Project Mailer - User contributions [en]

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-06T06:34:19Z

Cbrow34: /* I am done with this */ new section

{{Talk header}}

== Article Errors ==

I've added the body of the article to my sandbox page. What errors do I need to specifically change in order to make it correct?[[User:CDucharme|CDucharme]] ([[User talk:CDucharme|talk]]) 17:04, 14 September 2020 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|CDucharme}} Mostly you need to add the notes, citation, and read for typos. It’s meticulous, but that’s the job. (Thanks for signing.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:08, 14 September 2020 (EDT)

Hey, I need help with instructions for the Norman Mailer Bibliography for the remediation project. I am not sure what I am supposed to do.[[User:AJohnson|AJohnson]] ([[User talk:AJohnson|talk]]) 29 March 2021 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|AJohnson}} You need to remediate the bibliography by adding missing entries from the PDF to the article on this site using the correct templates. As the note on the bibliography says, you may use [[The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007|Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2007]] as a model. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 14:48, 29 March 2021 (EDT)

== Final edits ==
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)

Hello, Dr. Lucas, I finished editing my article. May I have the banner removed?[[User:KJordan|KJordan]] ([[User talk:KJordan|talk]]) 20:13, 22 September 2020 (EDT)KJordan
:{{Reply to|KJordan}} Maybe. You should always link to something you want me to have a look at, please. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 20:14, 22 September 2020 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished editing my article. Can you please review it? Thank You. Here is a link to it: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/The_Heart_of_the_Nation:_Jewish_Values_in_the_Fiction_of_Norman_Mailer --[[User:AMurray|AMurray]] ([[User talk:AMurray|talk]]) 21:56, 23 September 2020 (EDT)

:{{Reply to|AMurray}} Looking good! However, I still see quote a few typos. There should be no space before a footnote or citation.<ref>Like this.</ref> And all parenthetical citations need to be converted. I also see a lot of missing punctuation, especially around citations. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 24 September 2020 (EDT)

{{Reflist}}

Dr. Lucas, I finished editing my article. Will you please review?
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/The_Unknown_and_the_General --[[User:Jrdavisjr|Jrdavisjr]] ([[User talk:Jrdavisjr|talk]]) 09:00, 25 September 2020 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| Jrdavisjr}} It looks good. Let's go through editing week and see if anything else comes up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:15, 25 September 2020 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished editing my article. Can you please review it? Thank You
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:JSheppard/sandbox [[User:JSheppard|JSheppard]] ([[User talk:JSheppard|talk]])
:{{Reply to| JSheppard}} You have a '''lot''' of work left to do. I see [[User:Jules Carry]] is helping, but you’re missing references and there are typos throughout. Keep working. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:19, 25 September 2020 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas, I finished my article.
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/More_Than_The_Dead_Know
[[User:RWalsh|RWalsh]] ([[User talk:RWalsh|talk]]) 15:15, 8 February 2021 (EST)
:{{reply to|RWalsh}} Not quite, but it's looking good. Clean it up and begin helping others. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:11, 9 February 2021 (EST)

Dr. Lucas, I believe I have finished editing my article. Will you please review?
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/%E2%80%9CHer_Problems_Were_Everyone%E2%80%99s_Problems%E2%80%9D:_Self_and_Gender_in_The_Deer_Park [[User:Klcrawford|Klcrawford]] ([[User talk:Klcrawford|talk]]) 09:06, 15 February 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|Klcrawford}} Great work. I have removed the working banner. I would appreciate it if you began to assist some of the other editors. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:04, 15 February 2021 (EST)

Hello Dr. Lucas, I have been making some edits, I am still looking to see if there is more, can you look through and give any feedback?https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Angst,_Authorship,_Critics:_“The_Snows_of_Kilimanjaro,”_“The_Crack-Up,”_Advertisements_for_Myself [[User:JFordyce|JFordyce]] ([[User talk:JFordyce|talk]]) 18:27, 20 February 2021 (EST)JFordyce

Hello Dr. Lucas, I believe I have finished my article. Can you please review it? https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Request [[User:EKrauskopf|EKrauskopf]] ([[User talk:EKrauskopf|talk]]) 13:06, 22 Februrary 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|EKrauskopf}} OK, looks good. Well done. Now please begin assisting others on getting volume 9 finished. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 06:41, 23 February 2021 (EST)

Dr. Lucas, I have finished and cleaned up my article. Could you please review it?
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/More_Than_The_Dead_Know [[User:RWalsh|RWalsh]] ([[User talk:RWalsh|talk]]) 12:35, 23 February 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|RWalsh}} OK, nice job. Now please begin assisting others on getting volume 9 finished. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:47, 23 February 2021 (EST)

Hello Dr.Lucas final edits have been made and the article is finished.https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Angst,_Authorship,_Critics:_“The_Snows_of_Kilimanjaro,”_“The_Crack-Up,”_Advertisements_for_Myself[[User:JFordyce|JFordyce]] ([[User talk:JFordyce|talk]]) 22:27, 2 March 2021 (EST) JFordyce

Hello, Dr. Lucas! I have completed remediation on [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/The American Civil War in The Naked and the Dead and Across the River and Into the Trees]]. Can you please let me know if there's anything I need to correct? Thanks so much! [[User:KaraCroissant|KaraCroissant]] ([[User talk:KaraCroissant|talk]]) 17:11, 1 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|KaraCroissant}} great work! 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. Other than that—great job! I have removed the banner, so you are free to help with the rest of the volume. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:58, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

Hi, Dr. Lucas. I think I have finished my PM article:[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|Hemingway to Mailer-A Delayed Response to The Deer Park]]. Please let me know if there is anything else needed from me. [[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 17:54, 2 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|Hobbitonya}} nice work. 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. Look at punctuation placement and footnotes; commas go inside quotation marks; punctuation goes before footnotes. You still have some citation issues. Note the read errors at the bottom of the page. These need to be gone. (Check the Mailer 1963 short footnote; there is no corresponding citation for 1963.) Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:58, 3 April 2025 (EDT)

Hi Dr. Lucas. I think I have finished my article: https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Ernest_and_Norman:_A_Dialogue_in_Two_Acts&oldid=17870
Please let me know if there is anything I need to fix. Also, let me know if the link is working. [[User:DSánchez|DSánchez]] ([[User talk:DSánchez|talk]]) 17:13, 3 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| DSánchez}} looks good. I removed the banner, but please remove all the links. I understand what you were trying to do, but it's unnecessary. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:13, 4 April 2025 (EDT)

==Article Request==
Dr. Lucas. I have started working on another article. Would you be able to send me the PDF of "The Savage Poet-- Unlocking the Universe With Metaphor" so that I can help add to the article? [[User:Klcrawford|Klcrawford]] ([[User talk:Klcrawford|talk]]) 18:24, 23 February 2021 (EST)
:{{Reply to|Klcrawford}} Done. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:46, 24 February 2021 (EST)

== When we Were Kings 1st remediation ==

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/When_We_Were_Kings:_Review_and_Commentary|https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/When_We_Were_Kings:_Review_and_Commentary]]

Here is the link for the remediation I did for this weeks assignment. I did not now where to place the link.

Thank you,
Trevor Ryals
:{{Reply to|TRyals}} Thank you, but this is unnecessary. Just do the work; I promise I will see it. (And be sure to sign your talk page posts.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 18:16, 2 February 2021 (EST)

==Summer 2021==
Can you please review my article? I have a couple errors that I do not understand how to fix. Other than that, I am finished. https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:PLowery/sandbox

Can you review my article again please? I think I might be done. [[User:PLowery|PLowery]] ([[User talk:PLowery|talk]])
:{{Reply to|PLowery}} In order for you to be finished, your entire article must be posted [[The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/A Favor for the Ages|in the mainspace]]. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:29, 21 June 2021 (EDT)
::Done
:::I believe I have it done correctly now.

My topic person is Marion Stegeman Hodgson,however she was not my first choice. There are four others who initially chose Hodgson, Tyler McMillan, Elizabeth Webb, Caleb Andrews, and Marguerite Walker. I haven't gotten in touch with either classmate as of this date however.[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]])Kenneth Wilcox(KWilcox)July 7, 2021[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]])
:{{Reply to|KWilcox}} This work should be done on Wikipedia. Please post all questions and work about project 2 on Wikipedia. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 8 July 2021 (EDT)

My attempt at creating a draft article failed by creating a new page. My next attempt will be using the user page to create the draft article, is this correct?[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]]) 10:22, 8 July 2021 (EDT)Kenneth Wilcox, July 8, 2021, 10:21am[[User:KWilcox|KWilcox]] ([[User talk:KWilcox|talk]]) 10:22, 8 July 2021 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|KWilcox}} As I said: please post all questions for project 2 on Wikipedia. This is an inappropriate forum for them. Thank you. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:27, 8 July 2021 (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)

== 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)

== 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)

== I am done with this ==

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Situating_Hemingway:_Mailer,_Style,_Ethics

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-06T06:27:50Z

Cbrow34: /* Works Cited */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee
|abstract=Lee Spinks is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of ''Friedrich Nietzsche'' (Routledge, 2003), ''James Joyce: A Critical Guide'' (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) and ''Michael Ondaatje'' (Manchester UP, 2009). He is currently completing a book on Norman {{NM}} for Manchester UP.
|url=https://prmlr.us/mr11spin}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style”?{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=19}} These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel.{{sfn|Poirier|1972|p=41}}

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human. {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=xi,10}} We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=x-xi}} We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=xi}} If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=10}} The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=59}}This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=59}}

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation.{{sfn|Graham|1973|p=18}} It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf.{{sfn|Graham|1973|p=18}} Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood”.{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=165}} Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=30}} Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=22}} Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=30}} Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=104}} This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=77-78}} </blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=103}} But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense?{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=88}} Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=66}}</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life''.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=158}} Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}
==Citations==

{{Reflist}}
==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= |publisher=Harmondsworth: Penguin |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=John |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Meaning of a Style. Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |editor=Arthur Waldhorn |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=18-34 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lodge |first=David |date=1981 |title=Working With Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature |url= |location=London |publisher=Routledge |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1972 |title=Existential Errands |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=__. |first= |date=1959 |title=Advertisement for Myself. Advertisements For Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons |pages=17-24 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Mailer |url= |location=London |publisher=Fontana |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last= |first= |editor=Waldhorn, Arthur |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics}}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-06T06:14:40Z

Cbrow34: /* Works Cited */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee
|abstract=Lee Spinks is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of ''Friedrich Nietzsche'' (Routledge, 2003), ''James Joyce: A Critical Guide'' (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) and ''Michael Ondaatje'' (Manchester UP, 2009). He is currently completing a book on Norman {{NM}} for Manchester UP.
|url=https://prmlr.us/mr11spin}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style”?{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=19}} These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel.{{sfn|Poirier|1972|p=41}}

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human. {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=xi,10}} We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=x-xi}} We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=xi}} If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=10}} The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=59}}This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=59}}

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation.{{sfn|Graham|1973|p=18}} It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf.{{sfn|Graham|1973|p=18}} Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood”.{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=165}} Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=30}} Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=22}} Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=30}} Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=104}} This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=77-78}} </blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=103}} But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense?{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=88}} Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=66}}</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life''.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=158}} Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}
==Citations==

{{Reflist}}
==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= |publisher=Harmondsworth: Penguin |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=John |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Meaning of a Style. Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |editor=Arthur Waldhorn |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=18-34 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lodge |first=David |date=1981 |title=Working With Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature |url= |location=London |publisher=Routledge |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1972 |title=Existential Errands |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=__. |first= |date=1959 |title=Advertisement for Myself. Advertisements For Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons |pages=17-24 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Mailer |url= |location=London |publisher=Fontana |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Waldhorn |first=Arthur |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics}}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-06T05:33:29Z

Cbrow34: returning url for author

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee
|abstract=Lee Spinks is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of ''Friedrich Nietzsche'' (Routledge, 2003), ''James Joyce: A Critical Guide'' (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) and ''Michael Ondaatje'' (Manchester UP, 2009). He is currently completing a book on Norman {{NM}} for Manchester UP.
|url=https://prmlr.us/mr11spin}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style”?{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=19}} These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel.{{sfn|Poirier|1972|p=41}}

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human. {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=xi,10}} We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=x-xi}} We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=xi}} If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=10}} The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=59}}This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=59}}

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation.{{sfn|Graham|1973|p=18}} It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf.{{sfn|Graham|1973|p=18}} Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood”.{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=165}} Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=30}} Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=22}} Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=30}} Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=104}} This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=77-78}} </blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=103}} But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense?{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=88}} Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=66}}</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life''.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=158}} Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}
==Citations==

{{Reflist}}
==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= |publisher=Harmondsworth: Penguin |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=John |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Meaning of a Style. Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |editor=Arthur Waldhorn |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=18-34 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lodge |first=David |date=1981 |title=Working With Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature |url= |location=London |publisher=Routledge |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1972 |title=Existential Errands |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=__. |first= |date=1959 |title=Advertisement for Myself. Advertisements For Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons |pages=17-24 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Mailer |url= |location=London |publisher=Fontana |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Waldhorn |first=Arthur, ed. |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics}}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-06T05:30:59Z

Cbrow34:

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee
|abstract=Lee Spinks is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of ''Friedrich Nietzsche'' (Routledge, 2003), ''James Joyce: A Critical Guide'' (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) and ''Michael Ondaatje'' (Manchester UP, 2009). He is currently completing a book on Norman {{NM}} for Manchester UP.}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style”?{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=19}} These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel.{{sfn|Poirier|1972|p=41}}

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human. {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=xi,10}} We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=x-xi}} We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=xi}} If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=10}} The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=59}}This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=59}}

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation.{{sfn|Graham|1973|p=18}} It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf.{{sfn|Graham|1973|p=18}} Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood”.{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=165}} Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=30}} Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=22}} Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=30}} Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=104}} This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=77-78}} </blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=103}} But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense?{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=88}} Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=66}}</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life''.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=158}} Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}
==Citations==

{{Reflist}}
==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= |publisher=Harmondsworth: Penguin |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=John |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Meaning of a Style. Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |editor=Arthur Waldhorn |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=18-34 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lodge |first=David |date=1981 |title=Working With Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature |url= |location=London |publisher=Routledge |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1972 |title=Existential Errands |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=__. |first= |date=1959 |title=Advertisement for Myself. Advertisements For Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons |pages=17-24 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Mailer |url= |location=London |publisher=Fontana |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Waldhorn |first=Arthur, ed. |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics}}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-06T05:29:34Z

Cbrow34: removing faulty url

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee
|abstract='''Lee Spinks''' is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of ''Friedrich Nietzsche'' (Routledge, 2003), ''James Joyce: A Critical Guide'' (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) and ''Michael Ondaatje'' (Manchester UP, 2009). He is currently completing a book on Norman {{NM}} for Manchester UP.}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style”?{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=19}} These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel.{{sfn|Poirier|1972|p=41}}

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human. {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=xi,10}} We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=x-xi}} We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=xi}} If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=10}} The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=59}}This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=59}}

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation.{{sfn|Graham|1973|p=18}} It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf.{{sfn|Graham|1973|p=18}} Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood”.{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=165}} Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=30}} Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=22}} Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=30}} Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=104}} This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=77-78}} </blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=103}} But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense?{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=88}} Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=66}}</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life''.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=158}} Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}
==Citations==

{{Reflist}}
==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= |publisher=Harmondsworth: Penguin |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=John |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Meaning of a Style. Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |editor=Arthur Waldhorn |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=18-34 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lodge |first=David |date=1981 |title=Working With Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature |url= |location=London |publisher=Routledge |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1972 |title=Existential Errands |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=__. |first= |date=1959 |title=Advertisement for Myself. Advertisements For Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons |pages=17-24 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Mailer |url= |location=London |publisher=Fontana |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Waldhorn |first=Arthur, ed. |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics}}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-06T05:28:22Z

Cbrow34: adding abstract

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee
|abstract='''Lee Spinks''' is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of ''Friedrich Nietzsche'' (Routledge, 2003), ''James Joyce: A Critical Guide'' (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) and ''Michael Ondaatje'' (Manchester UP, 2009). He is currently completing a book on Norman {{NM}} for Manchester UP.
|url=https://prmlr.us/mr11spin}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style”?{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=19}} These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel.{{sfn|Poirier|1972|p=41}}

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human. {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=xi,10}} We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=x-xi}} We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=xi}} If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=10}} The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=59}}This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=59}}

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation.{{sfn|Graham|1973|p=18}} It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf.{{sfn|Graham|1973|p=18}} Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood”.{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=165}} Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=30}} Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=22}} Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=30}} Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=104}} This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=77-78}} </blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=103}} But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense?{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=88}} Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=66}}</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life''.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=158}} Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}
==Citations==

{{Reflist}}
==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= |publisher=Harmondsworth: Penguin |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=John |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Meaning of a Style. Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |editor=Arthur Waldhorn |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=18-34 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lodge |first=David |date=1981 |title=Working With Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature |url= |location=London |publisher=Routledge |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1972 |title=Existential Errands |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=__. |first= |date=1959 |title=Advertisement for Myself. Advertisements For Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons |pages=17-24 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Mailer |url= |location=London |publisher=Fontana |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Waldhorn |first=Arthur, ed. |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics}}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-06T05:15:28Z

Cbrow34: Adding abstract

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee
|Abstract='''Lee Spinks''' is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of ''Friedrich Nietzsche'' (Routledge, 2003), ''James Joyce: A Critical Guide'' (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) and ''Michael Ondaatje'' (Manchester UP, 2009). He is currently completing a book on Norman {{NM}} for Manchester UP.}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style”?{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=19}} These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel.{{sfn|Poirier|1972|p=41}}

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human. {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=xi,10}} We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=x-xi}} We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=xi}} If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=10}} The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=59}}This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=59}}

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation.{{sfn|Graham|1973|p=18}} It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf.{{sfn|Graham|1973|p=18}} Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood”.{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=165}} Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=30}} Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=22}} Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=30}} Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=104}} This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=77-78}} </blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=103}} But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense?{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=88}} Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=66}}</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life''.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=158}} Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}
==Citations==

{{Reflist}}
==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= |publisher=Harmondsworth: Penguin |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=John |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Meaning of a Style. Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |editor=Arthur Waldhorn |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=18-34 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lodge |first=David |date=1981 |title=Working With Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature |url= |location=London |publisher=Routledge |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1972 |title=Existential Errands |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=__. |first= |date=1959 |title=Advertisement for Myself. Advertisements For Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons |pages=17-24 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Mailer |url= |location=London |publisher=Fontana |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Waldhorn |first=Arthur, ed. |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics}}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-06T04:53:05Z

Cbrow34: Added citations

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style”?{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=19}} These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel.{{sfn|Poirier|1972|p=41}}

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human. {{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=xi,10}} We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=x-xi}} We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=xi}} If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=10}} The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=59}}This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=59}}

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation.{{sfn|Graham|1973|p=18}} It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf.{{sfn|Graham|1973|p=18}} Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood”.{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=165}} Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=30}} Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=22}} Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’”.{{sfn|Lodge|1981|p=30}} Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=104}} This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=77-78}} </blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power”.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=103}} But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense?{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=88}} Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=66}}</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life''.{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=158}} Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}
==Citations==

{{Reflist}}
==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= |publisher=Harmondsworth: Penguin |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=John |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Meaning of a Style. Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |editor=Arthur Waldhorn |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=18-34 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lodge |first=David |date=1981 |title=Working With Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature |url= |location=London |publisher=Routledge |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1972 |title=Existential Errands |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=__. |first= |date=1959 |title=Advertisement for Myself. Advertisements For Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons |pages=17-24 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Mailer |url= |location=London |publisher=Fontana |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Waldhorn |first=Arthur, ed. |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics}}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-06T01:32:10Z

Cbrow34: Added code for citations

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between. (66)</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}
==Citations==

{{Reflist}}
==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= |publisher=Harmondsworth: Penguin |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=John |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Meaning of a Style. Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |editor=Arthur Waldhorn |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=18-34 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lodge |first=David |date=1981 |title=Working With Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature |url= |location=London |publisher=Routledge |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1972 |title=Existential Errands |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=__. |first= |date=1959 |title=Advertisement for Myself. Advertisements For Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons |pages=17-24 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Mailer |url= |location=London |publisher=Fontana |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Waldhorn |first=Arthur, ed. |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics}}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-06T01:17:35Z

Cbrow34: Trying to add the category.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between. (66)</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= |publisher=Harmondsworth: Penguin |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=John |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Meaning of a Style. Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |editor=Arthur Waldhorn |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=18-34 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lodge |first=David |date=1981 |title=Working With Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature |url= |location=London |publisher=Routledge |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1972 |title=Existential Errands |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=__. |first= |date=1959 |title=Advertisement for Myself. Advertisements For Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons |pages=17-24 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Mailer |url= |location=London |publisher=Fontana |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Waldhorn |first=Arthur, ed. |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics}}
[[Category:Miscellany (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-06T01:10:20Z

Cbrow34: Added code for category.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between. (66)</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= |publisher=Harmondsworth: Penguin |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=John |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Meaning of a Style. Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |editor=Arthur Waldhorn |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=18-34 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lodge |first=David |date=1981 |title=Working With Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature |url= |location=London |publisher=Routledge |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1972 |title=Existential Errands |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=__. |first= |date=1959 |title=Advertisement for Myself. Advertisements For Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons |pages=17-24 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Mailer |url= |location=London |publisher=Fontana |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Waldhorn |first=Arthur, ed. |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics}}
{{Category:Miscellany (MR)}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-06T01:00:37Z

Cbrow34: Added the default sort.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between. (66)</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= |publisher=Harmondsworth: Penguin |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=John |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Meaning of a Style. Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |editor=Arthur Waldhorn |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=18-34 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lodge |first=David |date=1981 |title=Working With Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature |url= |location=London |publisher=Routledge |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1972 |title=Existential Errands |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=__. |first= |date=1959 |title=Advertisement for Myself. Advertisements For Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons |pages=17-24 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Mailer |url= |location=London |publisher=Fontana |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Waldhorn |first=Arthur, ed. |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-06T00:54:15Z

Cbrow34: Added the footer.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between. (66)</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= |publisher=Harmondsworth: Penguin |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=John |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Meaning of a Style. Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |editor=Arthur Waldhorn |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=18-34 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lodge |first=David |date=1981 |title=Working With Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature |url= |location=London |publisher=Routledge |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1972 |title=Existential Errands |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=__. |first= |date=1959 |title=Advertisement for Myself. Advertisements For Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons |pages=17-24 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Mailer |url= |location=London |publisher=Fontana |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Waldhorn |first=Arthur, ed. |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

{{Review}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-06T00:46:37Z

Cbrow34: /* Works Cited */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between. (66)</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= |publisher=Harmondsworth: Penguin |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=John |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Meaning of a Style. Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |editor=Arthur Waldhorn |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=18-34 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lodge |first=David |date=1981 |title=Working With Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature |url= |location=London |publisher=Routledge |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1972 |title=Existential Errands |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=__. |first= |date=1959 |title=Advertisement for Myself. Advertisements For Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons |pages=17-24 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Mailer |url= |location=London |publisher=Fontana |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Waldhorn |first=Arthur, ed. |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-06T00:43:11Z

Cbrow34: /* Works Cited */

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between. (66)</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location= |publisher=Harmondsworth: Penguin |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Graham |first=John |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Meaning of a Style. Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |editor=Arthur Waldhorn |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages=18-34 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Lodge |first=David |date=1981 |title=Working With Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature |url= |location=London |publisher=Routledge |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1972 |title=Existential Errands |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last= |first= |date=1959 |title=Advertisement for Myself. Advertisements For Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons |pages=17-24 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Mailer |url= |location=London |publisher=Fontana |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Waldhorn |first=Arthur, ed. |date=1973 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Collection of Criticism |url= |location=New York |publisher=McGraw-Hill |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-06T00:02:15Z

Cbrow34: Added code for works cited.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between. (66)</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}

==Works Cited==
{{refbegin|30em|indent=yes}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-05T23:23:13Z

Cbrow34: Added code for notes.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between. (66)</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

==Notes==
{{notelist}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-05T23:20:34Z

Cbrow34: Removed code for notes.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between. (66)</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-05T23:18:59Z

Cbrow34: Added code for notes.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between. (66)</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

{{notelist}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-02T03:19:45Z

Cbrow34: Added page numbers.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a {{pg|301|302}} moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between. (66)</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-02T03:17:42Z

Cbrow34: Added page numbers.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but {{pg|300|301}} the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between. (66)</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-02T03:15:02Z

Cbrow34: Added page numbers.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship be- {{pg|299|300}} tween the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between. (66)</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-02T03:07:49Z

Cbrow34: Added page numbers.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and {{pg|298|299}} ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship between the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between. (66)</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-02T03:03:48Z

Cbrow34: Added page numbers.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and {{pg|297|298}} still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship between the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between. (66)</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-02T02:58:40Z

Cbrow34: Added page numbers.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather {{pg|296|297}}portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship between the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between. (66)</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-02T02:53:12Z

Cbrow34: Adjusted text for block quote.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship between the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
<blockquote>So why not write a play which went from explosion to explosion, or . . . from one moment of intensity or reality (which is to say a moment which feels more real than other moments) to the next—a play which went at full throttle all the way. Which is precisely what was done this summer when ''The Deer Park'', a four-hour play, its third draft five years old, had an hour or more taken out of it, a transition which cut away all dramatic scaffolding, connective tissue, road signs, guides, and left the play stripped to its essential connections, the movement ideally from one real scene to the next, with the audience left to fill the spaces between. (66)</blockquote>

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-02T02:48:08Z

Cbrow34: Adjusted text for block quote

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship between the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of Conformity which came to America after the Second World War. Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
So why not write a play which
went from explosion to explosion,
or . . . from one moment of
intensity or reality (which is to
say a moment which feels more
real than other moments) to the
next—a play which went at full
throttle all the way. Which is
precisely what was done this
summer when ''The Deer Park'', a
four-hour play, its third draft
five years old, had an hour or
more taken out of it, a
transition which cut away all
dramatic scaffolding, connective
tissue, road signs, guides, and
left the play stripped to its
essential connections, the
movement ideally from one real
scene to the next, with the
audience left to fill the spaces
between. (66)

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-02T02:46:05Z

Cbrow34: Adjusted text for block quote

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship between the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching television for twenty years and the style of television has transfused itself not only into the taste, but the demand, even the expectancy, of the suburban middle class—that precise compound of neurons and suet so capable of being smelted into money.... Television, after all, was the child of the Age of
Conformity which came to America
after the Second World War.
Television produced a genre: moderate characters in modest situations. It offered endlessly recognizable detail, ''surface'' detail: supermarkets, highways, suburban streets, pastel-colored classrooms. However, the characters in such television dramas presented nothing which was biologically real. They bore the same relation to human beings which vinyl does to leather. (77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
So why not write a play which
went from explosion to explosion,
or . . . from one moment of
intensity or reality (which is to
say a moment which feels more
real than other moments) to the
next—a play which went at full
throttle all the way. Which is
precisely what was done this
summer when ''The Deer Park'', a
four-hour play, its third draft
five years old, had an hour or
more taken out of it, a
transition which cut away all
dramatic scaffolding, connective
tissue, road signs, guides, and
left the play stripped to its
essential connections, the
movement ideally from one real
scene to the next, with the
audience left to fill the spaces
between. (66)

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-02T02:43:58Z

Cbrow34: Added code for block quote

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship between the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
<blockquote>America has been watching
television for twenty years and
the style of television has
transfused itself not only into
the taste, but the demand, even
the expectancy, of the suburban
middle class—that precise
compound of neurons and suet so
capable of being smelted into
money.... Television, after all,
was the child of the Age of
Conformity which came to America
after the Second World War.
Television produced a genre:
moderate characters in modest
situations. It offered endlessly
recognizable detail, ''surface''
detail: supermarkets, highways,
suburban streets, pastel-colored
classrooms. However, the
characters in such television
dramas presented nothing which
was biologically real. They bore
the same relation to human beings
which vinyl does to leather.
(77– 8)</blockquote>

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
So why not write a play which
went from explosion to explosion,
or . . . from one moment of
intensity or reality (which is to
say a moment which feels more
real than other moments) to the
next—a play which went at full
throttle all the way. Which is
precisely what was done this
summer when ''The Deer Park'', a
four-hour play, its third draft
five years old, had an hour or
more taken out of it, a
transition which cut away all
dramatic scaffolding, connective
tissue, road signs, guides, and
left the play stripped to its
essential connections, the
movement ideally from one real
scene to the next, with the
audience left to fill the spaces
between. (66)

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-02T00:21:28Z

Cbrow34: Added italics to words that called for it.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how ''implicit'' and sometimes almost ''subterranean''—his engagement with Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Hemingway’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in ''Barbary Shore'' (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in ''The Sun Also Rises'') which is rather portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of ''The Deer Park'' is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a ''style'' of living, that is, that insists upon a depth ''beneath'' style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in ''Existential Errands'', “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances ''not'' to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own (59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship between the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
America has been watching
television for twenty years and
the style of television has
transfused itself not only into
the taste, but the demand, even
the expectancy, of the suburban
middle class—that precise
compound of neurons and suet so
capable of being smelted into
money.... Television, after all,
was the child of the Age of
Conformity which came to America
after the Second World War.
Television produced a genre:
moderate characters in modest
situations. It offered endlessly
recognizable detail, ''surface''
detail: supermarkets, highways,
suburban streets, pastel-colored
classrooms. However, the
characters in such television
dramas presented nothing which
was biologically real. They bore
the same relation to human beings
which vinyl does to leather.
(77– 8)

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
So why not write a play which
went from explosion to explosion,
or . . . from one moment of
intensity or reality (which is to
say a moment which feels more
real than other moments) to the
next—a play which went at full
throttle all the way. Which is
precisely what was done this
summer when ''The Deer Park'', a
four-hour play, its third draft
five years old, had an hour or
more taken out of it, a
transition which cut away all
dramatic scaffolding, connective
tissue, road signs, guides, and
left the play stripped to its
essential connections, the
movement ideally from one real
scene to the next, with the
audience left to fill the spaces
between. (66)

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Situating Hemingway: Mailer, Style, Ethics

2025-04-02T00:04:26Z

Cbrow34: I added the body of the essay.

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR05}}
{{Byline|last=Spinks|first=Lee|}}
{{Working}} 
THE PURPOSE OF THIS PAPER IS TO OFFER some preliminary reflections upon the following question: How might we make sense of the conjunction “Mailer and Hemingway”? This question has considerable force and pertinacity because to think back upon the scope and variety of Mailer’s corpus, and to begin to come to terms with his manifold significance as a major American writer, is to be compelled to recognize how profound—but also
how implicit and sometimes almost subterranean—his engagement with
Hemingway had been. We can, I would suggest, start to think about the nature of this engagement in various ways. We might begin, as others have, with some of the dominant features of the established account of Heming
way’s literary influence upon Mailer, which habitually accentuate both the allure of a certain romantic strain within American modernism and the seductions of the heroic literary personality. Mailer, we should note, is happily complicit with some of the presiding elements of this account; who can forget his imperishable remark in Advertisements for Myself that “[e]very American writer who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style” (19)? These, I must confess, are to me the least interesting aspects of Mailer’s fidelity to Hemingway, although his hypertrophy of romanticism would later constitute a crucial component of his critique of the “technological” sense. One problem with this type of investment in character and topos is that it too easily becomes, for want of a better phrase, dully thematic in its predilections and emphases: one is reminded, perhaps, of Mailer’s depiction of Lovett’s wartime infirmity in Barbary Shore (with its knowing evocation of Jake Barnes’s condition in The Sun Also Rises) which is rather portentously intended to symbolize an aspect of damaged life brought upon by the war, most particularly its degrading effects upon our conceptions of subjective autonomy and the possibility of genuinely free and vital existence. It is difficult, in this regard, not to agree with Richard Poirier’s more general observation that one of the principal weaknesses of The Deer Park is that Sergius O’Shaugnessy is a rather tedious and lifeless invention precisely because he too closely resembles the typology of Hemingway’s alienated war veteran and, in consequence, lacks the singularity and vivacity of perspective
and perception to bear the emotional and dramatic weight accorded him by the novel (41).

A second and, to my way of thinking, much more significant aspect of Hemingway’s influence upon Mailer is that something in what Mailer calls Hemingway’s “inner life” (an “inner” life that appears inextricably tied to both the public projection of an image of heroic and embattled personality and the internal constituents of a style) exposed to him the existential edge and quality of what it means to be fully human (''Existential'' xi, 10). We can approach Mailer’s imbrication of Hemingway’s example with properly existential thinking and being in a number of ways. We should first acknowledge that, for Mailer, existentialism in its essence (to use a necessarily
paradoxical formulation) is implacably opposed to what he elsewhere calls “camp” or the “put on” of technology: a mode of life that has surrendered its vitality to “directives determined in the main by the ruminative processes of computers” and which tricks out its desiccated sense of being in the garb of irony, pastiche and the vestments of dead style (x-xi).We should further recognize that Mailer locates the most potent means of resistance to such devitalized and technologized life in the existential sense of our radically contingent and alienated relationship to the world around us, a sense or perception that reveals itself most potently in “that stricken existential moment
in which Camp is stripped of its marks of quotation and put-ons shrivel in the livid air” (xi). If existentialism, properly conceived, is for Mailer a form
of anti-technological anti-camp—a style of living, that is, that insists upon a depth beneath style—then boxing and bullfighting become both a scene and a metaphor for this moment of naked existentialist vision. And it was,
of course, Hemingway who presented himself to Mailer as the chief literary inhabitant and adept of both of these existential scenes: “Hemingway is the example above all,” as Mailer phrased the matter in Existential Errands, “[b]ecause he wished to be the greatest writer in the history of literature and still be a hero with all the body arts age would yet grant him, he was alone and he knew it” (10). The importance of Hemingway’s example to Mailer’s
developing existentialist formulation of the need to “keep the sweet nerve of life alive” becomes clear during one of his bullfighting trips to Mexico. Here
he is compelled to concede that although it would it would be quite an achievement in these circumstances not to write like Hemingway, whenever he considers what bullfighting actually means to him (the “knowledge,” as he puts it, “that a man cannot be judged by what he is every day, but only in his greatest moment, for that is the moment when he shows what he was intended to be”), he cannot finally distinguish Hemingway’s accents from his own(59).This concession, honestly and forthrightly made, should concentrate our minds when we recall that the two aspects of bullfighting and boxing Mailer most highly prizes (their “romantic” and “impractical” refusal of the “twentieth-century’s demand for predictable ethics, high production, dependability of function, and categorization of impulse” and their disclosure that “form is the record of a war”) lie right at the heart of his mature aesthetics and ethics (59).

Mailer’s exuberant, sometimes dizzying, collocation of terms like existentialism, ethics, writing, form, and risk brings us closer to the core of my concern with Hemingway’s “influence” upon him (if the word can register
the impression of a pressure at once so pervasive and indistinct): the question of literary style. It is worth acknowledging at the outset that the claim that Hemingway exerted a stylistic, rather than attitudinal or more generally cultural, influence upon Mailer requires careful nuance and qualification. Thus when I read as sensitive a critic of Hemingway’s style as John Graham I find myself once again reminded of a certain Mailerian fidelity to Hemingway and yet continuingly unsure in what this fidelity actually consists.
Graham locates the well-spring of the extraordinary vitality of Hemingway’s prose in features such as his active presentation of subject and object, his character’s conscious reception of present fact (not judgement or even response to fact), the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects,
the interplay between his character’s awareness of their relation to these objects and a deliberate simplicity of plot, a directness of human relations, and
a basic impermanency of novelistic situation (18). It is undoubtedly true that Mailer excels at the active presentation of subject and object and the constant activity of sensory perception of active objects, and I shall return momentarily to his preoccupation with the idea of the ''situation'' of aesthetical and ethical deliberation and judgement. But his novels also never allow us to forget that the perception of ''any'' subject or object must contend with the contextual web of socio-political discourse and institutional pressure that would
bend us to their will and they are replete with judgements, responses and resistances to these preemptive and coercive forces. Returning briefly to Hemingway, we might also want to suggest that any description of his narrative vitality that locates its source in the “constant activity of sensory perception of active objects and, still more important, in the subject’s awareness of relationship to these objects” misses the meaning of its subject in the act of accounting for it by confusing Hemingway with Henry James or Virginia Woolf (18). Valuable though it is on its own terms, Graham’s typical (some might say stereotypical) reading of Hemingway’s style needs to be supplemented by the analytical rigour David Lodge brings to his engagement with Hemingway’s 1925 story “Cat in the Rain.” Beginning, as we all must, with the interpretative conundrums Hemingway’s prose presents to us (by which I mean our sense as readers that the meaning of the story does not inhere in its action), Lodge reminds us of Carlos Baker’s observation that in the 1920s Hemingway was evolving a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew what you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (165). Lodge finds Baker’s description of Hemingway’s practices to be of seminal significance because it rather gropingly captures what is vital and new in Hemingway’s style: his “application of the metonymic mode of classic realism to modernist literary purposes” (30). Metonymy, we recall, is a principle of nonlogical deletion (Lodge reminds us that Baker’s own word is “omission”): metonymy “connects actions that are contiguous in time and space and engendered by the principle of cause and effect,” but, since it cannot describe exhaustively, the “narrative text selects certain details or connections and suppresses or deletes others” (22). Hemingway’s genius was to generate emotional resonances from a constellation of metonymically connected details while suppressing or subtracting the kinds of motivation that would explain them. In so doing, he “generated a symbolist polyvalency in his deceptively simple stories, making the readers ‘feel more than they understood’” (30). Against this background it would be a mistake to look for a single clue or explanatory narrative ground to explain the “meaning” of Hemingway’s fiction: the “situation” of his prose always exceeds the scene he evokes at the
same time that the suggestive but necessarily indeterminate relationship between the two compels us as readers continually to reconsider the interpretative (by which I mean ethical as well as aesthetic) decisions by which we bring our own narrative worlds into coherence.

In the space that remains I want to develop these remarks by suggesting that the real clue to Mailer’s interest in Hemingway’s writing lay in its persistent reworking of the relationship between style, situation and vitality. My central claim is that the crucial and constitutive relationship Mailer’s work adduces between style and vitality (or that expansive mode of being
that pits itself ceaselessly against the managerial and technocratic determination and regulation of modern life) is best understood as an elaboration
of Hemingway’s literary and existential paradigm of the ''situation'': a paradigm that seeks to tie a new grammar of perception to a new style of life. Everything, it seems to me, that Mailer most prizes in Hemingway’s situational aesthetics and ethics—its radicalization of perception and point-of-view, its inventive rethinking of interpretative contexts and grounds, and its
dissolution of values into power-relationships and shifting alignments of force—later comes to inflect his mature conception of both an improvisational and an existential ethics. We might begin to elucidate the complex relationship in Mailer’s work among form, perception and ethics by dwelling for a moment upon the implications of one of his most Hemingwayesque sentences: “[Y]ou are in an existential situation when something important and/or unfamiliar is taking place and you do not know how it is going to turn out” (''Existential'' 104). This expository statement is drawn from a passage in ''Existential Errands'' where he makes an explicit connection between the “technological” deadening of spirit, reflex, and vitality that subtends the increasing administration and management of modern life and what he sees as the contemporary narcosis of apprehensive and visual forms. Mailer brings his point into sharper relief by positing an antithesis between the formal modalities of theatre and television. Television, Mailer
argues, is one of the key media by which the technological waning of affect and vitality degrades the body politic because it recycles pre-programmed (the clue is in the title) and incipiently generic gobbets of cultural style and
judgement in order to impose a kind of universal suburban mediocrity of taste:
America has been watching
television for twenty years and
the style of television has
transfused itself not only into
the taste, but the demand, even
the expectancy, of the suburban
middle class—that precise
compound of neurons and suet so
capable of being smelted into
money.... Television, after all,
was the child of the Age of
Conformity which came to America
after the Second World War.
Television produced a genre:
moderate characters in modest
situations. It offered endlessly
recognizable detail, ''surface''
detail: supermarkets, highways,
suburban streets, pastel-colored
classrooms. However, the
characters in such television
dramas presented nothing which
was biologically real. They bore
the same relation to human beings
which vinyl does to leather.
(77– 8)

The flatness of television, its subtraction of a shared intersubjective space for audience response and interaction, engenders a kind of narcosis or stupefaction in the same way that the familiarity of its generic routine dulls the synapses and conditions and enervates our imaginative reflexes (and television increasingly depends upon the conditioned reflex of canned laughter). Mailer emphasizes that such conditioning of reflex and response lies at the
heart of the administered life: corporate control, he argues, extends and reproduces itself by imposing a rational and repeatable structure upon every form of exchange (even the exchange of nerve and synapse); he distils the
essence of this corporate conversion of responsiveness into a conditioned and dependably reactive reflex into the lapidary formulation “Fear + Control = Corporate Power” (103). But what might offer us solace and redemption from the “camps of concentration” established by the technological circumscription of sense (88)? Mailer’s answer arrives in the form of a new
mode (or situation) of existential theatre (and later cinema) that works by stripping out the connective tissue of narrative consecution and implicating his audience instead in the collective labor of devising an interpretative ground from a circulating array of reality-effects. Crucially, for my purposes, his elaboration of this new mode of existential or situational drama (a drama in which all the “formal” elements of thought no longer frame the scene of writing but compose its very possibility or ground) is conducted in explicitly Hemingwayesque terms:
So why not write a play which
went from explosion to explosion,
or . . . from one moment of
intensity or reality (which is to
say a moment which feels more
real than other moments) to the
next—a play which went at full
throttle all the way. Which is
precisely what was done this
summer when ''The Deer Park'', a
four-hour play, its third draft
five years old, had an hour or
more taken out of it, a
transition which cut away all
dramatic scaffolding, connective
tissue, road signs, guides, and
left the play stripped to its
essential connections, the
movement ideally from one real
scene to the next, with the
audience left to fill the spaces
between. (66)

This observation strikes me, in conclusion, as a signal moment in Mailer’s developing aesthetic philosophy. It reaches forward to what he describes as the explicitly existential milieu of films like ''Maidstone'' and ''Wild'' which loose their participants into a situation without a script or normative
ground and record them composing a world together from a series of un
premeditated responses to shifts and alignments of force. It pits creativity and vitality against both the authoritarian recourse to the refuge of “moral values” and the condescension and programmatic devitalisation of liberal reformism and the social coding of “good taste” that retards any authentic expression of thinking and feeling; and it portends, in terms Mailer was yet to clarify, an experience of becoming-life, a life which is not managed life,
a life which in its fluid improvisational forms is not ''quite life'' and yet which is ready to ''become life'' (158).Yet if this newly fashioned improvisational aesthetics points us forwards towards the style of Mailer’s great literary accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s, it also reaches back in its forms and figures to those radical years in the 1920s when Hemingway reinvented American prose page by page from one moment of intensity or reality to the next.

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