan’s grandfather, a veteran of the American Civil War:

<blockquote>
It was a single action officer’s model .32 caliber and there was no trigger. It had the softest, sweetest trigger pull you had ever felt and it was always well oiled and the bore was clean although the finish was all worn off and the brown metal of the barrel and the cylinder was worn smooth from the leather of the holster. (Hemingway, ''For Whom'' ''336'')
</blockquote>

After Robert’s father commits suicide with this gun (like the author’s own father), although the revolver is lovingly described, Robert Jordan disposes of it in a memorable flashback by dropping it into an eight hundred feet deep lake (337). In the main action of the novel, Jordan is armed with an automatic pistol and a submachine gun, both unspecified as to caliber or manufacture. But other guns are more clearly defined: the Lewis gun of which the guerrilla band is so proud but whose obsolescence disappoints Jordan, and the 9mm Star pistol with which El Sordo carries out his “suicide” ruse on the fascists surrounding him in his last stand. Finally, Robert Jordan, waiting to make ''his'' last stand at the novel’s conclusion, grasps his submachine gun and thinks, “I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it” (467). Here, as with Harry Morgan, the firearm is an extension of the individual’s capacity to resist evil forces and fight with existential heroism for the good.
{{pg|161|162}}
Firearms play minor roles in other Hemingway novels and stories: the shotguns Col. Cantwell uses in the opening duck-hunting sequence of ''Across the River and into the Trees;''{{sfn|Hemingway|1950|}} the .357 Magnum carried by Thomas Hudson in ''Islands in the Stream''{{sfn|Hemingway|1970|}} and the Thompson gun used to shoot sharks in that novel; the shotgun used by the father in “A Day’s Wait” to dispense death to quail while his beloved son is lying in bed at home mistakenly expecting his own death. Finally, the last gun for Hemingway was the “double-barreled Boss shotgun with a tight choke” with which he took his own life.{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=563}}

What, finally, can we say about the role of guns in the works of Hemingway and Mailer? They are virtually ubiquitous, sometimes mere everyday equipment, more often objects of profound symbolic and thematic significance. But always, as in life, they loom as instruments that amplify the individual’s influence on the world around him. Whether used to hunt game, commit murder, or fight for a political ideal, every gun is a tool that extends the power of the existential human will in a world that would attempt to render it impotent.

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin|indent=1|20em}}
*{{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1969 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1950 |title=Across the River and into the Trees |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1936 |title=A Day's Wait |chapter=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=34-36 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1940 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1970 |title=Islands in the Stream |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1936 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |chapter=The Killers |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=71-81 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1936 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and other Stories |chapter=The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber |location= New York |publisher=Scribner |pages=121-154 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1937 |title=To Have and Have Not |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite AV media | people= Siodmak, Robert (Dir.), Lancaster, Burt (Perf.) | title=The Killers | medium=Film | publisher=Universal Pictures | location= | date=1946 |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |location=New York |publisher=Dial Press |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1979 |title=The Executioner’s Song |location=Boston |publisher=Litte, Brown and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1995 |title=Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown and Co. |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1984 |title=Tough Guys Don’t Dance |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1967 |title=Why Are We in Vietnam? |location=New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam’s Sons |pages= |ref=harv}}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

==Discussion Post - Week 3==

===Creating Better Headlines===

I learned a lot during this week's reading about crafting a headline that stands out to our readers, and how important a headline can be for the information you are writing about. I feel like the reading this week goes well with me learning more about how headers work and how to incorporate them. It is extremely important to have headers that draw your readers in, and it helps encourage them to read your article. According to Carroll, "research tells us that about 70% [of readers] will read at least your headline, so what you put in it is of paramount importance." {{sfn|Carroll|p=64}}

70% is a huge percentage of readers that are at least reading your header. This shows just how important it is to ensure that your header is a good one and creates a sense of curiosity that makes the reader want to know more. I was also able to read throughout this chapter different guidelines to follow that make headlines even better. I am thrilled to have been able to learn so much about how to create the best headlines, especially after I learned exactly how important they are.

===Content Gaps===

Based on the questions from the Wikipedia training this week, I also wanted to share some insight into my thoughts about content gaps. To me, a content gap is when a topic being discussed/written about is missing vital information to help the reader understanding what is being discussed. If there are pieces of information missing, then the reader will have a hard time understanding what they are supposed to be gaining from the information being shared with them. I think content gaps arise many times due to the lack of knowledge or history about these topics. Normally, we see content gaps occur with diverse topics and information about minority groups. We can see this happen due to the types of people that are contributing information to Wikipedia pages. Content gaps like these can make it difficult for topics to stay relevant in the world and will eventually cease to exist. What happens if we just stop discussing topics like a minority group in a small village in Africa. Those people just don't stop existing. Therefore, how do we ensure that there are groups out there that don't get forgotten?

===Feeling More Prepared===

This week definitely had lots of moving parts going on, however, I enjoyed getting to work on my sandbox and taking the time to learn a lot during the remediation project. I still have my moments where I get nervous that I have done something incorrectly, or forgotten a step, but overall I have enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I still believe I have a lot to learn, but it is becoming more enjoyable for me to learn about. I am looking forward to seeing what is coming up next week.

===Citations===
{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* Carroll, Brian. *Writing and Editing for Digital Media*. New York: Routledge, 2023. 63-92 Print.

== Bibliography ==

For Wikipedia Project:

Allen, Leah Claire. “From New Criticism to Postcritique: Kate Millett’s Method in The History of The Present.” Criticism, vol. 63, no. 4, Oct. 2021, pp. 1–28. EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=65a6e2ce-d7d6-3a34-b449-432b3bd1aa9b.

Fishel, Elizabeth R. “The Prisoner of Sexism Jail and Roses: News: The Harvard Crimson.” News | The Harvard Crimson, The University Daily, www.thecrimson.com/article/1971/3/18/the-prisoner-of-sexism-jail-and/. Accessed 8 Apr. 2025.

== Individual Wikipedia Project - Edith Elizabeth House ==

"Edith Elizabeth House was born in 1903 in Winder, GA. She went on to become one of the first female graduates of the University of Georgia School of Law in 1925. Technically she was the second female graduate, since alphabetically her name came after classmate Gussie Brooks."

"While studying at the University of Georgia she was a member of Chi Omega sorority. Following graduation she began law practice with the firm of Baskin and Jordan in Clearwater, Florida. In 1929 House became chief clerk for U.S. District Attorney Wilburn P. Hughes in Jacksonville, Florida. She was notified she passed the Florida bar exam in 1930 and in 1931 was appointed Assistant U.S. Attorney, serving in Jacksonville."

"She received citation for 25 years of outstanding service in 1955, and in 1960 was appointed chief administrative aide to U.S. Attorney Coleman Madsen in Miami. Later, in 1963, she was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, becoming the first woman to hold that post in the state. She retired eight months later. In 1983 she was honored with the Edith House named lecture series establishment at the University of Georgia School of Law, featuring Professor Nadine Taub, of Rutgers Law School as the inaugural speaker."

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-14T22:54:15Z

CVinson: /* Remediation for Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing */

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Hello, my article is complete: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman_(Exit_Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]]
:{{Reply to|Flowersbloom}} great, thank you. I made some corrections. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, Dr. Lucas. Below is the link to my edited article:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:ASpeed/sandbox
:{{Reply to|ASpeed}} great. Let me know when it’s finished and posted, and I’l have a look. It appears as if you still have a bit of work to do. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. I have completed most of my Remediation Articles, but I still show issues for the one named, "[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]].

Based on the latest updates, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Battles_for_Regard,_Writerly_and_Otherwise|Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise]] looks good with exception of including a '''category'''.
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} this one is good. I made some corrections before removing the banner, mostly in your sources. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

May you let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to resolve the issues with the first [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|article]]?

[[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 21:47, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} looking very good, but some sources missing page numbers. Please see to those. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

:::Thank you @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] . I will review those and respond when complete. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 22:47, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. Thank you for your feedback. A review of article additions was made for source pages. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 20:22, 11 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{Reply to| ALedezma}} ok, looking good. I made some corrections. There's one final thing to do: no footnotes should appear in the notes section; use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead; I did one to show you how to use the template. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] Changes were done to footnote sources. Thank you! [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 19:59, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TWietstruk}} good work so far, but there is more to do: placement of footnotes (eliminate spaces around them and punctuation always goes ''before'' the footnote.); proofread for typos; fix all red errors at the bottom (most of these are from errors in sourcing); works cited entries should be bulleted list and eliminate space between entries. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Final edit and no errors with some help from @NRMMGA5108, @JKilchenmann. Please mark me as complete. On to help someone else with the things I've learned
https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 17:52, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.
:{{Reply to|ADear}} thank you. I have marked this as complete. Please be sure you sign your talk page posts correctly. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I have updated the sources and updated the in-text citations. I am still having trouble with the "Harv and Sfn no-target errors." I have not been successful in fixing this error and have tried multiple ways to fix it. —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 8:18, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

::::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I see that I still have a red X for my remediation assignment. Is there something else I am still missing? —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{reply to| CVinson}} sorry, I'm just getting back to it. There are quite a few punctuation errors. Some left out and others appear after the {{tl|sfn}}. I'm trying to correct those I see, but you should have a look, too. Page is designated as <code>p=</code> in {{tl|sfn}}, not <code>pg=</code>; and a span of pages needs <code>pp=</code>. Again, I have tried to correct these. I removed the banner, but please have another look through. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:01, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have managed to get rid of two of the red target errors. I am still working on finding the harv sfn multiple target error. Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 20:37, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything i can think of to remove the last red error flag. I had to turn it in. I don't know that else I can do in this situation. I was given citation that did not follow any of the given formats. [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:45, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} all parenthetical citations must be remediated to {{tl|sfn}}; none of yours are. Get these done, then we can worry about the errors. (Some notes on sources: any generic <code><nowiki>{{citation}}</nowiki></code> will not be correct. I see you have a book review by Marshall that has no source (I tried to find the original and cannot; this is a weird citation; I'll continue to look for it). There's also one that looks like a film that should use the [[w:Template:Cite AV media|<code>Cite AV media</code> template]].) Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:16, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}}I believe I have completed these fixes, so the article is again ready for review. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 15:49, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to| Sherrilledwards}} truly exceptional work—a model remediation! Marked as complete. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:30, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I found the page number error and its corrected, and yes all the parenthetical citations should be referencing issues of the ''playboy'' magazine, which were not listed in the works cited. --[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| NrmMGA5108}} it looks great. I removed the banner! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:29, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

I have gone through and fixed all of the short footnotes.

I have gone line by line with a ruler to look at any typos, and fixed the words that I found that had a dash in them/needed to be lowercased.

I have also fixed the quotations.

—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} much better. Periods go inside quotations marks; I think I fixed these, but please check. Also, there are no spaces before footnotes; again, I did a find/replace, but you should check. Also, check that all titles of novels are italicized (if it's italicized in the PDF, then it has to be italicized in the remediation, including abbreviations, like ''Naked''); I fixed a couple. Also, no extra spaces; there should only be a single blank space between paragraphs. There are quite a few little details that needed (need?) fixing. I removed the banner, but please check my work. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 12:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
:{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Thank you. I will get started on these revisions immediately. Thanks for the feedback and your time. :)[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 11:30, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} I have completed all the requested revisions and ready for review round 2. Thank you again![[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 12:10, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} looking better! There are still items to be seen to, like titles on novels and magazines need to appear like they do in the original: if it's italicized in the PDF, it must be italicized on the web. I added the epigram for you and corrected that pesky citation. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation article: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley
:{{Reply to|Priley1984}} thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:40, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna
:{{Reply to|Wverna}} received, thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:51, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010
:{{Reply to| Essence903m}} thank you. I had to fix and clean-up quite a bit. Your saves also do not include summaries. When you move on to your next article, please be more careful and follow the instructions. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} thank you, and this is a good start, but there are still many items that need to be cleaned up, like footnote indications (They go after punctuation), citation errors (all the red errors at the bottom need to be seen to), extra spaces and ALL CAPS need to be removed. Please see other completed articles for models. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:18, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/What Would Be the Fun of That?|"What Would Be the Fun of That?"]] by Peter Alson.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:33, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} awesome! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:21, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “Remembering Norris Church” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris Church|“Remembering Norris Church”]] by John Bowers.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 16:17, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} and again, excellent! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:22, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “The Norris I Knew” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/The Norris I Knew|“The Norris I Knew”]] by Christopher Busa.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:04, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} rockin’! 👍🏼 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Norris Mailer" Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Norris Mailer|"Norris Mailer"]] by Nancy Collins.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} thanks again. You’re tearing it up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:32, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Rise Above It" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Rise Above It|"Rise Above It"]] by David Ebershoff—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 11:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} excellent. Many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:15, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Additional Articles ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have remediated [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/A_View_Through_the_Prism&oldid=18744|"A View Through the Prism"], [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/Lip_Liner|"Lip Liner"], and [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Living_Room_Show#|"The Living Room Show"] in Volume 5. They are ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 12:31, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ADavis}} great work. Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:26, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Submission notification sent 29 March ==

@grlucas

Dr. Lucas - I sent a Talk Page notification that I had completed the page I remediated on 29 March. The table indicates I haven't done anything yet. I sent it from the Talk Page from the article site. I don't see a response from that notification, but I had received one from you earlier in the process.
I don't understand what happened.

[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|LogansPop22}} sorry if I missed that. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works|this article]], right? It's looking great, though all the parenthetical citations must be converted to footnotes using {{tl|sfn}} and some of the author names in your notes should use {{tl|harvtxt}}. I added the "citations" section for you. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law ==

@Grlucas, I have made some additional edits to this [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law article] in Volume 5 by correcting most of the citations. There are 2 that still do not work, but I think that is because the sources are incomplete.

[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 21:16, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TPoole}} Looking really good, and this is a complicated one. A couple of things: no spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}; I removed the spaces before {{tl|sfn}}, but you might want to check them; there are some typos, like missing spaces before some parentheses; no footnotes should appear in the notes section: use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead. And all the red errors at the bottom need to be cleared up. Great work so far! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:00, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Red Error-Gone ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}I have deleted all the sfn's and the red error is gone. I don't know why I didn't think about this days ago.

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe|Gladstein-Monroe]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 23:07, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} getting closer. A few things: you should use <code>|author-mask=1</code> for repeated author names in your works cited; all parenthetical citations need to be replaced with footnotes using {{tl|sfn}}; must punctuation in your sources need to be removed as the templates do that for you; and you need to use {{tl|harvtxt}} for citations in your endnotes. Also, letters and films have their own templates. I did a couple of these for you as examples. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:14, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Remembering Norris" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris|"Remembering Norris"]] by Margo Howard.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:20, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_From_Orgone_Accumulator_to_Cancer_Protection_for_Schizophrenics

I was unable to find the correct format for the first works cited entry under Mailer. It is a reprint of a magazine article. Thank you. [[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 16:28, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} you are a master remediator! Thank you for going above and beyond. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:44, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

==Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Trust & Sparring with Norman==
Dr. Lucas, these were some of the smaller ones, so I went ahead and knocked them out. They are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Sparring with Norman|Sparring with Norman]], [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Trust|Trust]], and [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls|Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 10:27, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Kamyers}} all excellent—above and beyond! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing'' ==

Hi everyone,
I am currently helping with the article, [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Death,_Art,_and_the_Disturbing:_Hemingway_and_Mailer_and_the_Art_of_Writing Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing]. It still has a good bit to go, if anyone wants to help out.
—[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 5:17 PM, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} thanks! I added the author info. I'm not sure many will see your request; you might want to post it on the forum. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:56, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Thank you for adding the author information and I have posted the request in the forum. Thank you! —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:CVinson|talk]]) 6:53 PM, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Mimi and Mercer ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have corrected the Mimi Gladstein [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Piling On: Norman Mailer’s Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]] and removed all the red errors. I also have finishe the Erin Mercer article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Automatons and the Atomic Abyss: The Naked and the Dead]], except the ''The Naked and the Dead'' in the display title. An error occured.
[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 19:26, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work. There should be no footnotes in the endnotes, please. Since this is the only thing to correct, I have removed the banner, but please let me know when you made that final correction. Thanks! (I will respond about your second article shortly.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:59, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} your second article looks good. Could you use the [[w:Template:Cite interview|Template:Cite interview]] for interviews. I did one for you. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:33, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Through the Lens of the Beatniks Remediation ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas! I've completed the remediation of [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Through_the_Lens_of_the_Beatniks:_Norman_Mailer_and_Modern_American_Man’s_Quest_for_Self-Realization#CITEREFNaked1992|Through the Lens of the Beatniks]]. I wasn't able to get the letter citations exactly how I thought they should be. If there's anything I'm missing, please let me know! Thanks! [[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 10:09, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} got it! It looks great. I made some format changes, but you did a great job! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 15:58, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

== Finish Mimi ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}

I have made the final edit to Mimi and removed the footnotes from the endnotes. [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe]] [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 15:50, 14 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you removed all the citations. Only '''footnotes''' need to be removed, but citations need to stay. I did the first note for you (now erased, but you can see it in the history) so you could see how it was done. You can also see [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer|this one]]. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 16:52, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010

2025-04-14T22:51:50Z

CVinson:

===Article Assignments, Vol. 4===
You will need to request an article and user name for {{PM}}. You may click the link to your article below to begin your edits. Status indicators: {{tick}} = complete (ready for final edits and banner removal); {{yellow tick}} = in process; {{cross}} = not started.

{| class="wikitable sortable" style="width: 100%;"
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! Author !! Article !! Editor !! Status
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| Mailer || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Postscript to the Fourth Advertisement for Myself|Postscript to the Fourth Advertisement for Myself]] || [[User:Grlucas]] || {{tick}}
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| Mailer || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hemingway Revisited|Hemingway Revisited]] || [[User:Grlucas]] || {{tick}}
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| Lennon || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hemingway to Mailer — A Delayed Response to The Deer Park|Hemingway to Mailer]] || [[User:Hobbitonya]] || {{tick}}
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| Hemingway || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman, Ernest, and Greg|Norman, Ernest, and Greg]] || [[User:Grlucas]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Begiebing || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Ernest and Norman: A Dialogue in Two Acts|Ernest and Norman]] || [[User:DSánchez]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Bufithis & Curnutt || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway|A Dialogue Essay on Mailer and Hemingway]] || [[User:Grlucas]] || {{yellow tick}}
|-
| Meredith || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees|The American Civil War]] || [[User:KaraCroissant]] || {{cross}}
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| Shuman || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman vs. Ernest: Influence and Identity|Norman vs. Ernest]] || [[User:MSeleb]] || {{cross}}
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| Lowenburg || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hooking Off the Jab: Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway and Boxing|Hooking Off the Jab]] || [[User:ASpeed]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Cirino || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer's The Fight: Hemingway, Bullfighting, and the Lovely Metaphysics of Boxing|Norman Mailer's ''The Fight'']] || [[User:TWietstruk]] || {{tick}}
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| Boddy || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing]] || [[User:JBrown]] || {{cross}}
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| Leeds || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer|Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer]] || [[User:CVinson]] || {{tick}}
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| Plath || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Jive-Ass Aficionado: Why Are We in Vietnam? and Hemingway's Moral Code|Jive-Ass Aficionado]] || [[User:ADear]] || {{cross}}
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| Cappell || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Hemingway's Jewish Progeny: Roth and Goldstein in ''The Naked and the Dead''|Hemingway's Jewish Progeny]] || [[User:THarris]] || {{cross}}
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| Peppard || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and the “Reds”|Mailer, Hemingway, and the “Reds”]] || [[User:KWatson]] || {{cross}}
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| Kaufmann || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]] || [[User:Flowersbloom]] || {{tick}}
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| Justice || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation]] || [[User:APKnight25]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Josephs || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer's "Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"|Mailer's "Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"]] || [[User:KForeman]] || {{cross}}
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| Hays || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise|Battles for Regard]] || [[User:ALedezma]] || {{tick}}
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| Gladstein || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]] || [[User:ALedezma]] || {{tick}}
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| Batchelor || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls|Looking at the Past]] || [[User:DBond007]] || {{yellow tick}}
|-
| Robinson || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures of Across the River and Into the Trees and The Naked and the Dead|Effects of Trauma on the Narrative Structures]] ||[[User:Priley1984]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Sanders || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing|Death, Art, and the Disturbing]] || [[User:JBawlson]] [[User:CVinson]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Stoneback || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/"Oohh Normie — You're Sooo Hemingway": Mailer Memories and Encounters|Mailer Memories and Encounters]] || [[User:Tbara4554]] || {{tick}}
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| Jacomo || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Sparring with Norman|Sparing with Norman]] || [[User:Kamyers]] || {{tick}}
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| Gordon || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Encounters with Mailer|Encounters with Mailer]] || [[User:Priley1984]] || {{tick}}
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| Vince || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer|Rumors of Grace]] || [[User:Sherrilledwards]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Apple || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]] || [[User:Chelsey.brantley]] || {{tick}}
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| Sinclair || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place|An Expected Encounter]] || [[User:Wverna]] || {{tick}}
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| Klavan || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/On Reading Mailer Too Young|On Reading Mailer Too Young]] || [[User:Essence903m]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Miele || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/What Norman Mailer Taught Me about Combat|What Norman Mailer Taught Me about Combat]] || [[User:TBorel]] || {{cross}}
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| Vernon || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches|Style, Politics, and Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Dispatches]] || [[User:MerAtticus]] || {{cross}}
|-
| Hooker || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics|From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics]] || [[User:JKilchenmann]] || {{tick}}
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| Hinton || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Advertisements for Others: The Blurbs of Norman Mailer|Advertisements for Others]] || [[User:NrmMGA5108]] || {{cross}}
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| Hicks || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway|''Harlot’s Ghost'', ''Bildungsroman'', Masculinity and Hemingway]] || [[User:JKilchenmann]] || {{tick}}
|-
| Mercer || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Automatons and the Atomic Abyss: The Naked and the Dead|Automatons and the Atomic Abyss]] || [[User:MerAtticus]] || {{cross}}
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| Westaway || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/“A Noble Pursuit”: The Armies of the Night as Outside Agitator|“A Noble Pursuit”]] || [[User:Chelsey.brantley]] || {{yellow tick}}
|-
| Fox || [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]] || [[User:Kamyers]] || {{tick}}
|}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

2025-04-13T21:25:40Z

CVinson: /* HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{''Death,Art, and the Disturbing'':Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing }}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 

{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L.|}}

{{dc|dc=I|N A 1964 INTERVIEW PUBLISHED IN THE PARIS REVIEW—}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to“try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique“affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true”(Death 1).Echoing Hemingway’s standards,Mailer believes a writer must write“to the limit of one’s honesty”(“Hazards” 399). But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes,“Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good” (354). According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is” (354). Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,
<blockquote>
how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)
</blockquote>

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to,this“point of purity,”the author succeeds in showing life“as it really is”(“Letter to John”). Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity”when he defines what he calls“the real thing”in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon (). Hemingway writes,
In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. ()
Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely enough,”captures the“motion and fact”of life as it really happens,then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader (). Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that“we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest” (“Hazards” ). Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and,correlatively, art and writing,life and death,and the violence,brutality,and cruelty of the bullfight and life ().
Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards,yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”
You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—  dimensions and if possible  that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker )
The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer:“I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing” (qtd. in Baker ). Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,
I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself,but rather effects which come from being truly radical,from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster )
Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John”)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker ), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death –). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster ). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.
According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,”“the purity,”“the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, Death ) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves,and thus bring readers to see life,themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (–).
Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” ). In fact,in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon,Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (, ), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more“clearly”and as a“whole”(, –). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (). Mailer writes,
It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster )
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, Cannibals ). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John”), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, selfdeveloped philosophy of writing and art.
Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (Advertisements ). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions,see self and world more clearly,get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” ).The catalyst for this perceptual shift,according to existentialists,is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death , ) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it,of making“something of his own,”of creating“art”and becoming “artist” () or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
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Mills, Jon. “The False Dasein: From Heidegger to Sartre and Pyschoanalysis.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology . (): –. EBSCOhost. Web.  Aug. .
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., . Print.
Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
Yalom, Irvin. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, . Print.

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{dc|dc=I|N A 1964 INTERVIEW PUBLISHED IN THE PARIS REVIEW—}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to“try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique“affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true”(Death 1).Echoing Hemingway’s standards,Mailer believes a writer must write“to the limit of one’s honesty”(“Hazards” 399). But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes,“Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good” (354). According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is” (354). Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,
<blockquote>how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)

If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to,this“point of purity,”the author succeeds in showing life“as it really is”(“Letter to John”). Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity”when he defines what he calls“the real thing”in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon (). Hemingway writes,
In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. ()
Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely enough,”captures the“motion and fact”of life as it really happens,then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader (). Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that“we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest” (“Hazards” ). Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and,correlatively, art and writing,life and death,and the violence,brutality,and cruelty of the bullfight and life ().
Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards,yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”
You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—  dimensions and if possible  that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker )
The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer:“I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing” (qtd. in Baker ). Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,
I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself,but rather effects which come from being truly radical,from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster )
Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John”)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker ), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death –). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster ). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.
According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,”“the purity,”“the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, Death ) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves,and thus bring readers to see life,themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (–).
Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” ). In fact,in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon,Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (, ), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more“clearly”and as a“whole”(, –). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (). Mailer writes,
It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster )
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, Cannibals ). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John”), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, selfdeveloped philosophy of writing and art.
Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (Advertisements ). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions,see self and world more clearly,get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” ).The catalyst for this perceptual shift,according to existentialists,is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death , ) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it,of making“something of his own,”of creating“art”and becoming “artist” () or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
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: . Print.
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Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{dc|dc=I|N A 1964 INTERVIEW PUBLISHED IN THE PARIS REVIEW—}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to“try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique“affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true”(Death 1).Echoing Hemingway’s standards,Mailer believes a writer must write“to the limit of one’s honesty”(“Hazards” 399). But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes,“Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good” (354). According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is” (354). Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,
<blockquote>how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)<blockquote>
If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to,this“point of purity,”the author succeeds in showing life“as it really is”(“Letter to John”). Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity”when he defines what he calls“the real thing”in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon (). Hemingway writes,
In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. ()
Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely enough,”captures the“motion and fact”of life as it really happens,then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader (). Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that“we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest” (“Hazards” ). Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and,correlatively, art and writing,life and death,and the violence,brutality,and cruelty of the bullfight and life ().
Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards,yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”
You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—  dimensions and if possible  that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker )
The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer:“I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing” (qtd. in Baker ). Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,
I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself,but rather effects which come from being truly radical,from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster )
Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John”)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker ), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death –). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster ). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.
According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,”“the purity,”“the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, Death ) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves,and thus bring readers to see life,themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (–).
Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” ). In fact,in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon,Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (, ), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more“clearly”and as a“whole”(, –). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (). Mailer writes,
It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster )
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, Cannibals ). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John”), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, selfdeveloped philosophy of writing and art.
Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (Advertisements ). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions,see self and world more clearly,get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” ).The catalyst for this perceptual shift,according to existentialists,is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death , ) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it,of making“something of his own,”of creating“art”and becoming “artist” () or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
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Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, . Print.
Broer, Lawrence R. Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy. University, AL: U of Alabama P, . Print.
de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
: . Print.
Finkelstein, Sidney. Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. New York: International Publishers, . Print.
Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
Paul, MN: North Central Publishing Co., . Print.
Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
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Kvam, Wayne E. Hemingway in Germany: The Fiction, the Legend, and the Critics. Athens: Ohio UP,
. Print.
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———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
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Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
———. Interview by Steven Marcus.“The Art of Fiction: No.  Norman Mailer.”The Paris Review
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{dc|dc=I|N A 1964 INTERVIEW PUBLISHED IN THE PARIS REVIEW—}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to“try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique“affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true”(Death 1).Echoing Hemingway’s standards,Mailer believes a writer must write“to the limit of one’s honesty”(“Hazards” 399). But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes,“Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good” (354). According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is” (354). Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,
how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” 399)
If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to,this“point of purity,”the author succeeds in showing life“as it really is”(“Letter to John”). Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity”when he defines what he calls“the real thing”in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon (). Hemingway writes,
In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. ()
Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely enough,”captures the“motion and fact”of life as it really happens,then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader (). Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that“we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest” (“Hazards” ). Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and,correlatively, art and writing,life and death,and the violence,brutality,and cruelty of the bullfight and life ().
Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards,yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”
You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—  dimensions and if possible  that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker )
The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer:“I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing” (qtd. in Baker ). Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,
I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself,but rather effects which come from being truly radical,from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster )
Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John”)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker ), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death –). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster ). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.
According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,”“the purity,”“the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, Death ) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves,and thus bring readers to see life,themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (–).
Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” ). In fact,in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon,Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (, ), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more“clearly”and as a“whole”(, –). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (). Mailer writes,
It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster )
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, Cannibals ). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John”), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, selfdeveloped philosophy of writing and art.
Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (Advertisements ). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions,see self and world more clearly,get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” ).The catalyst for this perceptual shift,according to existentialists,is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death , ) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it,of making“something of his own,”of creating“art”and becoming “artist” () or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
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de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
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———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
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———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
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Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
———. Interview by Steven Marcus.“The Art of Fiction: No.  Norman Mailer.”The Paris Review
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Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{dc|dc=I|N A 1964 INTERVIEW PUBLISHED IN THE PARIS REVIEW—}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to“try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique“affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true”(Death 1).Echoing Hemingway’s standards,Mailer believes a writer must write“to the limit of one’s honesty”(“Hazards” 399). But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes,“Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good” (354). According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is” (354). Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,
how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” )
If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to,this“point of purity,”the author succeeds in showing life“as it really is”(“Letter to John”). Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity”when he defines what he calls“the real thing”in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon (). Hemingway writes,
In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. ()
Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely enough,”captures the“motion and fact”of life as it really happens,then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader (). Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that“we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest” (“Hazards” ). Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and,correlatively, art and writing,life and death,and the violence,brutality,and cruelty of the bullfight and life ().
Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards,yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”
You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—  dimensions and if possible  that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker )
The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer:“I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing” (qtd. in Baker ). Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,
I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself,but rather effects which come from being truly radical,from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster )
Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John”)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker ), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death –). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster ). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.
According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,”“the purity,”“the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, Death ) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves,and thus bring readers to see life,themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (–).
Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” ). In fact,in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon,Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (, ), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more“clearly”and as a“whole”(, –). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (). Mailer writes,
It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster )
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, Cannibals ). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John”), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, selfdeveloped philosophy of writing and art.
Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (Advertisements ). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions,see self and world more clearly,get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” ).The catalyst for this perceptual shift,according to existentialists,is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death , ) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it,of making“something of his own,”of creating“art”and becoming “artist” () or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
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: . Print.
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Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{dc|dc=I|N A 1964 INTERVIEW PUBLISHED IN THE PARIS REVIEW—}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to“try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique“affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true”(Death 1).Echoing Hemingway’s standards,Mailer believes a writer must write“to the limit of one’s honesty”(“Hazards” 399). But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March 1932 letter. Hemingway writes,“Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good” (). According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is” (). Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,
how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” )
If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to,this“point of purity,”the author succeeds in showing life“as it really is”(“Letter to John”). Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity”when he defines what he calls“the real thing”in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon (). Hemingway writes,
In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. ()
Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely enough,”captures the“motion and fact”of life as it really happens,then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader (). Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that“we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest” (“Hazards” ). Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and,correlatively, art and writing,life and death,and the violence,brutality,and cruelty of the bullfight and life ().
Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards,yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”
You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—  dimensions and if possible  that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker )
The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer:“I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing” (qtd. in Baker ). Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,
I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself,but rather effects which come from being truly radical,from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster )
Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John”)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker ), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death –). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster ). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.
According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,”“the purity,”“the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, Death ) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves,and thus bring readers to see life,themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (–).
Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” ). In fact,in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon,Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (, ), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more“clearly”and as a“whole”(, –). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (). Mailer writes,
It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster )
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, Cannibals ). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John”), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, selfdeveloped philosophy of writing and art.
Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (Advertisements ). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions,see self and world more clearly,get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” ).The catalyst for this perceptual shift,according to existentialists,is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death , ) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it,of making“something of his own,”of creating“art”and becoming “artist” () or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
Adams, Laura. Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer. Athens: Ohio UP, . Print.
Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, . Print.
Broer, Lawrence R. Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy. University, AL: U of Alabama P, . Print.
de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
: . Print.
Finkelstein, Sidney. Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. New York: International Publishers, . Print.
Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
Paul, MN: North Central Publishing Co., . Print.
Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
Killinger, John. Hemingway and the Dead Gods. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, . Print.
Kvam, Wayne E. Hemingway in Germany: The Fiction, the Legend, and the Critics. Athens: Ohio UP,
. Print.
Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. “The Hazards and Sources of Writing.” Michigan Quarterly Review . (): –.
Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
———. Interview by Steven Marcus.“The Art of Fiction: No.  Norman Mailer.”The Paris Review
 (): –. Print.
Mailer, Norman and John Buffalo Mailer. The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and Bad Conscience in America. New York: Nation Books, . Print.
Mills, Jon. “The False Dasein: From Heidegger to Sartre and Pyschoanalysis.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology . (): –. EBSCOhost. Web.  Aug. .
Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The s. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., . Print.
Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
Yalom, Irvin. Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, . Print.

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-13T21:17:55Z

CVinson: /* Remediation for Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing */

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Hello, my article is complete: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman_(Exit_Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]]
:{{Reply to|Flowersbloom}} great, thank you. I made some corrections. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, Dr. Lucas. Below is the link to my edited article:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:ASpeed/sandbox
:{{Reply to|ASpeed}} great. Let me know when it’s finished and posted, and I’l have a look. It appears as if you still have a bit of work to do. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. I have completed most of my Remediation Articles, but I still show issues for the one named, "[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]].

Based on the latest updates, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Battles_for_Regard,_Writerly_and_Otherwise|Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise]] looks good with exception of including a '''category'''.
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} this one is good. I made some corrections before removing the banner, mostly in your sources. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

May you let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to resolve the issues with the first [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|article]]?

[[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 21:47, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} looking very good, but some sources missing page numbers. Please see to those. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

:::Thank you @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] . I will review those and respond when complete. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 22:47, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. Thank you for your feedback. A review of article additions was made for source pages. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 20:22, 11 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{Reply to| ALedezma}} ok, looking good. I made some corrections. There's one final thing to do: no footnotes should appear in the notes section; use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead; I did one to show you how to use the template. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] Changes were done to footnote sources. Thank you! [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 19:59, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TWietstruk}} good work so far, but there is more to do: placement of footnotes (eliminate spaces around them and punctuation always goes ''before'' the footnote.); proofread for typos; fix all red errors at the bottom (most of these are from errors in sourcing); works cited entries should be bulleted list and eliminate space between entries. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.
:{{Reply to|ADear}} thank you. I have marked this as complete. Please be sure you sign your talk page posts correctly. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I have updated the sources and updated the in-text citations. I am still having trouble with the "Harv and Sfn no-target errors." I have not been successful in fixing this error and have tried multiple ways to fix it. —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 8:18, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

::::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I see that I still have a red X for my remediation assignment. Is there something else I am still missing? —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{reply to| CVinson}} sorry, I'm just getting back to it. There are quite a few punctuation errors. Some left out and others appear after the {{tl|sfn}}. I'm trying to correct those I see, but you should have a look, too. Page is designated as <code>p=</code> in {{tl|sfn}}, not <code>pg=</code>; and a span of pages needs <code>pp=</code>. Again, I have tried to correct these. I removed the banner, but please have another look through. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:01, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have managed to get rid of two of the red target errors. I am still working on finding the harv sfn multiple target error. Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 20:37, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything i can think of to remove the last red error flag. I had to turn it in. I don't know that else I can do in this situation. I was given citation that did not follow any of the given formats. [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:45, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} all parenthetical citations must be remediated to {{tl|sfn}}; none of yours are. Get these done, then we can worry about the errors. (Some notes on sources: any generic <code><nowiki>{{citation}}</nowiki></code> will not be correct. I see you have a book review by Marshall that has no source (I tried to find the original and cannot; this is a weird citation; I'll continue to look for it). There's also one that looks like a film that should use the [[w:Template:Cite AV media|<code>Cite AV media</code> template]].) Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:16, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}}I believe I have completed these fixes, so the article is again ready for review. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 15:49, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to| Sherrilledwards}} truly exceptional work—a model remediation! Marked as complete. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:30, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I found the page number error and its corrected, and yes all the parenthetical citations should be referencing issues of the ''playboy'' magazine, which were not listed in the works cited. --[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| NrmMGA5108}} it looks great. I removed the banner! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:29, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

I have gone through and fixed all of the short footnotes.

I have gone line by line with a ruler to look at any typos, and fixed the words that I found that had a dash in them/needed to be lowercased.

I have also fixed the quotations.

—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} much better. Periods go inside quotations marks; I think I fixed these, but please check. Also, there are no spaces before footnotes; again, I did a find/replace, but you should check. Also, check that all titles of novels are italicized (if it's italicized in the PDF, then it has to be italicized in the remediation, including abbreviations, like ''Naked''); I fixed a couple. Also, no extra spaces; there should only be a single blank space between paragraphs. There are quite a few little details that needed (need?) fixing. I removed the banner, but please check my work. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 12:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
:{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Thank you. I will get started on these revisions immediately. Thanks for the feedback and your time. :)[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 11:30, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} I have completed all the requested revisions and ready for review round 2. Thank you again![[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 12:10, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} looking better! There are still items to be seen to, like titles on novels and magazines need to appear like they do in the original: if it's italicized in the PDF, it must be italicized on the web. I added the epigram for you and corrected that pesky citation. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation article: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley
:{{Reply to|Priley1984}} thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:40, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna
:{{Reply to|Wverna}} received, thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:51, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010
:{{Reply to| Essence903m}} thank you. I had to fix and clean-up quite a bit. Your saves also do not include summaries. When you move on to your next article, please be more careful and follow the instructions. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} thank you, and this is a good start, but there are still many items that need to be cleaned up, like footnote indications (They go after punctuation), citation errors (all the red errors at the bottom need to be seen to), extra spaces and ALL CAPS need to be removed. Please see other completed articles for models. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:18, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/What Would Be the Fun of That?|"What Would Be the Fun of That?"]] by Peter Alson.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:33, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} awesome! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:21, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “Remembering Norris Church” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris Church|“Remembering Norris Church”]] by John Bowers.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 16:17, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} and again, excellent! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:22, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “The Norris I Knew” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/The Norris I Knew|“The Norris I Knew”]] by Christopher Busa.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:04, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} rockin’! 👍🏼 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Norris Mailer" Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Norris Mailer|"Norris Mailer"]] by Nancy Collins.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} thanks again. You’re tearing it up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:32, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Rise Above It" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Rise Above It|"Rise Above It"]] by David Ebershoff—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 11:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} excellent. Many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:15, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Additional Articles ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have remediated [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/A_View_Through_the_Prism&oldid=18744|"A View Through the Prism"], [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/Lip_Liner|"Lip Liner"], and [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Living_Room_Show#|"The Living Room Show"] in Volume 5. They are ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 12:31, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ADavis}} great work. Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:26, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Submission notification sent 29 March ==

@grlucas

Dr. Lucas - I sent a Talk Page notification that I had completed the page I remediated on 29 March. The table indicates I haven't done anything yet. I sent it from the Talk Page from the article site. I don't see a response from that notification, but I had received one from you earlier in the process.
I don't understand what happened.

[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|LogansPop22}} sorry if I missed that. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works|this article]], right? It's looking great, though all the parenthetical citations must be converted to footnotes using {{tl|sfn}} and some of the author names in your notes should use {{tl|harvtxt}}. I added the "citations" section for you. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law ==

@Grlucas, I have made some additional edits to this [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law article] in Volume 5 by correcting most of the citations. There are 2 that still do not work, but I think that is because the sources are incomplete.

[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 21:16, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TPoole}} Looking really good, and this is a complicated one. A couple of things: no spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}; I removed the spaces before {{tl|sfn}}, but you might want to check them; there are some typos, like missing spaces before some parentheses; no footnotes should appear in the notes section: use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead. And all the red errors at the bottom need to be cleared up. Great work so far! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:00, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Red Error-Gone ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}I have deleted all the sfn's and the red error is gone. I don't know why I didn't think about this days ago.

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe|Gladstein-Monroe]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 23:07, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} getting closer. A few things: you should use <code>|author-mask=1</code> for repeated author names in your works cited; all parenthetical citations need to be replaced with footnotes using {{tl|sfn}}; must punctuation in your sources need to be removed as the templates do that for you; and you need to use {{tl|harvtxt}} for citations in your endnotes. Also, letters and films have their own templates. I did a couple of these for you as examples. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:14, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Remembering Norris" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris|"Remembering Norris"]] by Margo Howard.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:20, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_From_Orgone_Accumulator_to_Cancer_Protection_for_Schizophrenics

I was unable to find the correct format for the first works cited entry under Mailer. It is a reprint of a magazine article. Thank you. [[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 16:28, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} you are a master remediator! Thank you for going above and beyond. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:44, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

==Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Trust & Sparring with Norman==
Dr. Lucas, these were some of the smaller ones, so I went ahead and knocked them out. They are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Sparring with Norman|Sparring with Norman]], [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Trust|Trust]], and [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls|Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 10:27, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Kamyers}} all excellent—above and beyond! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing'' ==

Hi everyone,
I am currently helping with the article, [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Death,_Art,_and_the_Disturbing:_Hemingway_and_Mailer_and_the_Art_of_Writing Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing]. It still has a good bit to go, if anyone wants to help out.
—[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 5:17 PM, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-13T21:16:18Z

CVinson: /* Remediation for Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing */ new section

{{Talk header}}
[[/Archive 202504/]]

== Final edits ==
Hello, my article is complete: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman_(Exit_Music)|Ernest and Norman (Exit Music)]]
:{{Reply to|Flowersbloom}} great, thank you. I made some corrections. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, Dr. Lucas. Below is the link to my edited article:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:ASpeed/sandbox
:{{Reply to|ASpeed}} great. Let me know when it’s finished and posted, and I’l have a look. It appears as if you still have a bit of work to do. Please be sure to sign your talk page posts. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Good evening, @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. I have completed most of my Remediation Articles, but I still show issues for the one named, "[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|Norman, Papa, and the Autoerotic Construction of Woman]].

Based on the latest updates, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Battles_for_Regard,_Writerly_and_Otherwise|Battles for Regard, Writerly and Otherwise]] looks good with exception of including a '''category'''.
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} this one is good. I made some corrections before removing the banner, mostly in your sources. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

May you let me know if there is anything I can do on my end to resolve the issues with the first [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman,_Papa,_and_the_Autoerotic_Construction_of_Woman|article]]?

[[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 21:47, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ALedezma}} looking very good, but some sources missing page numbers. Please see to those. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:59, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

:::Thank you @[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] . I will review those and respond when complete. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 22:47, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]. Thank you for your feedback. A review of article additions was made for source pages. [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 20:22, 11 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{Reply to| ALedezma}} ok, looking good. I made some corrections. There's one final thing to do: no footnotes should appear in the notes section; use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead; I did one to show you how to use the template. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::@[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] Changes were done to footnote sources. Thank you! [[User:ALedezma|ALedezma]] ([[User talk:ALedezma|talk]]) 19:59, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TWietstruk}} good work so far, but there is more to do: placement of footnotes (eliminate spaces around them and punctuation always goes ''before'' the footnote.); proofread for typos; fix all red errors at the bottom (most of these are from errors in sourcing); works cited entries should be bulleted list and eliminate space between entries. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas I have finished my assigned remediation article: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Jive-Ass_Aficionado:_Why_Are_We_in_Vietnam%3F_and_Hemingway%27s_Moral_Code#cite_note-FOOTNOTEHemingway2003-24
Username ADear.
:{{Reply to|ADear}} thank you. I have marked this as complete. Please be sure you sign your talk page posts correctly. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished remediating my assigned article. Please review it at your earliest convenience. The link is here: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer's_Mythmaking_in_An_American_Dream_and_“The_White_Negro”|Norman Mailer's Mythmaking in An American Dream and “The White Negro”]]—[[User:Erhernandez|Erhernandez]] ([[User talk:Erhernandez|talk]]) 08:52, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Erhernandez}} well done! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. I removed your banner after making a few corrections. Please have a look over it and move on to the next thing. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:06, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I transferred and edited my article. Can you look at it and remove the banner? Here's the link: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Authorship_and_Alienation_in_Death_in_the_Afternoon_and_Advertisements_for_Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself]] ( [[User:APKnight25|APKnight25]] ([[User talk:APKnight25|talk]]) 13:02, 28 March 2025 (EDT) )
:{{Reply to| APKnight25}} looking good! A couple of things: never bury your talk page post. Put it at the bottom, preferably in its own section by clicking "Add topic" on the top-right. Next, eliminate all "fang" quotes in the article and add “real quotation marks.” Your sources should be a bulleted list. And there should be no space before a citation. You’re almost finished! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:21, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Reinventing the Wheel" Mailer Article for Review ==

Dr. Lucas,

My [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Reinventing_a_New_Wheel:_The_Films_of_Norman_Mailer|article]] is ready for review.

Thank you!
[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 15:29, 29 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|TPoole}} great! Could you include a link to it? Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:07, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
::OK, I [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Reinventing a New Wheel: The Films of Norman Mailer|found it]]. Looking really good. Great work. There are some citation issues that need to be seen to. The two red categories at the bottom should not be there; they will go away when the citations errors are corrected. Eliminate any quotation mark "fangs" in the text and replace them with “real quotation marks.” Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:14, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:::@Grlucas, what are the citation issues? Which ones need correcting? [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 17:31, 31 March 2025 (EDT)
::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} When you click your citations, they should jump to the works cited entry they correspond to. Several of yours do not, indicated by the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” at the bottom. You also have a "CS1 maint: Unrecognized language" error that will likely be cleared up when you fix the citation issues. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:55, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::@Grlucas, I have tried correcting the sfn codes in my citations. I was able to get the 2 web citations to link correctly. But for some reason, I cannot get the Mailer 1967 film Wild 90 citation to link to the reference list. Please advise. [[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 20:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
::::::{{Reply to| TPoole}} OK, all fixed and published. Thanks. Please move on to another remediation. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:46, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of: "Contradictory Syntheses: Norman Mailer’s Left Conservatism and the Problematic of 'Totalitarianism'" ==

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Contradictory_Syntheses:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Left_Conservatism_and_the_Problematic_of_%E2%80%9CTotalitarianism%E2%80%9D

It is ready for your review. Thank you.
[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 19:04, 30 March 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} looks great. I made some tweaks to the references and some throughout, like changing ' and " to real apostrophes and quotation marks. A bit more clean-up, but you might want to check over it again. I removed the under-construction banner. Well one. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 21:32, 30 March 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edit ==

Thank you for your comments on my remediation of
"[[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself|Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself.]]"

I've eliminated the "fang quotes" and changed them to “real quotation marks.” This was a very fascinating tip that taught me something new. It's something I've never noticed before but now always will.

I also put my sources in a bulleted list and removed the space before the citations. I think I'm all set now.
:{{Reply to|APKnight25}} great work! Please help other editors to complete the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:34, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Firearms in the Works of Hemingway and Mailer'' ==

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

I believe I have done everything for the Remediation of my article. Please let me know if there is anything else I need to do.

I will also link the article below:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Firearms_in_the_Works_of_Hemingway_and_Mailer

Thank you,
Caitlin Vinson
:{{Reply to|CVinson}} great work so far. Your references must use templates, please. Blockquotes must also be done correctly. No spaces or line breaks before or after the {{tl|pg}} template. Footnote placement is also off (punctuation goes before the footnote; no spaces before or after the footnote). I will add the abstract and url. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:30, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I believe there have been some updates made to the project. I believe I have also updated the works cited section to show correct templates. Please let me know if there is anything further that I need to do. Thank you, Caitlin.
::{{reply to| CVinson}} please sign your talk page posts correctly. Thanks. You still need to do some work on the sources. Use the <code>|author-mask=1</code> in your template for repeated author names. Also, you must eliminate the red “Harv and Sfn no-target errors” message at the bottom. No spaces or returns before or after the {{tl|pg}} call, as I already mentioned above. No parenthetical citations should be left, either; those should all be remediated to footnotes. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:50, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I have updated the sources and updated the in-text citations. I am still having trouble with the "Harv and Sfn no-target errors." I have not been successful in fixing this error and have tried multiple ways to fix it. —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 8:18, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

::::{{Reply to|Grlucas}} Hi Dr. Lucas, I see that I still have a red X for my remediation assignment. Is there something else I am still missing? —[[User:CVinson|CVinson]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 11:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::::{{reply to| CVinson}} sorry, I'm just getting back to it. There are quite a few punctuation errors. Some left out and others appear after the {{tl|sfn}}. I'm trying to correct those I see, but you should have a look, too. Page is designated as <code>p=</code> in {{tl|sfn}}, not <code>pg=</code>; and a span of pages needs <code>pp=</code>. Again, I have tried to correct these. I removed the banner, but please have another look through. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:01, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norman Mailer Today'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up my remediation article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer Today|Norman Mailer Today]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 18:20, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Kamyers}} Great work! Please help your fellow editors finish the volume, or pick something to work on in [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010|Volume 4]]. Thanks, and well done. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:00, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of “The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like White Elephants’” ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished my remediation of Jennifer Yirinec's article: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”|The Conception of Irreversibility: Hannah Arendt and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”]] Thank you for your assistance with the article. It is ready for its final review! [[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 10:24, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} a stellar job. Well done. I removed the banner, so you can move on to another article. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:12, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediations ==
Dr. Lucas, I have begun work on the tributes for volume 5. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Grace Notes|Grace Notes]] by Stephen Borkowski is ready for its final review.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 12:58, 4 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} Well done! Banner removed, url added. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:18, 5 April 2025 (EDT)

==Oohh Normie Final Edits==
Hi Dr. Lucas, I have finished my article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/"Oohh_Normie_—_You're_Sooo_Hemingway":_Mailer_Memories_and_Encounters|Oohh Normie, You're Sooo Hemingway]]. Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. [[User:Tbara4554|Tbara4554]] ([[User talk:Tbara4554|talk]]) 20:01, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Harlot's Ghost, Bildungsroman, Masculinity and Hemingway ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Harlot%27s_Ghost,_Bildungsroman,_Masculinity_and_Hemingway

[[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 21:22, 5 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} excellent. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:39, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics
:Received. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:29, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Hobbitonya}} great work. I have removed the banner, so you are good to move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:20, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have finished my remedidation project and I am ready for it to be reviewed. '''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe]

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} good work so far. Please remove wikilinks. Change ' and " to typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. And all red errors at the bottom of the page need to be taken care of. These are likely all from coding errors in your sources. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}}
I have removed the wikilinks, changed to the correct typographic style and updated my sources.
'''Article link''': [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe#Works_Cited|Piling On: Norman Mailer's Utilization of Marilyn Monroe] Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:55, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

[I forgot to fill out the summary box. I am adding my summary]
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} you're getting there! It looks great. You must eliminate all the red errors at the bottom. These appear when there are errors in your citations. Let me know if you need help. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:15, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

@{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything I can think of and I still have harv and sfn no-target errors and harv and sfn multiple-target errors and cs1 uses editors parameter. Do I not include the editor? [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 16:03, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have managed to get rid of two of the red target errors. I am still working on finding the harv sfn multiple target error. Thanks, [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 20:37, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

{{reply to|Grlucas}} I have tried everything i can think of to remove the last red error flag. I had to turn it in. I don't know that else I can do in this situation. I was given citation that did not follow any of the given formats. [[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 21:45, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| MerAtticus}} all parenthetical citations must be remediated to {{tl|sfn}}; none of yours are. Get these done, then we can worry about the errors. (Some notes on sources: any generic <code><nowiki>{{citation}}</nowiki></code> will not be correct. I see you have a book review by Marshall that has no source (I tried to find the original and cannot; this is a weird citation; I'll continue to look for it). There's also one that looks like a film that should use the [[w:Template:Cite AV media|<code>Cite AV media</code> template]].) Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:16, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Maggiemrogers}} nice work! Banner removed, so please move on to something else in the volume. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 7 April 2025 (EDT)

== Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated ==

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.
:{{Reply to|Sherrilledwards}} You have done a remarkable job—a real Herculean effort! Footnotes should not go in any notes. See those I changed; the others should be changed in the same way. I have done some, but the others have to be fixed, I'm afraid. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to|Grlucas}}I believe I have completed these fixes, so the article is again ready for review. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 15:49, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to| Sherrilledwards}} truly exceptional work—a model remediation! Marked as complete. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:30, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

Hi Dr. Lucas - I have finished remediating the article, [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer|Inside Norman Mailer]]. Please let me know if I need to make any adjustments. Thank you! [[User:Chelsey.brantley|Chelsey.brantley]] ([[User talk:Chelsey.brantley|talk]]) 18:09, 7 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Chelsey.brantley}} good work! Please help with another article from volume 4. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:36, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

I hope I am doing this is right. I have finished remediating my article about Norman Mailer and its in my designated sandbox [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Norman_Mailer:_Playboy_Magazine_Heavyweight here.]
If there are any last minute edits, let me know. I got the last of the errors removed yesterday. And I believe we are on the same page with leaving the in-line citations for ''Playboy'' to be as is, since the author didn't put them down in the works cited. [[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:14, 7 April 2025 (EDT)Nina Mizner
:{{Reply to|NrmMGA5108}} looking good! So, the parenthetical citations still in the article, I'm assuming, are there because of those missing sources? Please check your page numbers; some seem to be off. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:04, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}} I found the page number error and its corrected, and yes all the parenthetical citations should be referencing issues of the ''playboy'' magazine, which were not listed in the works cited. --[[User:NrmMGA5108|NrmMGA5108]] ([[User talk:NrmMGA5108|talk]]) 20:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| NrmMGA5108}} it looks great. I removed the banner! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:29, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Remediation From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity? ==

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

I also made additional edits to my short footnotes and noticed that my citations did not link to my references - which has been fixed.

I have tested all of my citations, and they all work.

Here is my article by Alexander Hicks, ''From Here to Eternity and The Naked and The Dead: Premier to Eternity?''

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/From_Here_to_Eternity_and_The_Naked_and_the_Dead:_Premiere_to_Eternity%3F

Have a great day.
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} Please always sign your talk page posts. Several “quoted items” in the article appear as ‘quoted items’; these must be corrected, please. No spaces or returns should surround {{tl|pg}} calls. Multiple page numbers should look like this <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Moretti|1996|pp=11-14}}</nowiki></code>; note the double <code>pp</code>. There seem to be many typos. I corrected some for you, but you must see to the rest. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:16, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

Are these the only additional corrections that need to be made? This is different from what you mentioned before.

I just want to be sure that I have hit everything.

Also can you verify what other typos you are seeing, I have ran through this twice.

If something is spelt a certain way, for example "Soljer", I have left it that way. Since it is mentioned like that in the article.
—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 06:49, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

I have gone through and fixed all of the short footnotes.

I have gone line by line with a ruler to look at any typos, and fixed the words that I found that had a dash in them/needed to be lowercased.

I have also fixed the quotations.

—[[User:THarrell|THarrell]] ([[User talk:THarrell|talk]]) 12:31, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| THarrell}} much better. Periods go inside quotations marks; I think I fixed these, but please check. Also, there are no spaces before footnotes; again, I did a find/replace, but you should check. Also, check that all titles of novels are italicized (if it's italicized in the PDF, then it has to be italicized in the remediation, including abbreviations, like ''Naked''); I fixed a couple. Also, no extra spaces; there should only be a single blank space between paragraphs. There are quite a few little details that needed (need?) fixing. I removed the banner, but please check my work. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 12:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
:{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Thank you. I will get started on these revisions immediately. Thanks for the feedback and your time. :)[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 11:30, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} I have completed all the requested revisions and ready for review round 2. Thank you again![[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 12:10, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} looking better! There are still items to be seen to, like titles on novels and magazines need to appear like they do in the original: if it's italicized in the PDF, it must be italicized on the web. I added the epigram for you and corrected that pesky citation. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation article: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley
:{{Reply to|Priley1984}} thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:40, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna
:{{Reply to|Wverna}} received, thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:51, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010
:{{Reply to| Essence903m}} thank you. I had to fix and clean-up quite a bit. Your saves also do not include summaries. When you move on to your next article, please be more careful and follow the instructions. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} thank you, and this is a good start, but there are still many items that need to be cleaned up, like footnote indications (They go after punctuation), citation errors (all the red errors at the bottom need to be seen to), extra spaces and ALL CAPS need to be removed. Please see other completed articles for models. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:18, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/What Would Be the Fun of That?|"What Would Be the Fun of That?"]] by Peter Alson.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:33, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} awesome! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:21, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “Remembering Norris Church” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris Church|“Remembering Norris Church”]] by John Bowers.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 16:17, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} and again, excellent! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:22, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “The Norris I Knew” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/The Norris I Knew|“The Norris I Knew”]] by Christopher Busa.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:04, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} rockin’! 👍🏼 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Norris Mailer" Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Norris Mailer|"Norris Mailer"]] by Nancy Collins.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} thanks again. You’re tearing it up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:32, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Rise Above It" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Rise Above It|"Rise Above It"]] by David Ebershoff—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 11:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} excellent. Many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:15, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Additional Articles ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have remediated [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/A_View_Through_the_Prism&oldid=18744|"A View Through the Prism"], [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/Lip_Liner|"Lip Liner"], and [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Living_Room_Show#|"The Living Room Show"] in Volume 5. They are ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 12:31, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ADavis}} great work. Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:26, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Submission notification sent 29 March ==

@grlucas

Dr. Lucas - I sent a Talk Page notification that I had completed the page I remediated on 29 March. The table indicates I haven't done anything yet. I sent it from the Talk Page from the article site. I don't see a response from that notification, but I had received one from you earlier in the process.
I don't understand what happened.

[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|LogansPop22}} sorry if I missed that. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works|this article]], right? It's looking great, though all the parenthetical citations must be converted to footnotes using {{tl|sfn}} and some of the author names in your notes should use {{tl|harvtxt}}. I added the "citations" section for you. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law ==

@Grlucas, I have made some additional edits to this [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law article] in Volume 5 by correcting most of the citations. There are 2 that still do not work, but I think that is because the sources are incomplete.

[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 21:16, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TPoole}} Looking really good, and this is a complicated one. A couple of things: no spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}; I removed the spaces before {{tl|sfn}}, but you might want to check them; there are some typos, like missing spaces before some parentheses; no footnotes should appear in the notes section: use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead. And all the red errors at the bottom need to be cleared up. Great work so far! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:00, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Red Error-Gone ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}I have deleted all the sfn's and the red error is gone. I don't know why I didn't think about this days ago.

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe|Gladstein-Monroe]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 23:07, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} getting closer. A few things: you should use <code>|author-mask=1</code> for repeated author names in your works cited; all parenthetical citations need to be replaced with footnotes using {{tl|sfn}}; must punctuation in your sources need to be removed as the templates do that for you; and you need to use {{tl|harvtxt}} for citations in your endnotes. Also, letters and films have their own templates. I did a couple of these for you as examples. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:14, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Remembering Norris" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris|"Remembering Norris"]] by Margo Howard.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:20, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} excellent! Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:35, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Norman Mailer: From Orgone Accumulator to Cancer Protection for Schizophrenics ==

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review:
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_From_Orgone_Accumulator_to_Cancer_Protection_for_Schizophrenics

I was unable to find the correct format for the first works cited entry under Mailer. It is a reprint of a magazine article. Thank you. [[User:JKilchenmann|JKilchenmann]] ([[User talk:JKilchenmann|talk]]) 16:28, 12 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JKilchenmann}} you are a master remediator! Thank you for going above and beyond. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:44, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

==Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Trust & Sparring with Norman==
Dr. Lucas, these were some of the smaller ones, so I went ahead and knocked them out. They are ready for review: [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Sparring with Norman|Sparring with Norman]], [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Trust|Trust]], and [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls|Tolls of War: Mailerian Sub-Texts in For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 10:27, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Kamyers}} all excellent—above and beyond! Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:56, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing'' ==

Hi everyone,
I am currently helping with the article, ''[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Death,_Art,_and_the_Disturbing:_Hemingway_and_Mailer_and_the_Art_of_Writing Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing].'' It still has a good bit to go, if anyone wants to help out.

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

2025-04-13T21:12:22Z

CVinson:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{''Death,Art, and the Disturbing'':Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing }}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 

{{Byline|last=Sanders|first=J’aimé L.|}}

{{dc|dc=I|N A 1964 INTERVIEW PUBLISHED IN THE PARIS REVIEW—}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to“try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique“affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.

===='''HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING'''====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true”(Death 1).Echoing Hemingway’s standards,Mailer believes a writer must write“to the limit of one’s honesty”(“Hazards” 399). But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March  letter. Hemingway writes,“Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good” (). According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is” (). Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,
how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” )
If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to,this“point of purity,”the author succeeds in showing life“as it really is”(“Letter to John”). Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity”when he defines what he calls“the real thing”in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon (). Hemingway writes,
In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. ()
Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely enough,”captures the“motion and fact”of life as it really happens,then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader (). Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that“we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest” (“Hazards” ). Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and,correlatively, art and writing,life and death,and the violence,brutality,and cruelty of the bullfight and life ().
Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards,yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”
You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—  dimensions and if possible  that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker )
The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer:“I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing” (qtd. in Baker ). Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,
I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself,but rather effects which come from being truly radical,from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster )
Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John”)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker ), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death –). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster ). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.
According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,”“the purity,”“the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, Death ) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves,and thus bring readers to see life,themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (–).
Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” ). In fact,in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon,Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (, ), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more“clearly”and as a“whole”(, –). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (). Mailer writes,
It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster )
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, Cannibals ). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John”), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, selfdeveloped philosophy of writing and art.
Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (Advertisements ). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions,see self and world more clearly,get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” ).The catalyst for this perceptual shift,according to existentialists,is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death , ) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it,of making“something of his own,”of creating“art”and becoming “artist” () or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
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Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, . Print.
Broer, Lawrence R. Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy. University, AL: U of Alabama P, . Print.
de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
: . Print.
Finkelstein, Sidney. Existentialism and Alienation in American Literature. New York: International Publishers, . Print.
Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
Paul, MN: North Central Publishing Co., . Print.
Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
Kierkegaard, Søren.“The Decisiveness of Death (At the Side of a Grave).” Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Trans. David F. Swenson. Ed.
Lillian Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, . –. Print.
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Kvam, Wayne E. Hemingway in Germany: The Fiction, the Legend, and the Critics. Athens: Ohio UP,
. Print.
Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. “The Hazards and Sources of Writing.” Michigan Quarterly Review . (): –.
Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{dc|dc=I|N A 1964 INTERVIEW PUBLISHED IN THE PARIS REVIEW—}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to“try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique“affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.

====HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING====
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true”(Death 1).Echoing Hemingway’s standards,Mailer believes a writer must write“to the limit of one’s honesty”(“Hazards” 399). But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March  letter. Hemingway writes,“Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good” (). According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is” (). Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,
how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” )
If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to,this“point of purity,”the author succeeds in showing life“as it really is”(“Letter to John”). Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity”when he defines what he calls“the real thing”in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon (). Hemingway writes,
In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. ()
Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely enough,”captures the“motion and fact”of life as it really happens,then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader (). Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that“we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest” (“Hazards” ). Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and,correlatively, art and writing,life and death,and the violence,brutality,and cruelty of the bullfight and life ().
Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards,yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”
You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—  dimensions and if possible  that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker )
The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer:“I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing” (qtd. in Baker ). Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,
I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself,but rather effects which come from being truly radical,from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster )
Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John”)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker ), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death –). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster ). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.
According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,”“the purity,”“the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, Death ) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves,and thus bring readers to see life,themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (–).
Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” ). In fact,in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon,Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (, ), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more“clearly”and as a“whole”(, –). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (). Mailer writes,
It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster )
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, Cannibals ). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John”), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, selfdeveloped philosophy of writing and art.
Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (Advertisements ). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions,see self and world more clearly,get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” ).The catalyst for this perceptual shift,according to existentialists,is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death , ) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it,of making“something of his own,”of creating“art”and becoming “artist” () or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
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de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
: . Print.
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Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
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Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
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Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
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Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, . Print.
———. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
———. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, . Print.
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Print.
———. Interview by Michiko Kakutani.“Mailer Talking.”New York Times  June , late ed., sec. : . Print.
———. Interview by Steven Marcus.“The Art of Fiction: No.  Norman Mailer.”The Paris Review
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Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover: UP of New England, . Print.
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{dc|dc=I|N A 1964 INTERVIEW PUBLISHED IN THE PARIS REVIEW—}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to“try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique“affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.

==HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING==
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true”(Death 1).Echoing Hemingway’s standards,Mailer believes a writer must write“to the limit of one’s honesty”(“Hazards” 399). But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March  letter. Hemingway writes,“Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good” (). According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is” (). Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,
how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” )
If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to,this“point of purity,”the author succeeds in showing life“as it really is”(“Letter to John”). Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity”when he defines what he calls“the real thing”in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon (). Hemingway writes,
In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. ()
Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely enough,”captures the“motion and fact”of life as it really happens,then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader (). Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that“we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest” (“Hazards” ). Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and,correlatively, art and writing,life and death,and the violence,brutality,and cruelty of the bullfight and life ().
Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards,yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”
You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—  dimensions and if possible  that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker )
The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer:“I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing” (qtd. in Baker ). Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,
I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself,but rather effects which come from being truly radical,from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster )
Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John”)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker ), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death –). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster ). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.
According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,”“the purity,”“the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, Death ) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves,and thus bring readers to see life,themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (–).
Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” ). In fact,in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon,Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (, ), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more“clearly”and as a“whole”(, –). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (). Mailer writes,
It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster )
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, Cannibals ). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John”), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, selfdeveloped philosophy of writing and art.
Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (Advertisements ). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions,see self and world more clearly,get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” ).The catalyst for this perceptual shift,according to existentialists,is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death , ) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it,of making“something of his own,”of creating“art”and becoming “artist” () or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
WORKS CITED
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de Madariaga, Salvador. “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence: Spain.” Saturday Review  July
: . Print.
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Foster, Richard. Norman Mailer: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. . St.
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Glenday, Michael. Modern Novelists: Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, . Print.
Guignon, Charles and Derk Pereboom, eds. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., . Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Simon & Schuster, . Print.
———.“Letter to John Dos Passos.” Mar. . Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, –. Ed.
Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner, . –. Print.
———. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, . Print.
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing

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{{dc|dc=I|N A 1964 INTERVIEW PUBLISHED IN THE PARIS REVIEW—}}, Norman Mailer cites the authors he has been influenced most by as James Farrell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E.M. Forster, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and, of course, Ernest Hemingway (43). Significantly, almost twenty years later, Mailer admits in a 1982 interview for The New York Times that his “ambition” as a writer is no longer to“try to reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway could reach them with a book, because I believe that’s beyond my powers”; “Hemingway’s style” he says, “affected whole generations of us. . . . I don’t have that kind of talent” (3). In these interviews Mailer does not elaborate on how Hemingway’s style and technique“affected whole generations” of writers or his own art, yet a closer look at Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-proclaimed American brand of existentialism reveals that Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art reaches far beyond the realm of style and technique. In fact, just as Hemingway’s philosophy of writing and art correlates to what has been labeled as Hemingway’s own, self-developed “characteristic philosophy” of life, Mailer’s philosophy of writing and his self-created brand of existentialism are also inevitably intertwined (de Madariaga 18). Yet in order to fully understand the depths and dimensions of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought, it is essential to first examine what founds each author’s philosophy of writing and artistic goals, then examine how they put their philosophy in motion in the form of literary art.

===HONEST, TRUE AND PURE: HEMINGWAY AND MAILER’S ART OF WRITING===
At their core, the art of writing both Hemingway and Mailer espouse is founded in their aspirations to, as Hemingway puts it, “tell honestly the things I have found true”(Death 1).Echoing Hemingway’s standards,Mailer believes a writer must write“to the limit of one’s honesty”(“Hazards” 399). But what exactly does this mean? Consider Hemingway’s advice to friend and contemporary writer John Dos Passos in a March  letter. Hemingway writes,“Keep them people, people, people, and don’t let them get to be symbols . . . Keep on showing it as it is. If you can show it as it really is you will do good” (). According to Hemingway’s standards, good writing is achieved by writing honestly and thus capturing life “as it really is” (). Mailer expresses a similar standard for good writing: “It proves amazing,”
Mailer writes,
how many evil reviews one can digest if there is a confidence that one has done one’s best on a book, written to the limit of one’s honesty, even scraped off a little of one’s dishonesty. Get to that point of purity and your royalties may be injured by a small welcome, but not your working morale. (“Hazards” )
If one achieves this level of honesty Mailer refers to,this“point of purity,”the author succeeds in showing life“as it really is”(“Letter to John”). Significantly, Hemingway also addresses this idea of honest writing reaching a “point of purity”when he defines what he calls“the real thing”in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon (). Hemingway writes,
In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another,you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing,the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. ()
Hemingway makes an important distinction between his journalism and his art and suggests that if a writer-artist depicts life honestly, states it “purely enough,”captures the“motion and fact”of life as it really happens,then honest, real, universal, and enduring emotions and experience will be conveyed to the reader (). Yet, for both Mailer and Hemingway, honest writing not only provides the foundation for good writing, but founds the morality of their philosophy of art, a sentiment reflected in Mailer’s statement that“we might quit [this discussion on writing] with the agreeable moral instruction that one must do one’s best to be honest” (“Hazards” ). Similarly, Hemingway tell readers in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon that although they must create their own standards—ranging from moral to artistic—he strives in his writing “only to tell honestly those things I have found true about it”—it referring to the Spanish bullfight and,correlatively, art and writing,life and death,and the violence,brutality,and cruelty of the bullfight and life ().
Honest writing is the foundation for good writing by Hemingway and Mailer standards,yet both authors have been accused by critics of being obsessed with death, violence, and the darker aspects of life. Hemingway answers: in order to write honestly and convey life “as it really is”
You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way. It is only by showing both sides—  dimensions and if possible  that you can write the way I want to. (qtd. in Baker )
The way he wants to write? Hemingway explains this directly in the following description of his goals as a writer:“I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing” (qtd. in Baker ). Similarly, Mailer defends his focus on “the bad and the ugly” in his writing as bound to his purpose and goals as an artist. Mailer writes,
I suppose that the virtue I should like most to achieve as a writer is to be genuinely disturbing and by this I mean no easy reliance upon material which is shocking or brutal in itself,but rather effects which come from being truly radical,from going to the root of what is written about, so that life—which I believe is always disturbing if it is indeed seen—may serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and the dead weight of public taste. (qtd. in Foster )
Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John”)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker ), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death –). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster ). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.
According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,”“the purity,”“the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, Death ) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves,and thus bring readers to see life,themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (–).
Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” ). In fact,in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon,Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (, ), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more“clearly”and as a“whole”(, –). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (). Mailer writes,
It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster )
Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, Cannibals ). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John”), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, selfdeveloped philosophy of writing and art.
Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (Advertisements ). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions,see self and world more clearly,get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John” ).The catalyst for this perceptual shift,according to existentialists,is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death , ) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it,of making“something of his own,”of creating“art”and becoming “artist” () or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom –). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death ) and the importance of“creating their lives as‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, Death )—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work ().It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
“the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.
As both Hemingway and Mailer directly and indirectly tell their readers, their philosophy of writing is an existential one; it is a philosophy of art in which the writer-artist strives to write honestly and show life“as it really is” by presenting the“genuinely disturbing”and“the bad and ugly”in order to express eternal, enduring human emotion and experience through their art (“Letter to John”; qtd.in Foster ; qtd.in Baker ).If they write“purely enough”(Hemingway, Death ), according to Hemingway and Mailer, what they present in their art will be felt by readers—and correlatively their fellow writers and artists—and bring them to the realization that they, too, must take responsibility for what their lives and their work or “art” are adding up to.Importantly,imbedded in both authors’philosophy of writing is a social-mindedness and a focus on individual responsibility not normally attributed to these writers. But both Hemingway and Mailer do present a philosophy of writing and a philosophy of life through which they attempt to teach readers to learn “how to live in it”—in the increasingly modernized, post-war culture that favors conformity over individual expression and thwarts the development of the creative spirit—by presenting an art of living for their times (Hemingway, Sun ).
Considering Hemingway and Mailer’s didactic focus on clarifying Americans’ visions of themselves and their aspirations to make“a revolution in the consciousness” of their times, it is not surprising that both authors were often disappointed when critics accused them of being morbidly obsessed with death and of endorsing violence through their works (qtd. in Glenday ).“Hemingway,” according to Carlos Baker,“was dismayed that many reviewers found Death in the Afternoon marred by a morbid ‘preoccupation with fatality’ and a tendency to ‘he-manish posturing’” (). Mailer was frustrated by critics of An American Dream, who accused him of being “no more than an American pornographer, socially irresponsible, and acutely immoral”(Wenke ).What these critics miss is that it is this death-obsessed view that founds their philosophies of writing and life and their aspirations as existentialist artists. The artist, in Hemingway and Mailer’s view, must strive to convey real, disturbing emotions and experiences in order to shake readers out of their everyday ways of being.Like the existentialists who“rose in revulsion against the corruption of values in capitalist society”and whose “basic conviction was that the evils it perceived were to be ascribed to the very concept and existence of society,” Hemingway and Mailer expose the inadequacy of American capitalism in an increasingly commercial and consumer culture and reject the capitalistic values, identities, and norms prescribed by and reinforced through the increasingly oppressive social and political structures of American culture (Finkelstein –).Therefore,both Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of “disturbing” and “ugly” subjects taken alongside their existential-oriented philosophy of writing and art not only points to these authors’ intense concern for how war, death, and violence have changed the face and heart of their native nation, but reveals a socialmindedness often overlooked in their art (qtd. in Foster ; qtd. in Baker
).
To this day critics still denounce Hemingway and Mailer’s choice of subjects—war, murder, rape, violence, madness, suicide, and senseless brutality—when, in fact, their choice of these subjects is consistent with existential philosophy of art and the concerns of the existential artist.In short, what Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing reveals is that they are intensely concerned with the direction our increasingly conformist and inauthentic American culture is headed: towards the death of the individual, the death of individualism,and the death of the vitality of the creative spirit (Adams ). Their philosophies focus on how to combat the feelings and forces that oppress the individual psyche and thwart individual growth and development. They show and tell readers to break from all illusions of self and world—they try to “clarify” our vision—and show us that we must refuse to be complicit.What they present is an art of writing that is also an art of living for their times, one in which the individual or artist must take responsibility first for what his/her life or art is adding up to, and then for what his/her culture is and is becoming. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and Mailer’s An American Dream, works a handful of critics—including Lawrence Broer, John Killinger, Kurt Muller, Michael Reynolds, Laura Adams, Michael Glenday and Richard Poirier—argue represent a shift in each author’s art and reflect the creation of their own,self-developed philosophies of life and death,philosophies that they will carry with them throughout the rest of their lives. These works, taken together, provide a key to the depth of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer’s art and thought.Throughout An American Dream Mailer subtly references and invokes Hemingway, the man, Hemingway’s characters, and espouses what is at the core of the philosophy of life,death and art Hemingway focuses on throughout his manifesto on bullfight, art and writing, Death in the Afternoon.
An American Dream not only reveals Mailer’s indebtedness to Hemingway’s existential-oriented philosophy of life, death, and art, but also reveals how Mailer puts this philosophy in novelistic motion is consistent with Hemingway’s philosophy and approach to art.For example,Mailer employs the “ice-berg” theory of writing Hemingway espouses and enacts throughout Death in the Afternoon (Death ). What we find below the surface is Mailer’s creation of a Hemingwayesque character—Stephen Richards “Rojack”—whose war experience,study of death,and attempts to create the feeling of “life and death” recall and reverberate the characteristic philosophy on life, death, and art Hemingway espouses in Death in the Afternoon (). In the opening pages of An American Dream, Mailer invokes both Hemingway and Mailer’s characters and reveals his indebtedness to both Hemingway’s art and his early brand of existentialism by presenting Rojack’s view toward death,his study of violent death,and of his own wounding and near-death experience as a continuation of Hemingway’s study of life and death in Death in the Afternoon.
BELOW THE SURFACE: THE DEPTHS OF HEMINGWAY IN ANAMERICANDREAM
From the opening pages of An American Dream, Hemingway is there. It begins with Rojack’s reference to his World War II wounding on “a particular hill in Italy” (Mailer, American ), an experience that echoes Hemingway’s own war experience on the Italian front,as well as that of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and A Farewell to Arms’Frederick Henry’s neardeath experiences and woundings on the Italian front.Rojack’s wounds—to his thigh and pelvis—are the wounds Frederick Henry, Jake Barnes, and
Hemingway himself received during their World War I service in Italy.
Rojack’s injury—“a minor crack and small split in the girdle of the pelvis”— recalls Jake Barnes’groin wound,in particular ().Yet,unlike Barnes’wound, Rojack’s wound does not leave him physically impotent, although Rojack admits that his wounding leaves him psychologically and existentially impotent. Rojack writes, “Where many another young athlete or hero might have had a vast and continuing recreation with sex, I was lost in a private kaleidoscope of death”(). Significantly, Rojack’s pelvis is split, which is not only suggestive of Rojack’s split selves—what he distinguishes as his “public” and his “lost in a private kaleidoscope of death” selves—but his is a wound, unlike that of Barnes’ wound, which can heal.
Part of Rojak’s public self is formed after Rojack returns from the war, is awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and is “used” by the Army as a “public relations”agent ().Rojack,like Hemingway,who is awarded an Italian Medal for Valor, returns from the war to a hero’s welcome bearing the “trace of a distinguished limp” and, like Hemingway, the first American wounded on the Italian front. Rojack, too,“was a curiosity after all, a most special product; I was the one intellectual in America’s history with a DSC and I spoke in public with a modest warrior’s charm”().But Rojack admits that years later he still“could not forget the fourth soldier”he killed in Italy.
Rojack writes,
His eyes had come to see what was waiting on the other side,and they told me then that death was a creation more dangerous than life. I could have had a career in politics if only I had been able to think that death was zero,death was everyone’s emptiness.But I knew it was not. I remained an actor. My personality was built upon a void. ()
Rojack’s realization that during his time in politics,“Congressman Stephen Richards Rojack, Democrat from New York,”he was merely“a young actor” playing a“part”and he must“depart from politics before [he] was separated from [myself] forever,”suggests that Rojack comes to the realization that his “personality was built upon a void” (). As existential scholar Charles Guignon puts it,“our social roles are really anonymous,‘anyone-roles’”; we see that in“playing our normal public roles, we are not really ourselves”and that we are ultimately“responsible for making something of our own lives” (). Although Rojack does not specify when he became a student of existential ideology,he suggests his need to understand and face up to his war experience and face up to his role as an “actor” for the Army, his “role” as a Congressman (Mailer, American ), and as an actor in a marriage he envisions to be“a five-act play”(), which is the catalyst for his examination of his own life and death and his Hemingwayesque study of death via the forum of the executioner.
Like Hemingway, the death-haunted Rojack not only studies his own near-death experience and repeatedly faces up to the possibility of his own death via his suicidal impulses, but he, like Hemingway, also publishes a study of violent death.Hemingway chooses the bullring,since it is“the only place where you could see life and death—that is, violent death now that the wars were over,”whereas Rojack chooses to study violent death in the forum of the executioner, the only place Rojack can study death now that his war is over (Hemingway, Death ). It is no coincidence that Rojack’s study of violent death focuses on differing forms of execution. It is a means of violent death that Hemingway mentions he would like to study in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon. After telling readers he never had the opportunity to study“an execution by firing squad,or a hanging,”Hemingway writes that he had “never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper” (). Rojack’s study, “a psychological study of the styles of execution in different states and nations—death by guillotine, firing squad, by rope, by electric chair, by gas pellets,” is an extension of Hemingway’s study of violent death in the bullring in Death in the Afternoon (Mailer, American ). Further, Hemingway’s mention of his desire to “study the death of his father,” or more accurately, the violent death by suicide of his father, lies just below the surface of Rojack’s study of his own suicidal impulses throughout An American Dream (Death ). Particularly in light of Hemingway’s violent death by suicide, which Mailer himself struggled to understand, Rojack seems to be haunted by the same demons Mailer imagined as Hemingway’s. Yet, what it most significant about Rojack’s study of violent death and suicide is the implication that he,like Hemingway, seeks a place where he can see, study, understand, and write about “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” he first experienced during the war (Hemingway, Death ).
Rojack’s study of violent death via the executioner and his study of existential psychology taken together are the basis for Rojack’s “thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation” (Mailer, American ). Although Rojack’s belief in “magic” is a variation on Hemingway’s and the existentialist’s philosophy of death, the concepts of existential dread or anxiety over facing up to one’s own certain future death and the resulting impact the study of one’s own death has on life and art are consistent with both Hemingway and the existential vision of life,death,and art. Because the study of death, to use Søren Kierkegaard’s words, gives the individual’s “life force as nothing else does,” death teaches the individual “not to fear those who kill the body but to fear for himself and fear having his life in vanity, in the moment, in imagination”(Kierkegaard , ). This “fear”of having lived an inauthentic life—the reason Rojack sees himself as a“failure”—is the unspoken catalyst for Rojack’s realization that he is merely an“actor,”that his“personality was built upon a void,”and that if he does not struggle free from his public roles, he will be “separated from” his self “forever” (Mailer,American ).This urgency to live life more authentically points to the impact the thought of death has on one’s life and work. It brings the individual to the realization that the individual is wholly“responsible for— that is, is the author of—his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions.” It motivates the individual to create his/her life and work as “art” (Yalom –).It is this existential awareness that Rojack has lived life“in vanity” (Kierkegaard ), falsely, by American standards of happiness and success, that brings Rojack to conclude that he “had come to the end of a very long street.Call it an avenue.For I had come to decide I was finally a failure” (Mailer, American ).
Rojack’s realization that he is a“failure”brings him to the admission that his “parts” did not add up to a self-authored, authentic “whole” (Mailer, American ), and sentiment that recalls Hemingway’s view that each“part” of the bullfight—and correlatively of one’s art and one’s life—“if made truly” will reflect the “whole” (Death –, ). Rojack writes,
At any rate, such were my parts. Without Deborah they did not add to any more than another name for the bars and gossip columns of NewYork.With her beside me,I had leverage ...But for myself the evidence made no good case: probably I did not have the strength to stand alone. ()
For the existentialists, as well as Hemingway and Rojack, each part signifies each separate moment of our lives or the temporal aspects of our lives. The “whole” signifies the overarching unity and meaning we give to our lives— the eternal. It is the expression of the eternal in our lives that is not only difficult, but it “comes only with a struggle” (Guignon ). This struggle is envisioned by some existential thinkers as a violent process through which an individual must wrench him/her “self” free from the cultural and social forces that thwart and corrupt identity, smother individuals in conformity, and destroy the individual’s creative spirit. Significantly, Rojack suggests throughout the opening chapter of An American Dream that Deborah is this inauthentic force, his unifying structure, his“whole,”which he envisions to be “fused” at the “center” of his being (Mailer ).
What Rojack suggests through his realization that Deborah—the embodiment of the corrupt, oppressive force of American culture—is “fused” at the“center”of his being is that with Deborah as his“center,”life is merely “a series of means-end strategies” (Guignon ). That is, Deborah serves and has served as the means to Rojack’s inauthentic dreams.“I thought the road to President,” Rojack writes,“might begin at the entrance to her Irish heart” (Mailer, American ). Her money, status, power, family, and connections are the basis from which all of his successes, post-war, stem. As his “center”—at the “center” of Rojack’s dreams and aspirations in life—Deborah, like the culture Rojack is beginning to reject,threatens annihilation of Rojack’s true“self.”Rojack couples this fear of annihilation of his“self”with his literal fear of Deborah on the night Rojack visits Deborah in her bedroom: Rojack tell us she“was violent”(), and“I was afraid of her. She was not incapable of murdering me” ().
Thus Rojack’s crisis over Deborah occupying his“center”is an existential crisis, a fear of existential annihilation of the “self.” He knows he must wrench himself free—which“comes only with a struggle”; he knows he must free his“self”from its false, unifying force: Deborah and the inauthentic aspects of the culture she represents (Guignon ). This existential fear of the death of the self, like Rojack’s fear that he is not able to wrench himself free from Deborah, becomes a literal fear of death when they engage in a physical struggle during which enraged Deborah charges Rojack “like a bull” (Mailer, American ).
MAN VERSUS BULL: ROJACK AS HEMINGWAY’S MATADOR
The most direct and most obvious reference to Hemingway in An American Dream is in the scene when Deborah admits to Rojack of a bullfighter lover in her past.Significantly,Deborah’s admission that she was once in love with a bullfighter comes at the end of Deborah’s almost methodical attempt to psychologically emasculate Rojack.
“God, you’re a whimperer,” said Deborah. “Sometimes I lie here and wonder how you ever became a hero. You’re such a bloody whimperer. I suppose the Germans were whimpering even worse than you.It must have been quite a sight.You whimpering and they whimpering, and you going pop pop pop with your little gun.” ()
After Deborah calls him a “whimperer,” questions his courage, and questions his masculinity for having an affair with a weak woman, a “sparrow” (),she confesses to sex acts with other lovers,then boasts of her affair with a great man—a bullfighter, she says (). Deborah admits,
“There was one man I never told you about. I never told anyone about him. Although once, somebody guessed.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was a bullfighter. Marvelous ripe man.”
“You’re lying.”
“Have it your way.”
“It wasn’t a bullfighter.”
“No,it wasn’t.It was someone far better than a bullfighter,far greater. . . . As a matter of fact, it was the finest and most extraordinary man I ever knew. Delicious. Just a marvelous wild feast of things. I tried to make him jealous once and lost him.” ()
Those familiar with Hemingway’s canon will recall Brett Ashley’s affair with bullfighter Pedro Romero and Jake Barnes’ physical emasculation. But Rojack, unlike Barnes, suggests he cannot “take it” and slaps Deborah in the face. “[T]he blow,” Rojack writes, “caught her on the side of the ear and knocked her half out of bed.”Deborah’s response,Rojack writes,“She was up like a bull and like a bull she charged” (). Here, Deborah’s psychological emasculation of Rojack escalates to a physical threat when Deborah tries, as Rojack puts it,“to find my root and mangle me”(). Faced with existential and literal emasculation, Rojack, like the matador, delivers a “cold chop” to “the back of the neck,”which drops Deborah, like the bull,“to a knee”().
Rojack then hooks his arm around her neck, yet Deborah, Rojack tells us, “had almost the strength to force herself up to her feet and lift me in the air,” an image that recalls Hemingway’s description of the bull tossing the matador ().At this moment Rojack kills Deborah like a bull: he cracks her neck like the bull’s spinal column is severed in what Hemingway describes as a clean kill (Hemingway, Death , ). This clean kill brings Rojack, like the matador, to transcend the material world, which Rojack suggests through his vision of “heaven,” the “new grace,” and the “honorable fatigue” he describes (Mailer, American –).
Because Deborah threatens Rojack’s “self” literally and existentially, he violently struggles with her in order to wrench himself free from the world in which he has been complicity absorbed and struggles to free himself from his absorption in the “they”—from the corrupt and oppressive American cultural values, identities, and norms Deborah represents—and free himself from her oppressive,corrupting,and pervasive force.He must reclaim his “self,”his“center”().Existential scholar Jon Mills envisions this process of freeing one’s self from the“they”as a“struggle,”a“violent process”through which the authentic self “finds itself in its lostness” and recovers “its authenticity in its freedom.” Rojack not only illustrates this process, but during his literal physical struggle with Deborah he feels he must kill her to reclaim his“center,”achieve his freedom,and thus begin to form his own,authentic basis for being ().
Throughout Rojack’s description of his physical struggle with Deborah, what Rojack experiences is a struggle for his freedom.He describes the mental picture he sees as his arm tightens around her neck: “I had the mental image I was pushing with my shoulder against an enormous door which would give inch by inch to the effort” (). Rojack writes,
I released the pressure on her throat, and the door I had been opening began to close. But I had had a view of what was on the other side of the door, and heaven was there . . . and I thrust against the door . . . and crack the door flew open and the wire tore in her throat, and I was through the door, hatred passing from me in wave after wave, illness as well, rot and pestilence, nausea,a bleak string of salts.I was floating.I was as far into myself as I had ever been and universes wheeled in a dream. ()
What Rojack sees on the other side of the door—“heaven”—is his freedom from the “they” and from Deborah who stands at the “center” of his Being (, ).What he catches a glimpse of is his freedom from his lostness in the “they.” What he sees is “heaven”—his freedom from earthly forces and constraints—and the authentic possibilities for the“self”that transcends its thrownness in a corrupt, oppressive and stifling culture (). Hemingway describes this feeling and this experience occurring at“the moment of truth” in the Spanish bullfight, the moment when life and death exist simultaneously for the audience and the matador to feel and see (Death ).
Rojack’s description of the “feeling of life and death,” his vision of “heaven,” and the feeling of freedom he achieves, recalls the spiritual experience Hemingway describes of the “moment of truth” or the “moment of killing” in the Spanish bullfight. According to Hemingway, this moment in the bullfight is charged with “emotional and spiritual intensity,” and “takes a man out of himself . . . makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding . . . [and] gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy”().It leaves you,Hemingway writes,“as empty,as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (). Rojack suggests a commensurate feeling and experience in his description of coming out of himself as“floating”and emptying himself as“wave after wave”of“hatred . . . illness . . . rot and pestilence”leave him (Mailer, American ). He tells us he was“as far into”himself as he“had ever been”() and his“flesh seemed new” (), since by freeing himself from his false “center”—Deborah—he transcends his inauthentic, everyday ways of being by literally killing what is fused at his“center”and frees himself to form his own basis for Being (). Further, Rojack envisions his experience as a religious one, an extension of what Hemingway describes as “the feeling of life and death” (Death ) charged with emotional and “spiritual intensity” that reaches “religious ecstasy” (), a feeling that becomes a vision of “heaven” in Rojack’s experience (Mailer, American ). It is this feeling“of life and death and mortality and immortality” that Rojack and the matador, as well as Hemingway and Mailer,strive to create in their life and art (Hemingway,Death ).Throughout the novel,Rojack is in the midst of this process,and his struggle for freedom is the life and death struggle of Hemingway’s matador, an artist who faces literal and existential death on almost a daily basis. Whether Rojack is studying executions, struggling with Deborah, or poised on a balcony or parapet over the abyss of meaninglessness that is the American city below, Rojack repeatedly faces death in an attempt to create and study the intense emotional and spiritual experience he first felt during the war, an experience, many critics argue, that founds Hemingway’s own intense interest in the study of death in general, and the bullfight, in particular.
Significantly, An American Dream both begins and ends on a Hemingwayesque note: after many attempts to create authentic meaning for his life by making a commitment—as husband to Cherry and father to their imagined child—Rojack wanders the desert mourning Cherry’s death and the loss of authentic possibilities for himself.Without a viable base for meaning in his life and without a base from which Rojack can begin to build an authentic community in America now that Cherry is dead, Rojack leaves America— the vast wasteland of the desert and the corrupting American cities, the only environments in America now that the frontier is closed—and heads for an environment capable of nurturing growth and expression of the creative spirit. He departs for the green breast of Guatemala and the Yucatan. Like Hemingway,who favors Spanish culture,the national art of the Spanish bullfight, and the virgin land of Spain to the overcrowded, modernized face of America and American culture, Rojack heads for Guatemala, another home of the bullfight, and toward the unspoiled jungles of the Yucatan.
Although few critics may agree, An American Dream ends optimistically, at least for the individual, but America does not fare as well. Rojack rejects the increasingly empty and materialistic values of his culture, shows us that he refuses to be complicit anymore, and becomes an artist, a writer, the author of his own story in the form of An American Dream. But the America that stands in both Rojack and Mailer’s imagination seems hopelessly lost to continue to stifle individual desire and expression and smother individuals in conformity until they can no longer act in any moral way. For Mailer, America is destined to continue to make individuals “think there’s something wrong”with them if they are“not on the big capitalist team”(The Big Empty ).In Mailer’s works,his disdain for the inauthentic parts of American culture sound loud, but you can often hear Hemingway’s whisper in the background.
Considering how influential Hemingway was on Mailer’s art and thought, it is surprising that Mailer gave up on trying to “reach Americans with a book the way Hemingway”did (Mailer,“Mailer”), when Mailer’s philosophy of art, his own brand of existentialism, and An American Dream, in particular,meet all of Hemingway’s criteria for what makes an artist a“great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). Hemingway writes,
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him,rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. ()
Although Mailer’s philosophy of art and his existentialism are indebted in their foundations to Hemingway’s philosophy of life, death, and art, Mailer “goes beyond”the founding philosophies Hemingway espouses and creates “something of his own” (): he creates a religiously charged, American brand of existentialism suited to meet the needs of his historic moment and creates an art that is social-minded and didactic with aspirations to both shock and heal his readers. As Hemingway does for his generation, Mailer presents an art of living for his times through which he attempts to shake us, wake us up, and teach us “how to live in it” (Hemingway, Sun ).
Thedecadesof criticismandpraiseHemingwayhasreceivedforcreatinghis own characteristic philosophy, his own philosophy of life, death and art and for trying to teach readers“how to live in it”() has earned Hemingway the titles of “guide” for his generation (Kvam ) and “prophet of those who are without faith”().Although Mailer’s philosophy and art are heavily indebted to Hemingway’s existential vision of art,life,andAmerican culture,Mailer,as Hemingwayadvises,“useseverythingthathasbeendiscoveredorknownabout his art” and creates “something of his own”: he creates his own Americanbased existentialism and puts it in motion in the form of literary art.By Hemingway’s standards,Mailer becomes,with An American Dream in particular,a “great artist” (Hemingway, Death ). In my estimation, this earns Mailer a place next to Hemingway as a seer and a healer, as a “guide” and a “prophet” for his post-war, post-modern lost generation (Kvam , ).
NOTES
. Rojack,like Hemingway,finds a forum in which he can study death now that his war is over.Both study“killers”: Hemingway studies the matador and Rojack, the executioner. Roajck’s choice to study execution is not explained, but it is suggested that he studies death in an attempt to see, feel, and understand the emotional experience of life and death, the “real thing” which is conveyed, as Hemingway tells us, to the audience in the bullring, and which Rojack and the audience can observe during differing styles of execution (Death ).
. Rojack’s claim that his study of death would“turn Freud on his head”echoes what Susuan Beegel identifies as Hemingway’s rejection of Freudian interpretations of the Spanish bullfight in Death in the Afternoon in favor of an existential interpretation of the experience of death and of the Spanish bullfight (Mailer, American ).
. Hemingway suggests an association between the matador and suicide, and Rojack expands his “study”to include his own inclinations toward suicide (Death ).The key for both Hemingway and Rojack: the study of death is essential to the creation of art and life as art. Like Hemingway describes the matador, Rojack faces death on a daily basis and attempts to create“the feeling of life and death”(). In the wake of Hemingway’s suicide, it is not coincidence that Rojack is suicidal. Plus, now that the war is over, the only place Rojack can study death in America is by climbing onto a balcony.
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