Project Mailer - User contributions [en]

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-15T00:54:47Z

Sherrilledwards: added link to Remediation Instructions

Karen, I've linked the [[Remediation Instructionshttps://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediation Instructions]] where I got the sample reference formatting.

'''Thank You Sherilledwards'''

I will review the edits you made and continue to move forward. I found the citations page once, but could not figure out how to get back to it.

[[User:Kforeman|Kforeman]] ([[User talk:Kforeman|talk]]) 7:53, 14 April 2025 (EDT)

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'''Copyedited, hoping to help:'''

I formatted the epigraphs (quotations at beginning) and bold/caps first line. We still need footnotes in the epigraphs. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 11:37, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas asked us to use the citation templates in the [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions. I've copied those to the very end of your draft to help jumpstart you. It looks like you are using different templates, so that might be why you are seeing red errors in the works cited. Using those, especially '''ref=harv''', is also necessary for shortened footnotes to work. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:24, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed pg break notations. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:41, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed line breaks. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 13:10, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Copyedited: Checked sentence-by-sentence for spaces, punctuation (e.g., em dashes), italics, and content (filling in a few missing words and deleting content not presenting in original). [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 14:07, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

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KForeman

"Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"

The following references and citations are what I contributed to this body of work.

Abstract:
The narrative of the story raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.

Works Cited:

1) Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972.

Norman Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7)

2) Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,

Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97).

3) Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE.

Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86)

Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project. (Messenger 86)

4) Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.

Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3)

For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5)

5) Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275.

Notably, the intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites. (Schell 260)

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T20:27:46Z

Sherrilledwards: Fixed ital p276

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| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = [[Mailer's review/volume 4, 2010/mailer's footnote to death in the Afternoon]]
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{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece,“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J.Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan are only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.” They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''” (182). In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.

But what of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”(353), which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (352).

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”).

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)” (286).

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss” (3–4)? When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd” (4–5). Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Brand | first1 = Anthony
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["'Far From Simple': The Published Photographs in Death in the Afternoon. "A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Mirian Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Bullfight.]]
| location = Bonanza Books, 1958. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["My Life Inside."]]
| location = Esquire September, 1988. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Hemingway | first1 = Ernest.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1987. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1932. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[For Whom the Bell Tolls.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1941. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kehoe | first1 = Vincent J-R.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Wine, Women & Toros.]]
| location = New York: Hastings House, 1961. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kinnamon | first1 = Keneth.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Miriam Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Lennon | first1 = J. Michael.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007."]]
| location = The Mailer Review 2.1 (2008): 515-17. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Mailer | first1 = Norman.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer.]]
| location = New York: CBS Records/Macmillan, 1967. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Deer Park.]]
| location = New York: Vintage, 1997. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
-----------------
{{Refbegin}}1. Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}2. Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}3. Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}4. Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}5. Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,</ref>
{{Refend}}

'''Citation Templates from [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions'''

===Works Cited===

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* {{cite book |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

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* {{cite news |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= |title= |last= |first= |date= |website= |publisher= |access-date= |quote= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T20:25:17Z

Sherrilledwards: fixed typo with italics

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{byline
| align = left|right (right is default)
| type = Written|Edited (Written is default)
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
|
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = [[Mailer's review/volume 4, 2010/mailer's footnote to death in the Afternoon]]
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece,“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J.Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan are only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.” They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''” (182). In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado'' or ''invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.

But what part of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”(353), which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (352).

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”).

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)” (286).

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss” (3–4)? When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd” (4–5). Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Brand | first1 = Anthony
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["'Far From Simple': The Published Photographs in Death in the Afternoon. "A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Mirian Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Bullfight.]]
| location = Bonanza Books, 1958. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["My Life Inside."]]
| location = Esquire September, 1988. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Hemingway | first1 = Ernest.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1987. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1932. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[For Whom the Bell Tolls.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1941. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kehoe | first1 = Vincent J-R.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Wine, Women & Toros.]]
| location = New York: Hastings House, 1961. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kinnamon | first1 = Keneth.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Miriam Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Lennon | first1 = J. Michael.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007."]]
| location = The Mailer Review 2.1 (2008): 515-17. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Mailer | first1 = Norman.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer.]]
| location = New York: CBS Records/Macmillan, 1967. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Deer Park.]]
| location = New York: Vintage, 1997. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
-----------------
{{Refbegin}}1. Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}2. Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}3. Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}4. Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}5. Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,</ref>
{{Refend}}

'''Citation Templates from [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions'''

===Works Cited===

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* {{cite book |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= |first= |title= |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= |title= |last= |first= |date= |website= |publisher= |access-date= |quote= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T20:13:59Z

Sherrilledwards: fixed missing space

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{byline
| align = left|right (right is default)
| type = Written|Edited (Written is default)
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
|
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = [[Mailer's review/volume 4, 2010/mailer's footnote to death in the Afternoon]]
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece,“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J.Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan are only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.” They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''” (182). In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado or invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.

But what part of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”(353), which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (352).

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”).

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)” (286).

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss” (3–4)? When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd” (4–5). Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Brand | first1 = Anthony
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["'Far From Simple': The Published Photographs in Death in the Afternoon. "A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Mirian Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Bullfight.]]
| location = Bonanza Books, 1958. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["My Life Inside."]]
| location = Esquire September, 1988. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Hemingway | first1 = Ernest.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1987. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1932. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[For Whom the Bell Tolls.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1941. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kehoe | first1 = Vincent J-R.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Wine, Women & Toros.]]
| location = New York: Hastings House, 1961. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kinnamon | first1 = Keneth.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Miriam Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Lennon | first1 = J. Michael.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007."]]
| location = The Mailer Review 2.1 (2008): 515-17. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Mailer | first1 = Norman.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer.]]
| location = New York: CBS Records/Macmillan, 1967. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Deer Park.]]
| location = New York: Vintage, 1997. Print
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-----------------
{{Refbegin}}1. Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}2. Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}3. Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}4. Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}5. Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,</ref>
{{Refend}}

'''Citation Templates from [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions'''

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= |first= |title= |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= |title= |last= |first= |date= |website= |publisher= |access-date= |quote= |ref=harv }}

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Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T18:22:49Z

Sherrilledwards: adjusted title

'''Copyedited, hoping to help:'''

I formatted the epigraphs (quotations at beginning) and bold/caps first line. We still need footnotes in the epigraphs. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 11:37, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas asked us to use the citation templates in the [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions. I've copied those to the very end of your draft to help jumpstart you. It looks like you are using different templates, so that might be why you are seeing red errors in the works cited. Using those, especially '''ref=harv''', is also necessary for shortened footnotes to work. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:24, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed pg break notations. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:41, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed line breaks. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 13:10, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Copyedited: Checked sentence-by-sentence for spaces, punctuation (e.g., em dashes), italics, and content (filling in a few missing words and deleting content not presenting in original). [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 14:07, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

---

KForeman

"Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"

The following references and citations are what I contributed to this body of work.

Abstract:
The narrative of the story raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.

Works Cited:

1) Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972.

Norman Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7)

2) Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,

Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97).

3) Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE.

Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86)

Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project. (Messenger 86)

4) Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.

Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3)

For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5)

5) Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275.

Notably, the intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites. (Schell 260)

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T18:21:59Z

Sherrilledwards: fixed typo

'''Hoping to Help:'''

I formatted the epigraphs (quotations at beginning) and bold/caps first line. We still need footnotes in the epigraphs. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 11:37, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas asked us to use the citation templates in the [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions. I've copied those to the very end of your draft to help jumpstart you. It looks like you are using different templates, so that might be why you are seeing red errors in the works cited. Using those, especially '''ref=harv''', is also necessary for shortened footnotes to work. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:24, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed pg break notations. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:41, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed line breaks. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 13:10, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Copyedited: Checked sentence-by-sentence for spaces, punctuation (e.g., em dashes), italics, and content (filling in a few missing words and deleting content not presenting in original).[[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 14:07, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

---

KForeman

"Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"

The following references and citations are what I contributed to this body of work.

Abstract:
The narrative of the story raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.

Works Cited:

1) Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972.

Norman Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7)

2) Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,

Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97).

3) Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE.

Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86)

Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project. (Messenger 86)

4) Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.

Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3)

For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5)

5) Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275.

Notably, the intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites. (Schell 260)

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T18:21:34Z

Sherrilledwards: modified notes

'''Hoping to Help:'''

I formatted the epigraphs (quotations at beginning) and bold/caps first line. We still need footnotes in the epigraphs. I'm hoping to help with some further copyediting today. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 11:37, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas asked us to use the citation templates in the [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions. I've copied those to the very end of your draft to help jumpstart you. It looks like you are using different templates, so that might be why you are seeing red errors in the works cited. Using those, especially '''ref=harv''', is also necessary for shortened footnotes to work. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:24, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed pg break notations. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:41, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed line breaks. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 13:10, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Copyedited: Checked sentence-by-sentence for spaces, punctuation (e.g., em dashes), italics, and content (filling in a few missing words and deleting content not presenting in original).[[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 14:07, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

---

KForeman

"Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"

The following references and citations are what I contributed to this body of work.

Abstract:
The narrative of the story raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.

Works Cited:

1) Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972.

Norman Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7)

2) Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,

Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97).

3) Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE.

Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86)

Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project. (Messenger 86)

4) Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.

Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3)

For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5)

5) Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275.

Notably, the intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites. (Schell 260)

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T18:08:18Z

Sherrilledwards: fixed typo

'''Hoping to Help:'''

I formatted the epigraphs (quotations at beginning) and bold/caps first line. We still need footnotes in the epigraphs. I'm hoping to help with some further copyediting today. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 11:37, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas asked us to use the citation templates in the [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions. I've copied those to the very end of your draft. It looks like you are using different templates, so that might be why you are seeing red errors in the works cited. Using those, especially '''ref=harv''', is also necessary for shortened footnotes to work. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:24, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed pg break notations. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:41, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed line breaks. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 13:10, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Copyedited: Checked sentence-by-sentence for spaces, punctuation (e.g., em dashes), italics, and content (filling in a few missing words and deleting content not presenting in original). [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 14:07, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

---

KForeman

"Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"

The following references and citations are what I contributed to this body of work.

Abstract:
The narrative of the story raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.

Works Cited:

1) Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972.

Norman Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7)

2) Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,

Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97).

3) Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE.

Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86)

Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project. (Messenger 86)

4) Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.

Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3)

For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5)

5) Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275.

Notably, the intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites. (Schell 260)

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T18:07:58Z

Sherrilledwards: fixed typo

'''Hoping to Help:'''

I formatted the epigraphs (quotations at beginning) and bold/caps first line. We still need footnotes in the epigraphs. I'm hoping to help with some further copyediting today. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 11:37, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas asked us to use the citation templates in the [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions. I've copied those to the very end of your draft. It looks like you are using different templates, so that might be why you are seeing red errors in the works cited. Using those, especially '''ref=harv''', is also necessary for shortened footnotes to work. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:24, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed pg break notations. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:41, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed line breaks [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 13:10, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Copyedited: Checked sentence-by-sentence for spaces, punctuation (e.g., em dashes), italics, and content (filling in a few missing words and deleting content not presenting in original). [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 14:07, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

---

KForeman

"Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"

The following references and citations are what I contributed to this body of work.

Abstract:
The narrative of the story raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.

Works Cited:

1) Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972.

Norman Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7)

2) Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,

Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97).

3) Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE.

Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86)

Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project. (Messenger 86)

4) Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.

Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3)

For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5)

5) Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275.

Notably, the intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites. (Schell 260)

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T18:07:39Z

Sherrilledwards: added sig

'''Hoping to Help:'''

I formatted the epigraphs (quotations at beginning) and bold/caps first line. We still need footnotes in the epigraphs. I'm hoping to help with some further copyediting today. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 11:37, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas asked us to use the citation templates in the [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions. I've copied those to the very end of your draft. It looks like you are using different templates, so that might be why you are seeing red errors in the works cited. Using those, especially '''ref=harv''', is also necessary for shortened footnotes to work. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:24, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed pg break notations. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:41, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed line breaks [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 13:10, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Copyedited: Checked sentence-by-sentence for spaces, punctuation (e.g., em dashes), italics, and content (filling in a few missing words and deleting content not presenting in original). [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 14:07, 13 April 2025 (EDT)
---

KForeman

"Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"

The following references and citations are what I contributed to this body of work.

Abstract:
The narrative of the story raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.

Works Cited:

1) Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972.

Norman Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7)

2) Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,

Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97).

3) Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE.

Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86)

Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project. (Messenger 86)

4) Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.

Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3)

For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5)

5) Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275.

Notably, the intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites. (Schell 260)

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T18:07:09Z

Sherrilledwards: added note about copyediting

'''Hoping to Help:'''

I formatted the epigraphs (quotations at beginning) and bold/caps first line. We still need footnotes in the epigraphs. I'm hoping to help with some further copyediting today. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 11:37, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas asked us to use the citation templates in the [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions. I've copied those to the very end of your draft. It looks like you are using different templates, so that might be why you are seeing red errors in the works cited. Using those, especially '''ref=harv''', is also necessary for shortened footnotes to work. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:24, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed pg break notations. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:41, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed line breaks [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 13:10, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Copyedited: Checked sentence-by-sentence for spaces, punctuation (e.g., em dashes), italics, and content (filling in a few missing words and deleting content not presenting in original).
---

KForeman

"Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"

The following references and citations are what I contributed to this body of work.

Abstract:
The narrative of the story raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.

Works Cited:

1) Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972.

Norman Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7)

2) Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,

Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97).

3) Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE.

Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86)

Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project. (Messenger 86)

4) Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.

Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3)

For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5)

5) Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275.

Notably, the intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites. (Schell 260)

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T18:04:13Z

Sherrilledwards: copyedit thru p284

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{byline
| align = left|right (right is default)
| type = Written|Edited (Written is default)
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
|
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = [[Mailer's review/volume 4, 2010/mailer's footnote to death in the Afternoon]]
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece,“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J.Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan are only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.” They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''” (182). In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado or invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.

But what part of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”(353), which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (352).

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”).

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)” (286).

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss” (3–4)? When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd” (4–5). Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase ''form is the record of a war''. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived ''doppelgänger'' Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable ''toreo'' in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}

''Form'' is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.

Form ''is'' the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.

Form is the ''record'' of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a ''war'': On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the ''alternative'' to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the ''alternativa'' and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “''the'' novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of ''toreo''. Thanks to the ''clue'' Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (''clue'' harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon''.{{pg|284|285}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Brand | first1 = Anthony
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["'Far From Simple': The Published Photographs in Death in the Afternoon. "A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Mirian Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Bullfight.]]
| location = Bonanza Books, 1958. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
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| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
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| title = [["My Life Inside."]]
| location = Esquire September, 1988. Print
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| last1 = Hemingway | first1 = Ernest.
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| title = [[Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1987. Print
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{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
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| title = [[Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1932. Print
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| date =
| isbn = }}
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{{Refbegin}}
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| last1 = ----. | first1 =
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| title = [[For Whom the Bell Tolls.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1941. Print
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| title = [["The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Miriam Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
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-----------------
{{Refbegin}}1. Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}2. Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}3. Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}4. Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}5. Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,</ref>
{{Refend}}

'''Citation Templates from [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions'''

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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T17:59:13Z

Sherrilledwards: copyedit thru p283

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{byline
| align = left|right (right is default)
| type = Written|Edited (Written is default)
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
|
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = [[Mailer's review/volume 4, 2010/mailer's footnote to death in the Afternoon]]
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece,“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J.Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan are only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.” They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''” (182). In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado or invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.

But what part of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”(353), which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (352).

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”).

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)” (286).

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss” (3–4)? When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd” (4–5). Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the ''muleta'' as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.” Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. ''The record of a war'' is not just El Loco’s crazy season, ''the record of a war'' is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t ''Amado''—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right—Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him—then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with ''toreo''. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of ''In Our Time'' (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, ''trying to write'', he writes about them [the bulls] ''for myself''—is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of ''Death in the Afternoon'': “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit the realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase form is the record of a war. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived doppelgänger Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable toreo in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}
Form is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.
Form is the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.
Form is the record of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a war: On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the alternative to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the alternative and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “the novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of toreo. Thanks to the clue Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (clue harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to Death in the Afternoon. Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97). {{pg|284|285}}

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| title = [[Wine, Women & Toros.]]
| location = New York: Hastings House, 1961. Print
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| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kinnamon | first1 = Keneth.
| first2 = | last2 =
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| title = [["The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Miriam Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
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{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Lennon | first1 = J. Michael.
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| title = [["Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007."]]
| location = The Mailer Review 2.1 (2008): 515-17. Print
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{{cite book
| last1 = Mailer | first1 = Norman.
| first2 = | last2 =
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| title = [[The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer.]]
| location = New York: CBS Records/Macmillan, 1967. Print
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| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
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{{cite book
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| title = [[The Deer Park.]]
| location = New York: Vintage, 1997. Print
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| isbn = }}
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{{Refbegin}}1. Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}2. Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}3. Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}4. Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}5. Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,</ref>
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T17:49:47Z

Sherrilledwards: copyedit thru p181

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
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{{Working}} 
{{byline
| align = left|right (right is default)
| type = Written|Edited (Written is default)
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
|
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = [[Mailer's review/volume 4, 2010/mailer's footnote to death in the Afternoon]]
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece,“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J.Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan are only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.” They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''” (182). In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado or invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.

But what part of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”(353), which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (352).

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”).

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)” (286).

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss” (3–4)? When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd” (4–5). Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanish, we say: “''Vaya usted a saber'',” which is not far from “Go figure.”

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in ''Death in the Afternoon'' when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}}

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a ''gallicina'' in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of ''larga,'' a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse ''serpentina'' counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like ''Death in the Afternoon'', which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be ''loco'', but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from ''Death in the Afternoon'': “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican ''toreros'' are highly inventive with the cape and with the ''muleta'' (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his ''imposible'' pass with the ''muleta'' was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a ''gallicina'' and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican ''toreo'' does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the muleta as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.”Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. The record of a war is not just El Loco’s crazy season, the record of a war is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t Amado the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with toreo. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of In Our Time (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, trying to write, he writes about them [the bulls] for me is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of Death in the Afternoon: “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit the realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase form is the record of a war. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived doppelgänger Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable toreo in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}
Form is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.
Form is the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.
Form is the record of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a war: On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the alternative to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the alternative and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “the novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of toreo. Thanks to the clue Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (clue harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to Death in the Afternoon. Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97). {{pg|284|285}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Brand | first1 = Anthony
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["'Far From Simple': The Published Photographs in Death in the Afternoon. "A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Mirian Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
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| first2 = | last2 =
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| title = [[Bullfight.]]
| location = Bonanza Books, 1958. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
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| title = [["My Life Inside."]]
| location = Esquire September, 1988. Print
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| title = [[Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1987. Print
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| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1932. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
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| title = [[For Whom the Bell Tolls.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1941. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
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| location = New York: Hastings House, 1961. Print
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{{Refbegin}}
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| title = [["The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Miriam Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
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{{Refbegin}}
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| location = The Mailer Review 2.1 (2008): 515-17. Print
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{{Refbegin}}
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| first2 = | last2 =
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| title = [[The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer.]]
| location = New York: CBS Records/Macmillan, 1967. Print
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| pages =
| date =
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{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
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| title = [[The Deer Park.]]
| location = New York: Vintage, 1997. Print
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-----------------
{{Refbegin}}1. Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}2. Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}3. Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}4. Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}5. Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,</ref>
{{Refend}}

'''Citation Templates from [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions'''

===Works Cited===

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* {{cite book |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

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* {{cite news |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= |title= |last= |first= |date= |website= |publisher= |access-date= |quote= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T17:39:31Z

Sherrilledwards: fix typo

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{byline
| align = left|right (right is default)
| type = Written|Edited (Written is default)
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
|
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = [[Mailer's review/volume 4, 2010/mailer's footnote to death in the Afternoon]]
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece,“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J.Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan are only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.” They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''” (182). In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado or invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.

But what part of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”(353), which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (352).

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”).

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)” (286).

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss” (3–4)? When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd” (4–5). Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.” Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanis, we say: “Vaya usted a saber,” which is not far from“Go figure.” Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7).

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in Death in the Afternoon when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}} More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a gallicina in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of larga, a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse serpentina counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in Death in the Afternoon: “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like Death in the Afternoon, which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be loco, but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from Death in the Afternoon: “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican toreros are highly inventive with the cape and with the muleta (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his impossible pass with the muleta was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a gallicina and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican toreo does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the muleta as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.”Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. The record of a war is not just El Loco’s crazy season, the record of a war is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t Amado the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with toreo. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of In Our Time (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, trying to write, he writes about them [the bulls] for me is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of Death in the Afternoon: “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit the realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase form is the record of a war. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived doppelgänger Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable toreo in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}
Form is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.
Form is the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.
Form is the record of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a war: On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the alternative to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the alternative and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “the novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of toreo. Thanks to the clue Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (clue harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to Death in the Afternoon. Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97). {{pg|284|285}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Brand | first1 = Anthony
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["'Far From Simple': The Published Photographs in Death in the Afternoon. "A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Mirian Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| first2 = | last2 =
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| title = [[Bullfight.]]
| location = Bonanza Books, 1958. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
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| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
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| title = [["My Life Inside."]]
| location = Esquire September, 1988. Print
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| last1 = Hemingway | first1 = Ernest.
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| title = [[Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1987. Print
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{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1932. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
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| title = [[For Whom the Bell Tolls.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1941. Print
| publisher =
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| date =
| isbn = }}
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{{Refbegin}}
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| location = New York: Hastings House, 1961. Print
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{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kinnamon | first1 = Keneth.
| first2 = | last2 =
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| title = [["The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Miriam Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
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{{Refbegin}}
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| location = The Mailer Review 2.1 (2008): 515-17. Print
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{{Refbegin}}
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| first2 = | last2 =
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| title = [[The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer.]]
| location = New York: CBS Records/Macmillan, 1967. Print
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| date =
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{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
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| title = [[The Deer Park.]]
| location = New York: Vintage, 1997. Print
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-----------------
{{Refbegin}}1. Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}2. Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}3. Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}4. Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}5. Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,</ref>
{{Refend}}

'''Citation Templates from [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions'''

===Works Cited===

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* {{cite book |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= |first= |title= |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= |title= |last= |first= |date= |website= |publisher= |access-date= |quote= |ref=harv }}

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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T17:38:44Z

Sherrilledwards: Copyedit thru p279

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{byline
| align = left|right (right is default)
| type = Written|Edited (Written is default)
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
|
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = [[Mailer's review/volume 4, 2010/mailer's footnote to death in the Afternoon]]
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece,“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J.Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan are only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.” They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''” (182). In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado or invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.

But what part of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”(353), which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (352).

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”).

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)” (286).

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man?” Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss” (3–4)? When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd” (4–5). Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding—if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with “a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with “a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in ''Death in the Afternoon'': “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “There was something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “''the'' novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.”Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanis, we say: “Vaya usted a saber,” which is not far from“Go figure.” Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7).

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in Death in the Afternoon when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}} More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a gallicina in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of larga, a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse serpentina counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in Death in the Afternoon: “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like Death in the Afternoon, which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be loco, but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from Death in the Afternoon: “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican toreros are highly inventive with the cape and with the muleta (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his impossible pass with the muleta was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a gallicina and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican toreo does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the muleta as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.”Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. The record of a war is not just El Loco’s crazy season, the record of a war is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t Amado the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with toreo. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of In Our Time (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, trying to write, he writes about them [the bulls] for me is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of Death in the Afternoon: “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit the realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase form is the record of a war. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived doppelgänger Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable toreo in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}
Form is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.
Form is the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.
Form is the record of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a war: On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the alternative to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the alternative and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “the novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of toreo. Thanks to the clue Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (clue harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to Death in the Afternoon. Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97). {{pg|284|285}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Brand | first1 = Anthony
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["'Far From Simple': The Published Photographs in Death in the Afternoon. "A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Mirian Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Bullfight.]]
| location = Bonanza Books, 1958. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["My Life Inside."]]
| location = Esquire September, 1988. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Hemingway | first1 = Ernest.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1987. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1932. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
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| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[For Whom the Bell Tolls.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1941. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
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| last1 = Kehoe | first1 = Vincent J-R.
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| title = [[Wine, Women & Toros.]]
| location = New York: Hastings House, 1961. Print
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{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kinnamon | first1 = Keneth.
| first2 = | last2 =
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| title = [["The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Miriam Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
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| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Lennon | first1 = J. Michael.
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| title = [["Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007."]]
| location = The Mailer Review 2.1 (2008): 515-17. Print
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{{Refbegin}}
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| first2 = | last2 =
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| title = [[The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer.]]
| location = New York: CBS Records/Macmillan, 1967. Print
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| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
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{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
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| title = [[The Deer Park.]]
| location = New York: Vintage, 1997. Print
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-----------------
{{Refbegin}}1. Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}2. Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}3. Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}4. Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}5. Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,</ref>
{{Refend}}

'''Citation Templates from [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions'''

===Works Cited===

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* {{cite news |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= |title= |last= |first= |date= |website= |publisher= |access-date= |quote= |ref=harv }}

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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T17:32:26Z

Sherrilledwards: small typos

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{byline
| align = left|right (right is default)
| type = Written|Edited (Written is default)
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
|
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = [[Mailer's review/volume 4, 2010/mailer's footnote to death in the Afternoon]]
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety—to get an idea imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece,“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J.Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan are only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.” They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer—twenty of them—range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably—two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)—should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''” (182). In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible—the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado or invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it—some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954—an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.

But what part of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”(353), which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (352).

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”).

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)” (286).

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man”? Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss” (3–4)? When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd” (4–5). Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with“a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with“a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in Death in the Afternoon: “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “Something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “the novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.”Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanis, we say: “Vaya usted a saber,” which is not far from“Go figure.” Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7).

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in Death in the Afternoon when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}} More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a gallicina in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of larga, a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse serpentina counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in Death in the Afternoon: “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like Death in the Afternoon, which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be loco, but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from Death in the Afternoon: “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican toreros are highly inventive with the cape and with the muleta (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his impossible pass with the muleta was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a gallicina and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican toreo does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the muleta as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.”Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. The record of a war is not just El Loco’s crazy season, the record of a war is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t Amado the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with toreo. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of In Our Time (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, trying to write, he writes about them [the bulls] for me is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of Death in the Afternoon: “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit the realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase form is the record of a war. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived doppelgänger Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable toreo in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}
Form is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.
Form is the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.
Form is the record of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a war: On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the alternative to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the alternative and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “the novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of toreo. Thanks to the clue Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (clue harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to Death in the Afternoon. Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97). {{pg|284|285}}

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{{Refbegin}}1. Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}2. Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}3. Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}4. Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}5. Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,</ref>
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'''Citation Templates from [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions'''

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{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T17:29:39Z

Sherrilledwards: copyedit and italics thru p277

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
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{{Working}} 
{{byline
| align = left|right (right is default)
| type = Written|Edited (Written is default)
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
|
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = [[Mailer's review/volume 4, 2010/mailer's footnote to death in the Afternoon]]
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety--to get an idea imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece,“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J.Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of ''The Mailer Review'', lists Macmillan (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records, and Macmillan are only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete ''corrida de toros''.” They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose. Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd.

The photographer--twenty of them--range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notabl--two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78)--should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of ''Death in the Afternoon''” (182). In fact, some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “''media verónica''” but a ''revolera''. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible--the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled ''derechazo'' by Dominguín, which is in fact a ''pase circular cambiado or invertido'' (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010: 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it--some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954--an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the credit-less young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions in spite of the fact that he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time.

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.

But what part of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.” That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in ''The Deer Park'', quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”(353), which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) ''The Deer Park'' instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (352).

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a ''novillero'', who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’Ss’ character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then “the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write ''the'' novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “''the'' novel about bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of ''Playboy'', in which he does not mention “''the'' novel about bullfight”).

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “''the'' novel on bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to ''Death in the Afternoon'' when ''Death in the Afternoon'' is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Except that Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” And he finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)” (286).

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man”? Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss” (3–4)? When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd” (4–5). Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with“a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with“a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in Death in the Afternoon: “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “Something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “the novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.”Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanis, we say: “Vaya usted a saber,” which is not far from“Go figure.” Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7).

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in Death in the Afternoon when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}} More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a gallicina in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of larga, a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse serpentina counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in Death in the Afternoon: “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like Death in the Afternoon, which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be loco, but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from Death in the Afternoon: “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican toreros are highly inventive with the cape and with the muleta (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his impossible pass with the muleta was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a gallicina and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican toreo does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the muleta as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.”Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. The record of a war is not just El Loco’s crazy season, the record of a war is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t Amado the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with toreo. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of In Our Time (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, trying to write, he writes about them [the bulls] for me is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of Death in the Afternoon: “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit the realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase form is the record of a war. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived doppelgänger Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable toreo in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}
Form is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.
Form is the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.
Form is the record of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a war: On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the alternative to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the alternative and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “the novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of toreo. Thanks to the clue Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (clue harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to Death in the Afternoon. Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97). {{pg|284|285}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Brand | first1 = Anthony
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["'Far From Simple': The Published Photographs in Death in the Afternoon. "A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Mirian Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Bullfight.]]
| location = Bonanza Books, 1958. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["My Life Inside."]]
| location = Esquire September, 1988. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Hemingway | first1 = Ernest.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1987. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1932. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[For Whom the Bell Tolls.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1941. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kehoe | first1 = Vincent J-R.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Wine, Women & Toros.]]
| location = New York: Hastings House, 1961. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kinnamon | first1 = Keneth.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Miriam Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Lennon | first1 = J. Michael.
| first2 = | last2 =
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| title = [["Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007."]]
| location = The Mailer Review 2.1 (2008): 515-17. Print
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| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Mailer | first1 = Norman.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer.]]
| location = New York: CBS Records/Macmillan, 1967. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Deer Park.]]
| location = New York: Vintage, 1997. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
-----------------
{{Refbegin}}1. Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}2. Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}3. Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}4. Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}5. Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,</ref>
{{Refend}}

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Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T17:10:16Z

Sherrilledwards: added note about line breaks

'''Hoping to Help:'''

I formatted the epigraphs (quotations at beginning) and bold/caps first line. We still need footnotes in the epigraphs. I'm hoping to help with some further copyediting today. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 11:37, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas asked us to use the citation templates in the [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions. I've copied those to the very end of your draft. It looks like you are using different templates, so that might be why you are seeing red errors in the works cited. Using those, especially '''ref=harv''', is also necessary for shortened footnotes to work. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:24, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed pg break notations. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:41, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed line breaks [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 13:10, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

---

KForeman

"Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"

The following references and citations are what I contributed to this body of work.

Abstract:
The narrative of the story raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.

Works Cited:

1) Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972.

Norman Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7)

2) Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,

Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97).

3) Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE.

Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86)

Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project. (Messenger 86)

4) Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.

Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3)

For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5)

5) Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275.

Notably, the intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites. (Schell 260)

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T16:55:40Z

Sherrilledwards: fixed line breaks

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| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = [[Mailer's review/volume 4, 2010/mailer's footnote to death in the Afternoon]]
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer, which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety to get an idea imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico García Lorca’s taurine poetic masterpiece,“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other. The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not even clear who claims to have published the book. J.Michael Lennon’s bibliography of first editions, published in the second volume of The Mailer Review, lists Macmillan (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS Records and Macmillan are only credited with distribution. The dust jacket begins by saying “This is the most unusual book to be published about the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement but not for the reasons the publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size (approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete corrida de toros.” They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive, impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that emerges from the photos or the initial prose.Also, the notion that anyone would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted, falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd. Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86).

The photographers twenty of them range from noted taurine experts such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín (credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably two by Bob Cato (nos. 60, 78) should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked, rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and serious section of Death in the Afternoon” (182). Some of the captions in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example, pictures, not a “media verónica” but a revolera. Both passes finish a series with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible the former is tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement. The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled derechazo by Dominguín, which is in fact a pase circular cambiado or invertido (nos. 61–65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration, somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010; 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954 an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the creditless young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions although he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time. Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project (Messenger 86).

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production. To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.

But what part of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.”That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3). That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in The Deer Park, quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”(353), which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) The Deer Park instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (352).

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a novillero, who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’S’s character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then“ the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write the novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “The Novel about Bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of Playboy, in which he does not mention “the novel about bullfight”). For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5).

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “The Novel on Bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to Death in the Afternoon when Death in the Afternoon is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” He finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)” (286).

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, the smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man”? Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss” (3–4)? When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust, would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd” (4–5). Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with“a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with“a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in Death in the Afternoon: “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “Something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “the novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.”Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he mean such an assertion? In Spanis, we say: “Vaya usted a saber,” which is not far from“Go figure.” Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7).

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in Death in the Afternoon when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.{{pg|280|281}} More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a gallicina in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of larga, a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse serpentina counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in Death in the Afternoon: “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like Death in the Afternoon, which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be loco, but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from Death in the Afternoon: “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican toreros are highly inventive with the cape and with the muleta (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his impossible pass with the muleta was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a gallicina and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican toreo does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the muleta as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.”Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. The record of a war is not just El Loco’s crazy season, the record of a war is also Mailer’s early career, both figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t Amado the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with toreo. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of In Our Time (Chapter IX Chapter XIV)—in which, trying to write, he writes about them [the bulls] for me is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of Death in the Afternoon: “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit the realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase form is the record of a war. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived doppelgänger Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable toreo in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}
Form is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.
Form is the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.
Form is the record of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a war: On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez, El Loco, took the alternative to become a full matador. He was unable to kill any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the alternative and ended his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “the novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of toreo. Thanks to the clue Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (clue harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to Death in the Afternoon. Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97). {{pg|284|285}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Brand | first1 = Anthony
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["'Far From Simple': The Published Photographs in Death in the Afternoon. "A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Mirian Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Bullfight.]]
| location = Bonanza Books, 1958. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["My Life Inside."]]
| location = Esquire September, 1988. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Hemingway | first1 = Ernest.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1987. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1932. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[For Whom the Bell Tolls.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1941. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kehoe | first1 = Vincent J-R.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Wine, Women & Toros.]]
| location = New York: Hastings House, 1961. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kinnamon | first1 = Keneth.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Miriam Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Lennon | first1 = J. Michael.
| first2 = | last2 =
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| title = [["Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007."]]
| location = The Mailer Review 2.1 (2008): 515-17. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Mailer | first1 = Norman.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer.]]
| location = New York: CBS Records/Macmillan, 1967. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Deer Park.]]
| location = New York: Vintage, 1997. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
-----------------
{{Refbegin}}1. Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}2. Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}3. Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}4. Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}5. Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,</ref>
{{Refend}}

'''Citation Templates from [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions'''

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= |first= |title= |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= |title= |last= |first= |date= |website= |publisher= |access-date= |quote= |ref=harv }}

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Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T16:41:13Z

Sherrilledwards: added note about pg breaks

'''Hoping to Help:'''

I formatted the epigraphs (quotations at beginning) and bold/caps first line. We still need footnotes in the epigraphs. I'm hoping to help with some further copyediting today. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 11:37, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas asked us to use the citation templates in the [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions. I've copied those to the very end of your draft. It looks like you are using different templates, so that might be why you are seeing red errors in the works cited. Using those, especially '''ref=harv''', is also necessary for shortened footnotes to work. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:24, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Fixed pg break notations. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:41, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

---

KForeman

"Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"

The following references and citations are what I contributed to this body of work.

Abstract:
The narrative of the story raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.

Works Cited:

1) Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972.

Norman Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7)

2) Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,

Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97).

3) Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE.

Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86)

Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project. (Messenger 86)

4) Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.

Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3)

For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5)

5) Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275.

Notably, the intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites. (Schell 260)

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T16:39:23Z

Sherrilledwards: fix pg break

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{byline
| align = left|right (right is default)
| type = Written|Edited (Written is default)
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
|
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = [[Mailer's review/volume 4, 2010/mailer's footnote to death in the Afternoon]]
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as
the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting
problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying
text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer,
which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals
with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El
Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety to get an idea imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward
from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico
García Lorca’s taurine poeticmasterpiece,“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez
Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the
quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or the photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other.
The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not
even clear who claims to have published the book. J.Michael Lennon’s bibliography
of first editions, published in the second volume of The Mailer Review,
lists Macmillan (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS
Records and Macmillan are only credited with distribution. The dust jacket
begins by saying “This is the most unusual book to be published about
the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement but not for the reasons the
publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical
reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size
(approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an
almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend
to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete corrida de
toros.”They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one
composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a
complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull
collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except
for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become
almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd
Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references
to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is
captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages
are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive,
impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the
opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a
weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer
we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that
emerges from the photos or the initial prose.Also, the notion that anyone
would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted,
falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd. Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86).

The photographers twenty of them range from noted taurine experts
such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already
published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large
format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín
(credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as
Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably two by Bob Cato (nos. 60,
78) should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked,
rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned
selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent
analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and
serious section of Death in the Afternoon” (182). Some of the captions
in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example,
pictures, not a “media verónica” but a revolera. Both passes finish a series
with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible the former is
tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement.
The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of
his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth
century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s
true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable
Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s
mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled derechazo by
Dominguín, which is in fact a pase circular cambiado or invertido (nos. 61–
65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in
tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious
to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration,
somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether
they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he
knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010; 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954 an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the creditless young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions although he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time. Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project (Messenger 86).

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production.
To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.

But what part of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.”That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3). That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in The Deer Park, quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”(353), which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) The Deer Park instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (352).

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a novillero, who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’S’s character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then“ the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write the novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “The Novel about Bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of Playboy, in which he does not mention “the novel about bullfight”). For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5).

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “The Novel on Bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to Death in the Afternoon when Death in the Afternoon is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions and the answers are not readily forthcoming.

Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” He finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)” (286).

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, the smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man”? Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss” (3–4)? When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the
sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust,
would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd” (4–5). Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—
humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with“a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with“a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in Death in the Afternoon: “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “Something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching
the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “the novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.”Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he
mean such an assertion? In Spanis, we say: “Vaya usted a saber,” which is not far from“Go figure.” Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7).

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly
Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a
Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in Death in the Afternoon when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr.
Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit
the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to
conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this
observation.{{pg|280|281}}
More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass
with the cape, one he calls a gallicina in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of larga, a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse serpentina counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”
(14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in Death in the Afternoon: “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a
description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like Death in the Afternoon, which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be loco, but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from Death in the Afternoon: “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican toreros are highly inventive with the cape and with the muleta (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his impossible pass with the muleta was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a gallicina and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican toreo does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has
some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the muleta as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about
what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there
is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because
he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.”Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the
mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. The record of a war is not just
El Loco’s crazy season, the record of a war is also Mailer’s early career, both
figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t Amado—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with toreo. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of In Our Time (Chapter IX–Chapter XIV)—in which, trying to write, he writes about them [the bulls] for me is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of Death in the Afternoon: “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the
spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit the realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase form is the record of a war. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived doppelgänger Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic
pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable toreo in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}
Form is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.
Form is the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.
Form is the record of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a war: On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez,
El Loco, took the alternative to become a full matador. He was unable to kill
any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the alternative and ended
his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “the novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context
of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of toreo. Thanks to the clue Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (clue
harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after
killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to Death in the
Afternoon. Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97). {{pg|284|285}}

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{{cite book
| last1 = Brand | first1 = Anthony
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| title = [["'Far From Simple': The Published Photographs in Death in the Afternoon. "A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Mirian Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
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-----------------
{{Refbegin}}1. Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}2. Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}3. Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}4. Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}5. Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,</ref>
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'''Citation Templates from [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions'''

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* {{cite magazine |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= |title= |last= |first= |date= |website= |publisher= |access-date= |quote= |ref=harv }}

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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T16:36:51Z

Sherrilledwards: fix typo bottom p276

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{byline
| align = left|right (right is default)
| type = Written|Edited (Written is default)
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
|
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = [[Mailer's review/volume 4, 2010/mailer's footnote to death in the Afternoon]]
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as
the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting
problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying
text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer,
which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals
with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El
Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety to get an idea imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward
from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico
García Lorca’s taurine poeticmasterpiece,“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez
Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the
quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or the photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other.
The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not
even clear who claims to have published the book. J.Michael Lennon’s bibliography
of first editions, published in the second volume of The Mailer Review,
lists Macmillan (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS
Records and Macmillan are only credited with distribution. The dust jacket
begins by saying “This is the most unusual book to be published about
the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement but not for the reasons the
publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical
reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size
(approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an
almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend
to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete corrida de
toros.”They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one
composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a
complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull
collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except
for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become
almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd
Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references
to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is
captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages
are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive,
impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the
opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a
weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer
we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that
emerges from the photos or the initial prose.Also, the notion that anyone
would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted,
falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd. Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86).

The photographers twenty of them range from noted taurine experts
such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already
published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large
format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín
(credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as
Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably two by Bob Cato (nos. 60,
78) should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked,
rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned
selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent
analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and
serious section of Death in the Afternoon” (182). Some of the captions
in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example,
pictures, not a “media verónica” but a revolera. Both passes finish a series
with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible the former is
tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement.
The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of
his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth
century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s
true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable
Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s
mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled derechazo by
Dominguín, which is in fact a pase circular cambiado or invertido (nos. 61–
65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in
tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious
to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration,
somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether
they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he
knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010; 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954 an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the creditless young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions although he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time. Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project (Messenger 86).

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production.
To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.

But what part of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.”That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3). That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in The Deer Park, quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”(353), which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) The Deer Park instead, not however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (352).

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a novillero, who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’S’s character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then“ the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write the novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “The Novel about Bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of Playboy, in which he does not mention “the novel about bullfight”). For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5).

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “The Novel on Bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to Death in the Afternoon when Death in the Afternoon is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions and the answers are not readily forthcoming.
{{pg|280|281}}
Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” He finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)” (286).

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, the smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man”? Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss” (3–4)? When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the
sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust,
would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd” (4–5). Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—
humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with“a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with“a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in Death in the Afternoon: “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “Something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching
the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “the novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.”Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he
mean such an assertion? In Spanis, we say: “Vaya usted a saber,” which is not far from“Go figure.” Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7).

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly
Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a
Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in Death in the Afternoon when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr.
Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit
the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to
conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this
observation.{{pg|280|281}}
More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass
with the cape, one he calls a gallicina in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of larga, a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse serpentina counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”
(14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in Death in the Afternoon: “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a
description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like Death in the Afternoon, which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be loco, but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from Death in the Afternoon: “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican toreros are highly inventive with the cape and with the muleta (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his impossible pass with the muleta was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a gallicina and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican toreo does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has
some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the muleta as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about
what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there
is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because
he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.”Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the
mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. The record of a war is not just
El Loco’s crazy season, the record of a war is also Mailer’s early career, both
figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t Amado—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with toreo. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of In Our Time (Chapter IX–Chapter XIV)—in which, trying to write, he writes about them [the bulls] for me is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of Death in the Afternoon: “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the
spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit the realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase form is the record of a war. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived doppelgänger Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic
pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable toreo in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}
Form is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.
Form is the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.
Form is the record of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a war: On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez,
El Loco, took the alternative to become a full matador. He was unable to kill
any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the alternative and ended
his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “the novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context
of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of toreo. Thanks to the clue Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (clue
harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after
killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to Death in the
Afternoon. Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97). {{pg|284|285}}

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| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[For Whom the Bell Tolls.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1941. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kehoe | first1 = Vincent J-R.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Wine, Women & Toros.]]
| location = New York: Hastings House, 1961. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kinnamon | first1 = Keneth.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Miriam Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Lennon | first1 = J. Michael.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007."]]
| location = The Mailer Review 2.1 (2008): 515-17. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Mailer | first1 = Norman.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer.]]
| location = New York: CBS Records/Macmillan, 1967. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Deer Park.]]
| location = New York: Vintage, 1997. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
-----------------
{{Refbegin}}1. Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}2. Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}3. Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}4. Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}5. Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,</ref>
{{Refend}}

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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T16:35:24Z

Sherrilledwards: Fixed placement of page breaks--Dr. Lucas wants them exactly as in the print version, even if they appear in the middle of lines

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{byline
| align = left|right (right is default)
| type = Written|Edited (Written is default)
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
|
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = [[Mailer's review/volume 4, 2010/mailer's footnote to death in the Afternoon]]
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as
the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting
problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying
text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer,
which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals
with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El
Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety to get an idea imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward
from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico
García Lorca’s taurine poeticmasterpiece,“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez
Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the
quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with either the {{pg|273|274}}essay or the photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other.
The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not
even clear who claims to have published the book. J.Michael Lennon’s bibliography
of first editions, published in the second volume of The Mailer Review,
lists Macmillan (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS
Records and Macmillan are only credited with distribution. The dust jacket
begins by saying “This is the most unusual book to be published about
the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement but not for the reasons the
publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical
reader is most certainly unintended.

The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size
(approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an
almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend
to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete corrida de
toros.”They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one
composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a
complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull
collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except
for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become
almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd
Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references
to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is
captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages
are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive,
impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the
opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a
weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer
we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that
emerges from the photos or the initial prose.Also, the notion that anyone
would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted,
falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd. Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86).

The photographers twenty of them range from noted taurine experts
such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already
published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large
format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín
(credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous {{pg|274|275}}photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as
Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably two by Bob Cato (nos. 60,
78) should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked,
rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned
selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent
analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and
serious section of Death in the Afternoon” (182). Some of the captions
in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example,
pictures, not a “media verónica” but a revolera. Both passes finish a series
with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible the former is
tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.

To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement.
The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of
his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth
century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s
true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable
Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s
mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled derechazo by
Dominguín, which is in fact a pase circular cambiado or invertido (nos. 61–
65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in
tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious
to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration,
somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether
they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he
knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010; 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954 an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked {{pg|275|276}}Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the creditless young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions although he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time. Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project (Messenger 86).

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production.
To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.

But what part of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.”That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3). That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in The Deer Park, quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”(353), which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) The Deer Park instead; however, {{pg|276|277}}without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (352).

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a novillero, who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’S’s character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then“ the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write the novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “The Novel about Bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of Playboy, in which he does not mention “the novel about bullfight”). For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5).

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “The Novel on Bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to Death in the Afternoon when Death in the Afternoon is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions and the answers are not readily forthcoming.
{{pg|280|281}}
Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” He finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)” (286).

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He {{pg|277|278}}howls, he whistles, the smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man”? Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss” (3–4)? When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the
sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust,
would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd” (4–5). Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—
humiliation. {{pg|278|279}}

Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with“a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with“a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in Death in the Afternoon: “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “Something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching
the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “the novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.”Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).
{{pg|279|280}}
The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he
mean such an assertion? In Spanis, we say: “Vaya usted a saber,” which is not far from“Go figure.” Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7).

This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly
Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a
Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in Death in the Afternoon when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr.
Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit
the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to
conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this
observation.{{pg|280|281}}
More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass
with the cape, one he calls a gallicina in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of larga, a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse serpentina counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”
(14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in Death in the Afternoon: “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a
description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like Death in the Afternoon, which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be loco, but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from Death in the Afternoon: “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican toreros are highly inventive with the cape and with the muleta (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came {{pg|281|282}}to Spain in the 1960s, and his impossible pass with the muleta was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a gallicina and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican toreo does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has
some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the muleta as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.

Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about
what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there
is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because
he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.”Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the
mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that {{pg|282|283}}Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. The record of a war is not just
El Loco’s crazy season, the record of a war is also Mailer’s early career, both
figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t Amado—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with toreo. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of In Our Time (Chapter IX–Chapter XIV)—in which, trying to write, he writes about them [the bulls] for me is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of Death in the Afternoon: “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the
spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot {{pg|283|284}}and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit the realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase form is the record of a war. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived doppelgänger Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic
pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable toreo in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}
Form is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.
Form is the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.
Form is the record of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a war: On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez,
El Loco, took the alternative to become a full matador. He was unable to kill
any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the alternative and ended
his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “the novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context
of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of toreo. Thanks to the clue Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (clue
harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after
killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to Death in the
Afternoon. Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97). {{pg|284|285}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Brand | first1 = Anthony
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["'Far From Simple': The Published Photographs in Death in the Afternoon. "A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Mirian Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Bullfight.]]
| location = Bonanza Books, 1958. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["My Life Inside."]]
| location = Esquire September, 1988. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Hemingway | first1 = Ernest.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1987. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1932. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[For Whom the Bell Tolls.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1941. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kehoe | first1 = Vincent J-R.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Wine, Women & Toros.]]
| location = New York: Hastings House, 1961. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kinnamon | first1 = Keneth.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Miriam Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Lennon | first1 = J. Michael.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007."]]
| location = The Mailer Review 2.1 (2008): 515-17. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Mailer | first1 = Norman.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer.]]
| location = New York: CBS Records/Macmillan, 1967. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Deer Park.]]
| location = New York: Vintage, 1997. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
-----------------
{{Refbegin}}1. Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}2. Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}3. Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}4. Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}5. Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,</ref>
{{Refend}}

'''Citation Templates from [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions'''

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= |first= |title= |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= |title= |last= |first= |date= |website= |publisher= |access-date= |quote= |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T16:25:03Z

Sherrilledwards: added sig

'''Hoping to Help:'''
I formatted the epigraphs (quotations at beginning) and bold/caps first line. We still need footnotes in the epigraphs. I'm hoping to help with some further copyediting today. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 11:37, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas asked us to use the citation templates in the [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions. I've copied those to the very end of your draft. It looks like you are using different templates, so that might be why you are seeing red errors in the works cited. Using those, especially '''ref=harv''', is also necessary for shortened footnotes to work.[[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 12:24, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

---

KForeman

"Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"

The following references and citations are what I contributed to this body of work.

Abstract:
The narrative of the story raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.

Works Cited:

1) Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972.

Norman Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7)

2) Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,

Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97).

3) Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE.

Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86)

Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project. (Messenger 86)

4) Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.

Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3)

For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5)

5) Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275.

Notably, the intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites. (Schell 260)

Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T16:24:42Z

Sherrilledwards: Added comment about citation templates

'''Hoping to Help:'''
I formatted the epigraphs (quotations at beginning) and bold/caps first line. We still need footnotes in the epigraphs. I'm hoping to help with some further copyediting today. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 11:37, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

Dr. Lucas asked us to use the citation templates in the [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions. I've copied those to the very end of your draft. It looks like you are using different templates, so that might be why you are seeing red errors in the works cited. Using those, especially '''ref=harv''', is also necessary for shortened footnotes to work.

---

KForeman

"Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"

The following references and citations are what I contributed to this body of work.

Abstract:
The narrative of the story raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.

Works Cited:

1) Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972.

Norman Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7)

2) Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,

Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97).

3) Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE.

Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86)

Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project. (Messenger 86)

4) Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.

Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3)

For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5)

5) Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275.

Notably, the intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites. (Schell 260)

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T16:21:16Z

Sherrilledwards: added citation templates to very bottom

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{byline
| align = left|right (right is default)
| type = Written|Edited (Written is default)
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
|
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = [[Mailer's review/volume 4, 2010/mailer's footnote to death in the Afternoon]]
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as
the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting
problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying
text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer,
which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals
with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El
Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety to get an idea imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward
from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico
García Lorca’s taurine poeticmasterpiece,“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez
Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the
quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with the essay or the photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other.
The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not
even clear who claims to have published the book. J.Michael Lennon’s bibliography
of first editions, published in the second volume of The Mailer Review,
lists Macmillan (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS
Records and Macmillan are only credited with distribution. The dust jacket
begins by saying “This is the most unusual book to be published about
the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement but not for the reasons the
publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical
reader is most certainly unintended.
{{pg|274|275}}
The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size
(approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an
almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend
to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete corrida de
toros.”They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one
composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a
complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull
collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except
for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become
almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd
Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references
to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is
captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages
are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive,
impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the
opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a
weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer
we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that
emerges from the photos or the initial prose.Also, the notion that anyone
would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted,
falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd. Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86).

The photographers twenty of them range from noted taurine experts
such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already
published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large
format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín
(credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as
Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably two by Bob Cato (nos. 60,
78) should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked,
rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned
selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent
analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and
serious section of Death in the Afternoon” (182). Some of the captions
in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example,
pictures, not a “media verónica” but a revolera. Both passes finish a series
with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible the former is
tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.
{{pg|276|277}}
To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement.
The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of
his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth
century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s
true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable
Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s
mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled derechazo by
Dominguín, which is in fact a pase circular cambiado or invertido (nos. 61–
65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in
tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious
to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration,
somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether
they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he
knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010; 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954 an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the creditless young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions although he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time. Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project (Messenger 86).

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production.
To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.
{{pg|278|279}}
But what part of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.”That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3). That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in The Deer Park, quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”(353), which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) The Deer Park instead; however, without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (352).

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a novillero, who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’S’s character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then“ the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write the novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “The Novel about Bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of Playboy, in which he does not mention “the novel about bullfight”). For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5).

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “The Novel on Bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to Death in the Afternoon when Death in the Afternoon is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions and the answers are not readily forthcoming.
{{pg|280|281}}
Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” He finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)” (286).

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He howls, he whistles, the smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man”? Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss” (3–4)? When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the
sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust,
would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd” (4–5). Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—
humiliation.
{{pg|282|283}}
Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with“a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with“a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in Death in the Afternoon: “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “Something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching
the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “the novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.”Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).

The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he
mean such an assertion? In Spanis, we say: “Vaya usted a saber,” which is not far from“Go figure.” Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7).
{{pg|284|285}}
This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly
Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a
Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in Death in the Afternoon when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr.
Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit
the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to
conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this
observation.

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass
with the cape, one he calls a gallicina in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of larga, a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse serpentina counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”
(14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in Death in the Afternoon: “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a
description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like Death in the Afternoon, which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.
{{pg|286|287}}
Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be loco, but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from Death in the Afternoon: “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican toreros are highly inventive with the cape and with the muleta (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came to Spain in the 1960s, and his impossible pass with the muleta was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a gallicina and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican toreo does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has
some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the muleta as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.
{{pg|288|289}}
Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about
what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there
is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because
he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.”Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the
mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. The record of a war is not just
El Loco’s crazy season, the record of a war is also Mailer’s early career, both
figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t Amado—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with toreo. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of In Our Time (Chapter IX–Chapter XIV)—in which, trying to write, he writes about them [the bulls] for me is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of Death in the Afternoon: “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the
spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit the realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase form is the record of a war. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived doppelgänger Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic
pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable toreo in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}
Form is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.
Form is the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.
Form is the record of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a war: On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez,
El Loco, took the alternative to become a full matador. He was unable to kill
any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the alternative and ended
his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “the novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context
of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of toreo. Thanks to the clue Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (clue
harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after
killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to Death in the
Afternoon. Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97).
{{pg|292|293}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Brand | first1 = Anthony
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["'Far From Simple': The Published Photographs in Death in the Afternoon. "A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Mirian Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
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| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
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| title = [[Bullfight.]]
| location = Bonanza Books, 1958. Print
| publisher =
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| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

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| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
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| title = [["My Life Inside."]]
| location = Esquire September, 1988. Print
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{{Refend}}

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| last1 = Hemingway | first1 = Ernest.
| first2 = | last2 =
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| title = [[Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1987. Print
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{{Refbegin}}
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| last1 = ----. | first1 =
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| title = [[Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1932. Print
| publisher =
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| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
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| last1 = ----. | first1 =
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| title = [[For Whom the Bell Tolls.]]
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| title = [["The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Miriam Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
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| location = The Mailer Review 2.1 (2008): 515-17. Print
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| title = [[The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer.]]
| location = New York: CBS Records/Macmillan, 1967. Print
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-----------------
{{Refbegin}}1. Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}2. Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}3. Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}4. Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}5. Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,</ref>
{{Refend}}

'''Citation Templates from [[The_Mailer_Review/Volunteer/Remediating_Articles|Remediating Articles]] instructions'''

===Works Cited===

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* {{cite book |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |location= |publisher= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last= |first= |title= |url= |journal= |volume= |issue= |date= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite magazine |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |magazine= |pages= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite news |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |work= |location= |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite web |url= |title= |last= |first= |date= |website= |publisher= |access-date= |quote= |ref=harv }}

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Talk:The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T15:38:04Z

Sherrilledwards: Added note about formatting first-page matter

Karen,

I formatted the epigraphs (quotations at beginning) and bold/caps first line. We still need footnotes in the epigraphs. I'm hoping to help with some further copyediting today. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 11:37, 13 April 2025 (EDT)

---

KForeman

"Footnote to Death in the Afternoon"

The following references and citations are what I contributed to this body of work.

Abstract:
The narrative of the story raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.

Works Cited:

1) Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972.

Norman Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7)

2) Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,

Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97).

3) Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE.

Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86)

Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project. (Messenger 86)

4) Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.

Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3)

For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5)

5) Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275.

Notably, the intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites. (Schell 260)

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T15:35:00Z

Sherrilledwards: fix typo in first line

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{byline
| align = left|right (right is default)
| type = Written|Edited (Written is default)
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
|
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = [[Mailer's review/volume 4, 2010/mailer's footnote to death in the Afternoon]]
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|he Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as
the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting
problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying
text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer,
which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals
with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El
Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety to get an idea imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward
from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico
García Lorca’s taurine poeticmasterpiece,“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez
Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the
quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with the essay or the photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other.
The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not
even clear who claims to have published the book. J.Michael Lennon’s bibliography
of first editions, published in the second volume of The Mailer Review,
lists Macmillan (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS
Records and Macmillan are only credited with distribution. The dust jacket
begins by saying “This is the most unusual book to be published about
the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement but not for the reasons the
publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical
reader is most certainly unintended.
{{pg|274|275}}
The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size
(approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an
almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend
to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete corrida de
toros.”They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one
composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a
complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull
collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except
for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become
almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd
Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references
to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is
captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages
are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive,
impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the
opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a
weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer
we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that
emerges from the photos or the initial prose.Also, the notion that anyone
would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted,
falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd. Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86).

The photographers twenty of them range from noted taurine experts
such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already
published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large
format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín
(credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as
Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably two by Bob Cato (nos. 60,
78) should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked,
rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned
selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent
analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and
serious section of Death in the Afternoon” (182). Some of the captions
in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example,
pictures, not a “media verónica” but a revolera. Both passes finish a series
with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible the former is
tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.
{{pg|276|277}}
To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement.
The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of
his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth
century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s
true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable
Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s
mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled derechazo by
Dominguín, which is in fact a pase circular cambiado or invertido (nos. 61–
65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in
tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious
to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration,
somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether
they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he
knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010; 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954 an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the creditless young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions although he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time. Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project (Messenger 86).

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production.
To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.
{{pg|278|279}}
But what part of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.”That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3). That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in The Deer Park, quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”(353), which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) The Deer Park instead; however, without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (352).

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a novillero, who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’S’s character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then“ the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write the novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “The Novel about Bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of Playboy, in which he does not mention “the novel about bullfight”). For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5).

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “The Novel on Bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to Death in the Afternoon when Death in the Afternoon is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions and the answers are not readily forthcoming.
{{pg|280|281}}
Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” He finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)” (286).

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He howls, he whistles, the smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man”? Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss” (3–4)? When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the
sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust,
would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd” (4–5). Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—
humiliation.
{{pg|282|283}}
Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with“a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with“a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in Death in the Afternoon: “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “Something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching
the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “the novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.”Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).

The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he
mean such an assertion? In Spanis, we say: “Vaya usted a saber,” which is not far from“Go figure.” Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7).
{{pg|284|285}}
This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly
Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a
Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in Death in the Afternoon when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr.
Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit
the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to
conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this
observation.

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass
with the cape, one he calls a gallicina in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of larga, a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse serpentina counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”
(14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in Death in the Afternoon: “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a
description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like Death in the Afternoon, which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.
{{pg|286|287}}
Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be loco, but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from Death in the Afternoon: “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican toreros are highly inventive with the cape and with the muleta (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came to Spain in the 1960s, and his impossible pass with the muleta was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a gallicina and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican toreo does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has
some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the muleta as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.
{{pg|288|289}}
Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about
what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there
is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because
he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.”Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the
mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. The record of a war is not just
El Loco’s crazy season, the record of a war is also Mailer’s early career, both
figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t Amado—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with toreo. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of In Our Time (Chapter IX–Chapter XIV)—in which, trying to write, he writes about them [the bulls] for me is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of Death in the Afternoon: “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the
spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit the realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase form is the record of a war. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived doppelgänger Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic
pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable toreo in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}
Form is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.
Form is the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.
Form is the record of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a war: On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez,
El Loco, took the alternative to become a full matador. He was unable to kill
any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the alternative and ended
his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “the novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context
of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of toreo. Thanks to the clue Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (clue
harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after
killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to Death in the
Afternoon. Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97).
{{pg|292|293}}

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| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Mailer | first1 = Norman.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer.]]
| location = New York: CBS Records/Macmillan, 1967. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Deer Park.]]
| location = New York: Vintage, 1997. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
-----------------
{{Refbegin}}1. Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}2. Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}3. Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}4. Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}5. Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,</ref>
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T15:34:38Z

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{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
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{{byline
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| type = Written|Edited (Written is default)
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
|
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = [[Mailer's review/volume 4, 2010/mailer's footnote to death in the Afternoon]]
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

{{dc|dc=T|The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer,}} as
the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting
problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying
text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer,
which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals
with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El
Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety to get an idea imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward
from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico
García Lorca’s taurine poeticmasterpiece,“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez
Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the
quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with the essay or the photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other.
The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not
even clear who claims to have published the book. J.Michael Lennon’s bibliography
of first editions, published in the second volume of The Mailer Review,
lists Macmillan (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS
Records and Macmillan are only credited with distribution. The dust jacket
begins by saying “This is the most unusual book to be published about
the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement but not for the reasons the
publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical
reader is most certainly unintended.
{{pg|274|275}}
The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size
(approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an
almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend
to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete corrida de
toros.”They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one
composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a
complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull
collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except
for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become
almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd
Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references
to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is
captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages
are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive,
impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the
opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a
weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer
we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that
emerges from the photos or the initial prose.Also, the notion that anyone
would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted,
falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd. Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86).

The photographers twenty of them range from noted taurine experts
such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already
published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large
format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín
(credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as
Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably two by Bob Cato (nos. 60,
78) should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked,
rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned
selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent
analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and
serious section of Death in the Afternoon” (182). Some of the captions
in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example,
pictures, not a “media verónica” but a revolera. Both passes finish a series
with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible the former is
tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.
{{pg|276|277}}
To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement.
The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of
his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth
century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s
true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable
Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s
mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled derechazo by
Dominguín, which is in fact a pase circular cambiado or invertido (nos. 61–
65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in
tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious
to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration,
somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether
they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he
knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010; 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954 an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the creditless young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions although he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time. Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project (Messenger 86).

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production.
To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.
{{pg|278|279}}
But what part of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.”That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3). That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in The Deer Park, quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”(353), which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) The Deer Park instead; however, without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (352).

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a novillero, who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’S’s character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then“ the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write the novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “The Novel about Bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of Playboy, in which he does not mention “the novel about bullfight”). For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5).

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “The Novel on Bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to Death in the Afternoon when Death in the Afternoon is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions and the answers are not readily forthcoming.
{{pg|280|281}}
Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” He finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)” (286).

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He howls, he whistles, the smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man”? Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss” (3–4)? When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the
sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust,
would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd” (4–5). Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—
humiliation.
{{pg|282|283}}
Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with“a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with“a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in Death in the Afternoon: “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “Something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching
the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “the novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.”Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).

The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he
mean such an assertion? In Spanis, we say: “Vaya usted a saber,” which is not far from“Go figure.” Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7).
{{pg|284|285}}
This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly
Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a
Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in Death in the Afternoon when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr.
Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit
the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to
conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this
observation.

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass
with the cape, one he calls a gallicina in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of larga, a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse serpentina counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”
(14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in Death in the Afternoon: “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a
description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like Death in the Afternoon, which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.
{{pg|286|287}}
Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be loco, but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from Death in the Afternoon: “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican toreros are highly inventive with the cape and with the muleta (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came to Spain in the 1960s, and his impossible pass with the muleta was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a gallicina and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican toreo does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has
some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the muleta as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.
{{pg|288|289}}
Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about
what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there
is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because
he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.”Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the
mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. The record of a war is not just
El Loco’s crazy season, the record of a war is also Mailer’s early career, both
figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t Amado—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with toreo. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of In Our Time (Chapter IX–Chapter XIV)—in which, trying to write, he writes about them [the bulls] for me is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of Death in the Afternoon: “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the
spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit the realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase form is the record of a war. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived doppelgänger Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic
pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable toreo in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}
Form is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.
Form is the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.
Form is the record of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a war: On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez,
El Loco, took the alternative to become a full matador. He was unable to kill
any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the alternative and ended
his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “the novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context
of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of toreo. Thanks to the clue Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (clue
harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after
killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to Death in the
Afternoon. Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97).
{{pg|292|293}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Brand | first1 = Anthony
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["'Far From Simple': The Published Photographs in Death in the Afternoon. "A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Mirian Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Bullfight.]]
| location = Bonanza Books, 1958. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["My Life Inside."]]
| location = Esquire September, 1988. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Hemingway | first1 = Ernest.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1987. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1932. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[For Whom the Bell Tolls.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1941. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kehoe | first1 = Vincent J-R.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Wine, Women & Toros.]]
| location = New York: Hastings House, 1961. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kinnamon | first1 = Keneth.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Miriam Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Lennon | first1 = J. Michael.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007."]]
| location = The Mailer Review 2.1 (2008): 515-17. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Mailer | first1 = Norman.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer.]]
| location = New York: CBS Records/Macmillan, 1967. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Deer Park.]]
| location = New York: Vintage, 1997. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
-----------------
{{Refbegin}}1. Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}2. Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}3. Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}4. Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}5. Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,</ref>
{{Refend}}

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”

2025-04-13T15:33:15Z

Sherrilledwards: Formatting epigraphs

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{MR04}}
{{Working}} 
{{byline
| align = left|right (right is default)
| type = Written|Edited (Written is default)
| last = Josephs
| first = Allen
|
| abstract = The narrative raises questions about its validity due to the unique, yet perplexing combination presented for aficionados of the corrida, as depicted by the unrelated photographs and text written by Norman Mailer. This paper aims to explore whether there is a parallel between Norman Mailer's works and Hemingway's prose, using the same title. By comparing Hemingway's eloquent work to his own, Mailer acknowledges that the title does not fit the narrative. In contrast, Hemingway's work represents the true meaning of the title through his narrative and photos.
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)
| url = [[Mailer's review/volume 4, 2010/mailer's footnote to death in the Afternoon]]
}}
{{cquote|I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. The Deer Park (356)}}

{{cquote|[O]ne and one is one . . . . For Whom the Bell Tolls (379)}}

THE BULLFIGHT: A PHOTOGRAPHIC NARRATIVE WITH TEXT BY NORMAN MAILER, as
the title reads on the cover, and the title page presents some interesting
problems for the aficionado of the corrida. To begin with, there is the ambiguity of the title: Is it a photographic narrative with text, both by Norman Mailer? Or is it an authorless photographic narrative, with accompanying
text by Norman Mailer? More logically, the latter, since the essay by Mailer,
which bares its interior title, “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon,” deals
with one Mexican torero, Amado Ramírez, who used the nom de guerre, El
Loco, while the photo section portrays the corrida exclusively in Spain, the photographs and the text do not correspond. The intent might have been to influence the Mexican elites (Schell 260). Non-aficionados may not appreciate the gravity of this impropriety to get an idea imagine an essay about an Indy car driver at the Indianapolis 500, with photos from Le Mans, Monaco, and the Mille Miglia, or an essay about the Atlanta Olympics with photographs from the Beijing Games. The mix—awkward
from the point of view of the aficionado—does not compute.

In between the essay and the photos appears a ten-line excerpt from Federico
García Lorca’s taurine poeticmasterpiece,“Lament for Ignacio Sánchez
Mejías,” translated woodenly by Mailer and his daughter Susan, not that the
quality matters, since the excerpt has nothing to do with the essay or the photos, nor does it serve as a transition from one to the other.
The overall effect of this haphazard mixture is one of ineptitude. It is not
even clear who claims to have published the book. J.Michael Lennon’s bibliography
of first editions, published in the second volume of The Mailer Review,
lists Macmillan (515), but the copyright appears as belonging to CBS
Records and Macmillan are only credited with distribution. The dust jacket
begins by saying “This is the most unusual book to be published about
the bullfight.” I tend to agree with that statement but not for the reasons the
publisher sets forth, and the resulting irony for the aficionado or the critical
reader is most certainly unintended.
{{pg|274|275}}
The ninety-one black and white photographs, all the same snapshot size
(approximately five inches by three and a half inches), are meant to give “an
almost cinematic experience,” and according to the dust jacket, they intend
to portray the spectacle “in the natural order of one complete corrida de
toros.”They do no such thing, showing instead one composite bull with one
composite matador. The overall effect is not that of cinema nor that of a
complete corrida of six bulls, but rather that of a clumsily constructed one-bull
collage, a concept that might have worked artificially except
for the absurdly small photographs, so small sometimes that the figures become
almost indistinguishable, especially to an untrained eye, with the odd
Lilliputian torero less than an inch high (for example, nos. 11, 28, 79).

Mailer, in the opening sentences of his essay, in one of only two references
to the photos, tells us: “Turning through the pages of this book one is
captured finally by a modest addiction. One keeps going back. As the pages
are toured for the tenth time, a small magic emerges” (1). The author’s passive,
impersonal, subdued, even removed tone is quite remarkable for the
opening of an essay, particularly one by Mailer, presenting to the reader a
weak lead, and projecting a weird sort of disconnect, as though the writer
we're seeing the photographs for the first time. Magic is the last thing that
emerges from the photos or the initial prose.Also, the notion that anyone
would “tour” these pages ten times, becoming even modestly addicted,
falls somewhere between fanciful and absurd. Mailer uses a nonconventional approach to his prose (Messenger 86).

The photographers twenty of them range from noted taurine experts
such as Robert Daley, Vincent Kehoe, and Peter Buckley, all of whom had already
published excellent photographic essays on the bulls (in suitable large
format), to those of news agencies and, in the case of the photos of Dominguín
(credited “courtesy of Luis Miguel Dominguín”), an anonymous photographer, probably one of the Spanish taurine professionals such as
Cano or Cuevas. Some of the images notably two by Bob Cato (nos. 60,
78) should have gone straight into the trash can.

The more I looked at these photographs as a group, the worse they looked,
rather the opposite of Hemingway’s carefully selected and artfully captioned
selections, about which taurine critic Anthony Brand wrote an excellent
analytical article: “The photo essay is perhaps the most intense, focused, and
serious section of Death in the Afternoon” (182). Some of the captions
in this book, whoever did them, is wrong. Photo no. 18, for example,
pictures, not a “media verónica” but a revolera. Both passes finish a series
with the cape, but their confusion is virtually impossible the former is
tight, classical, and closed, and the latter is loose, showy, and open.
{{pg|276|277}}
To label no. 47 as “El Cordobés in difficulty” seems a kind of pathetic understatement.
The famous matador is receiving the most severe goring of
his life, in perhaps the most famous non-fatal horn wound of the twentieth
century. The author of that caption was ignorant of the photograph’s
true significance. The telephoto shot, from an agency, is not the well-known one by Cano, but looks nearly identical, clearly showing the unmistakable
Munch-like open-mouthed silent shriek issuing from the torero’s
mouth as the horn penetrates his upper thigh. In difficulty indeed.

There are other fundamental errors, such as the so-labeled derechazo by
Dominguín, which is in fact a pase circular cambiado or invertido (nos. 61–
65), the confusion of which is tantamount to calling a backhand swing in
tennis a forehand, but it would become more than a little technical and tedious
to explore such technical matters here. At this point in my consideration,
somewhat disgusted by the mounting errors and problems, whether
they were Mailer’s or not, I decided to call Robert Daley and ask him if he
knew what the hell had been going on.

Daley remembered the project in detail. To resume very briefly my conversation with him on January 24, 2010; 1) Mailer had, as I suspected, nothing to do with the selection or placement of the photos, and Daley believes he may well have written the essay much earlier and simply used this vehicle to publish it some dozen years had elapsed since the summer and fall of the essay, 1954 an explanation that would help account for that strangely disconnected opening; 2) Bernard “Buzz” Farbar, a book editor at CBS Records, who knew nothing about bulls (the book’s dedication reads: “For Buzz and Mickey”), was in charge of the project and had originally asked Daley to do all the photos; 3) Farbar later tried to get out of paying Daley for the thirty-eight photos of his they eventually did use and Daley had to threaten legal action to get paid; 4) the photos were originally to have been full-size, but the creditless young man serving as art director at that time (not the credited book designer, Lydia Ferrera) foolishly insisted they had to be small for maximum artistic effect; 5) Daley got understandably upset about the unsuitability of the format and the non-payment, but Mailer would not take his call on at least two occasions although he and Daley had E.L. Doctorow in common as editor at the time. Due to Mailer’s personal and competitive demeanor, he included the essay in the book, then later distanced himself from the project (Messenger 86).

In any case, Farbar had charge of the book. It was his project. The overriding impression that Daley left me with was that Farbar was difficult to work with, did not know what he was doing, taurinely speaking, and was responsible in large part for the haphazardness of the book’s production.
To what extent Mailer was aware of how bad the final product was I cannot say, but in subsequent publications, no listing of this item appears on the “Books by Norman Mailer” page.
{{pg|278|279}}
But what part of the essay, of Norman Mailer’s “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon”? Aside from the obvious allusion to Hemingway’s book in his title, Mailer only mentions Hemingway once. On the first page he avers: “In Mexico, the hour before the fight is always the best hour of the week. It would be memorable not to sound like Hemingway, but you would get happy the night before just thinking of that hour the next day.”That does sound something like Hemingway, but after that first mention, there is no more Hemingway, except perhaps that shadow of his that hovers, sometimes nearer and sometimes farther, but always there, over every word written in English on the subject since 1932. Although it may not be intended, Mailer’s writing closely bears a resemblance to Hemingway’s (Gutierrez 3). That shadow is one of Mailer’s problems and he not unwisely chooses to go with Hemingway in his tone and title instead of against him, at least in principle.

Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s autobiographical protagonist in The Deer Park, quoted above in the epigraph, tries to write about a Mexican torero but finds that his novel was “[. . .] not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I [SO’S] was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer”(353), which is to say that O’Shaughnessy also suffers from the problem of Hemingway’s shadow. O’Shaugnessy ceases work on the taurine novel and writes (the first-person) The Deer Park instead; however, without having left himself an escape: “I tried for a long time to write that novel, and someday maybe I will” (352).

That novel, the one Sergius O’Shaugnessy did not write, was to be about an apprentice torero, a novillero, who resembles physically, as well as in time and in place and in character, especially in his wildly vacillating bravery and cowardice, the real Amado Ramírez, El Loco, the subject of Mailer’s essay. There can be little doubt that SO’S’s character in the fictitious novel would have been based on Ramírez, especially since Ramírez was the only torero Mailer saw often enough to write about with any confidence. In the essay, Mailer tells us that he is writing about “the origin of an addiction,” then“ the history of a passion,” and finally that in that summer of 1954, “I was going to write the novel about a bullfight, dig, digary” (sic, 6; Mailer’s emphasis). Mailer, like SO’S, never wrote “The Novel about Bullfight,” or any novel about it, and the essay itself seems a kind of surrogate piece for the novel neither of them wrote. (Perhaps I should mention that Mailer had published an earlier, prize-winning version of this essay—virtually identical—in the October 1967 issue of Playboy, in which he does not mention “the novel about bullfight”). For years, Mailer has worked to develop his prose to become a prized writer (Gutierrez 5).

The real question becomes: What was Mailer trying to do with his so-called footnote? With only the minor nod to Hemingway noted above, it certainly was not an overt homage. So was he coat-tailing? Merely being cheeky? Was he justifying not having written “The Novel on Bullfight”? How is the essay meant to be a footnote to Death in the Afternoon when Death in the Afternoon is only mentioned in the title, and Hemingway himself only in passing? Is it a footnote because it couldn’t rise to a level of competence equal to anything greater? These are not idle questions and the answers are not readily forthcoming.
{{pg|280|281}}
Hemingway critic and well-versed taurine aficionado Keneth Kinnamon has written that Mailer may have tried not to sound like Hemingway, but that “[. . .] he often does.” Mailer’s subject, unlike Hemingway’s, is “[. . .] whatever extravagant hyperbole may serve to shift the focus to hasty generalizations or preposterous inferences.” He opines that Mailer’s “[. . .] wild generalizations about Mexicans are absurd and at times even racist.” He finishes by saying that it is just as well that Mailer’s proposed novel about the bulls remains “[. . .] in his ‘Bureau of Abandoned Projects’ (Bullfight 2)” (286).

It is hard not to concur when, for example, Mailer writes: “Every Mexican is gloomy until the instant he becomes happy, and then he is a maniac. He howls, he whistles, the smoke of murder passes off his pores, he bullies, he beseeches friendship, he is a clown, a brigand, a tragic figure suddenly merry” (2). Hyperbole? Yes. Generalizations? Indeed. Racism?

Could Kinnamon be missing the hyperbolic, extravagant, and preposterous humor of the man, the ill-tempered, grotesque, intentionally skewed malice? What drives Mailer to proclaim that the crowd in the bullring is “[. . .] brutal to a man”? Why does he go out of his way to describe them in the following terms: “In the Plaza de Mexico, the Indians in the cheap seats buy a paper cup of beer and when they are done drinking, the walk to the W.C. is miles away, and besides they are usually feeling sullen, so they urinate in their paper cup and hurl it down in a cascade of harvest gold, Indian piss” (3–4)? When the matador has difficulty “[. . .] the crowd would jeer and the piss would fly in yellow arcs of the rainbow through the rain down from the cheap seats [. . .]” (4). Then comes perhaps the acme of tastelessness: “[. . .] and the whores would make farting sounds with their spoiled knowledgeable mouths, while the aficionados would roll their eyes and the
sound of Mexican laughter, that operative definition of the echo of total disgust,
would shake along like jelly gasoline through the crowd” (4–5). Rather than racism, I would call it stylistically intentional misanthropy directed at the Mexicans, an ur-gonzo line or style followed to one degree or another by William S. Burroughs and later by the gonzo master and inventor Hunter S. Thompson.

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death—
humiliation.
{{pg|282|283}}
Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with“a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with“a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in Death in the Afternoon: “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “Something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching
the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).

Somehow, with luck, this pathetic matador kills well and Mailer writes: “[. . .] I had felt contempt for a stranger and then a secret and most unsocialistic desire to see this type I did not like humiliated a little further [. . .]”. Mailer confesses he was: “[. . .] overcome by his last-minute success sufficiently to find myself liking a kind of man I had never considered near to human before” (6). And thus it was that a barely human, pimp-faced, profoundly mediocre peasant clod was responsible for Mailer’s getting “religion” (4), a revelation that “[. . .] had given a drop of humanity to a very dry area of my heart [. . .]” (6). Now properly irrigated with that drop of humanity, Mailer is instantly ready to convert, to move from “detestation of the bullfight” (4) to the addiction and the passion necessary to write “the novel on bullfight,” or, as it turned out, to tell us of his summer love affair with El Loco.

Love affair? Well, that’s what he says: “I fell in love with a bullfighter.”Not that they ever met: “Meeting him could only have spoiled the perfection of my love, so pure was my affection.” That courtly sentiment emanates from Mailer’s watching “El Loco, the Crazy One. It is not a term of endearment in Mexico, where half the populace is crazy” (8).

The rest of the essay proceeds to elucidate and obfuscate Mailer’s affair with El Loco. Obfuscation: As a sort of preface to our knowing El Loco, Mailer explains: “The bullfight is nine-tenths cruelty. The bullfight brews one’s cruelty out of one’s pores—it makes an elixir of cruelty.”Those are his chosen words—“an elixir of cruelty.” Mailer deliberately twists the old alchemical elixir of life into something oxymoronically reprehensible. Can he
mean such an assertion? In Spanis, we say: “Vaya usted a saber,” which is not far from“Go figure.” Mailer’s bold, outspoken, and prolific personality was reflected in his writing style. He was unafraid to express his thoughts, regardless of how controversial or risky they might be (Adams 7).
{{pg|284|285}}
This sociological quicksand that Mailer is creating gets deeper: “[. . .] one of the few gleams in the muck of all this dubious Mexican majesty called existence is that one can on occasion laugh bitterly with the gods.” As Mailer rakes through the Mexican muck, all he manages to do is to splatter his essay with Kinnamon’s hasty generalizations and preposterous inferences: “In the Spanish-Indian blood, the substance of one’s dignity is found in sharing the cruel vision of the gods.” Is Mailer comparing the sacrifice of the bull to the Aztec sacrifice of humans or is he conveniently forgetting that the corrida has its origins in the most profoundly
Spanish Catholic traditions? Or both? “In fact,” he goes on, “dignity can be found nowhere else. For courage is seen as the servant of the gods’ cruel vision” (11). There is no dignity to be found in all of Mexico except in the bullring? Courage is a joke?

In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a
Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in Death in the Afternoon when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr.
Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit
the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to
conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this
observation.

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass
with the cape, one he calls a gallicina in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of larga, a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse serpentina counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns”
(14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in Death in the Afternoon: “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a
description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like Death in the Afternoon, which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.
{{pg|286|287}}
Also, practiced aficionados will realize the impossibility of such a maneuver a Mailer describes, which, if it were possible, would not just be loco, but downright insane, like driving blindfolded. Non-aficionados puzzling it over need only attempt to picture how one is to drape the cape over one’s back while the cape is wrapped around one’s body. SO’S and Mailer may be able to“write about worlds [they] knew better than better than anyone alive,” but this is not one of those worlds, and Hemingway’s term ‘horseshit’ is much closer to the truth. I am also reminded of his dictum from Death in the Afternoon: “There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (192).

Am I making too much of Mailer’s ineptitude and faking? It is true that Mexican toreros are highly inventive with the cape and with the muleta (the small red cape). I never saw El Loco, but I did see El Imposible when he came to Spain in the 1960s, and his impossible pass with the muleta was intricate and it depended on precise timing. Is it possible that El Loco invented some strange pass and that Mailer, for better or for worse, tried to describe it? It is. El Loco did not call himself El Loco without reason. But there is no such thing as a gallicina and there never was—I went so far as to double-check with a source in Mexico City who knows Ramírez and who has trained with him over the years. So not even in the inventive and hermetic world of Mexican toreo does a pass with that name exist. Nor is the pass Mailer describes, whatever it was, possible to execute. I leave it to the reader to decide the degree of loss of credibility this matter entails, but I can say with assurance that it makes the aficionado snicker.

On the positive side, Mailer’s narration of his love affair with El Loco has
some amusing moments, as when he describes Ramírez with the muleta as looking like “[. . .] a man about to miss a train and so running with his suitcase.” About his bad killing, he writes: “It took him forever to kill and he stood out like an old lady talking to a barking dog” (Bullfight 14). When Ramírez is unable to kill a bull, “[. . .] he trots along like a farmer accompanying his mule down the road” (17). While these comparisons make us smile, in each instance they depend on bringing to bear non-taurine or even antitaurine elements. And they make Ramírez look even more ridiculous.

For elucidation, we find this depiction of El Loco: “He came up one summer a dozen years ago like a rocket, but a rocket with one tube hot and one tube wet and he spun in circles all over the bullfighting world of Mexico City all through the summer and fall” (9). That description, both comical and not inaccurate, more than adequately sums up El Loco’s delirious season. I ran it by a friend who works for NASA, asking how a rocket scientist would view such a simile and he came right back with “Pretty funny.” So it seems to satisfy the aficionado as well as amusing the specialist.
{{pg|288|289}}
Still, amusements aside, we have not answered the initial question about
what Mailer was trying to do with this piece. The answer, to the extent there
is one, lies in the last paragraph: “But I will always have a love for El Loco because
he taught me how to love the bullfight, and how to penetrate some of its secrets.”Then, leaving the easy middle ground of a clichéd response, Mailer plunges in much deeper: “And finally he taught me something about the
mystery of form. He gave me the clue that form is the record of a war” (23). This striking statement stands out in bold relief from the foregoing essay with its facile humor and dubious sociology, and it makes me think that Mailer came to identify with El Loco, that he saw something of himself in the torero and something of the torero in himself. The record of a war is not just
El Loco’s crazy season, the record of a war is also Mailer’s early career, both
figuratively and literally: “When Amado was happy and brave he delineated the form of bullfighting as bullfighting should be, and when he was awkward and afraid he engraved archetypes of clumsiness on the brain and offered models to avoid forever” (23). Don’t Amado—the only first-person reference to Ramírez—and Norman begin to superimpose, reflecting on each other as artists, as erratic geniuses and failures?

If I am right Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with toreo. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of In Our Time (Chapter IX–Chapter XIV)—in which, trying to write, he writes about them [the bulls] for me is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of Death in the Afternoon: “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the
spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit the realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase form is the record of a war. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived doppelgänger Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic
pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable toreo in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
{{pg|290|291}}
Form is the record of a war: Mailer’s own version of grace under pressure,
his own and El Loco’s.
Form is the record of a war: His recognition of Amado as his curate, his twin, his artistic double.
Form is the record of a war: This essay of Mailer’s is that record and the record of the summer of Amado, fused.

Form is the record of a war: On the 6th of February, 1955, Amado Ramírez,
El Loco, took the alternative to become a full matador. He was unable to kill
any of his three bulls and subsequently renounced the alternative and ended
his career as a professional matador. Norman Mailer would not write “the novel about the bullfight.”

Since the identification of the writer and torero, as well as the larger context
of war, came first from Hemingway, Mailer’s ultimate insight—his fleeting recognition of himself in the other, of the other in himself, and of both of them as one with Hemingway and his taurine shadow—was derivative in its source, yet original in its vision, adding another layer in its peculiar confirmation to Hemingway’s discovery of the literary value of toreo. Thanks to the clue Amado Ramírez had given him through his erratic performances (clue
harks back to the ball of thread Theseus used to escape the labyrinth, after
killing them in Otaur), Mailer’s eureka-like moment helps turn a messy essay in an unfortunate tome into an intricately conceived footnote to Death in the
Afternoon. Mailer’s fascination with Hemingway’s works inspired him to pursue similar ambitions in his writing (Rodriquez 97).
{{pg|292|293}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Brand | first1 = Anthony
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["'Far From Simple': The Published Photographs in Death in the Afternoon. "A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Mirian Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Daley | first1 = Robert
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Bullfight.]]
| location = Bonanza Books, 1958. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Farber | first1 = Bernad
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["My Life Inside."]]
| location = Esquire September, 1988. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Hemingway | first1 = Ernest.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1987. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1932. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[For Whom the Bell Tolls.]]
| location = New York: Scribner, 1941. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kehoe | first1 = Vincent J-R.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[Wine, Women & Toros.]]
| location = New York: Hastings House, 1961. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Kinnamon | first1 = Keneth.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["The Legacy of Death in the Afternoon:Norman Mailer and Barnaby Conrrad." A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon.]]
| location = Ed. Miriam Mandel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Lennon | first1 = J. Michael.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [["Norman Mailer, First Editions: 1948-2007."]]
| location = The Mailer Review 2.1 (2008): 515-17. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = Mailer | first1 = Norman.
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer.]]
| location = New York: CBS Records/Macmillan, 1967. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}
{{cite book
| last1 = ----. | first1 =
| first2 = | last2 =
| first3 = | last3 =
| title = [[The Deer Park.]]
| location = New York: Vintage, 1997. Print
| publisher =
| pages =
| date =
| isbn = }}
-----------------
{{Refbegin}}1. Schell, William. "Lions, Bulls, and Baseball: Colonel RC Pate and Modern Sports Promotion in Mexico." Journal of Sport History 20.3 (1993): 259-275{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}2. Gutierrez, Donald. "The Champ of the World and the Champ of the Word: Norman Mailer's" The Fight"." Aethlon 5.1 (1987): 1.{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}3. Messenger, Christian K. "Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 33 no. 1, 1987, p. 85-104. Project MUSE{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}4. Adams, Laura Gail. Norman Mailer's Aesthetics of Growth. Diss. 1972{{Refend}}

{{Refbegin}}5. Rodríguez, Emilio Cañadas. "Norman Mailer and Truman Capote: A Brief Account of Parallel Lives." 2008,</ref>
{{Refend}}

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-12T19:49:10Z

Sherrilledwards: /* Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated */

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Lucas I finished my remediation article https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer%27s_The_Fight:_Hemingway,_Bullfighting,_and_the_Lovely_Metaphysics_of_Boxing&action=edit [[User:TWietstruk|TWietstruk]] ([[User talk:TWietstruk|talk]]) 19:44, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TWietstruk}} good work so far, but there is more to do: placement of footnotes (eliminate spaces around them and punctuation always goes ''before'' the footnote.); proofread for typos; fix all red errors at the bottom (most of these are from errors in sourcing); works cited entries should be bulleted list and eliminate space between entries. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:05, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

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

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

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

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

Dr. Lucas,

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

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

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

Dr. Lucas

I finished the remediation of the following article:

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

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

== Final Edit ==

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

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

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

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

[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]]

Hi Dr. Lucas,

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

I will also link the article below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

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

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

== I am done with this ==

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

== Final Review PM Article ==

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

== Remediation Project ==

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

Thanks,

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

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

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

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

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

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

== Remediation Submission ==

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

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

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

:{{Reply to|Grlucas}}I believe I have completed these fixes, so the article is again ready for review. [[User:Sherrilledwards|Sherrilledwards]] ([[User talk:Sherrilledwards|talk]]) 15:49, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation of "Inside Norman Mailer ==

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

== Completed: Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine ==

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

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

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

Greeting Dr. Lucas,

I have made the adjustment that you mentioned.

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

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

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

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

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

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

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

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

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

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

:{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Greetings,

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

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

I have also fixed the quotations.

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

== Remediation for “Footnote to Death in the Afternoon” ==

Greetings Dr. Lucus,

My article is ready for your review. Thank you.

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer%E2%80%99s_%E2%80%9CFootnote_to_Death_in_the_Afternoon%E2%80%9D)
:{{Reply to| KForeman}} it's coming along. Please ''always'' sign your talk page posts. Right up top, there are errors. Please use the real {{tl|pg}}, like all the other articles. Citations need to be fixed. All parenthetical citations must be converted. You still have quite a bit of work to do. All red sections need to be seen to and corrected. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:20, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

=Remediation of "Cluster Seeds and the Mailer Legacy"=
Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have completed the remediation of [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Cluster_Seeds_and_the_Mailer_Legacy&oldid=18200| my article], and it is ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 11:32, 8 April 2025 (EDT)@ADavis
:{{Reply to| ADavis}} got it. I think I check it yesterday and removed the banner then. Please move on to another piece. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediating Article: Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing Volume 4. ==

Hello Dr. Lucas,

I have completed remediating my article. Here is the link [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Mailer, Hemingway, and Boxing|The Mailer Review: Volume 4: Mailer, Hemingway, Boxing (2010)]] [[User:JBrown|JBrown]] ([[User talk:JBrown|talk]]) 13:01, 8 April 2025 (EDT)JBrown
:{{Reply to|JBrown}} a good start, but all parenthetical citations need to be footnotes. Also, check your headers. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation for ''Norris Church Mailer'' ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished up remediating the article [[The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norris Church Mailer|Norris Church Mailer]], and it is ready for review. Please let me know if I missed something. Thank you! —[[User:Kamyers|Kamyers]] ([[User talk:Kamyers|talk]]) 13:42, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|Kamyers}} awesome work! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)

== Final Edits Completed and Ready for Review ==

Dr. Lucas, I have completed my assigned remediation article: [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Looking_at_the_Past:_Nostalgia_as_Technique_in_The_Naked_and_the_Dead_and_For_Whom_the_Bell_Tolls|Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls]]. Please review at your convenience. I enjoyed working on this assignment. I look forward to your suggestions and feedback. All the best, Danielle (DBond007)
:{{Reply to| DBond007}} ok, good work. Please remove all the external links. Links to Wikipedia are not necessary, but if used, they need to be done correctly. There should be no spaces before {{tl|sfn}}. May sure all your ' and " are actually typographical apostrophes and quotation marks. Remove any superfluous spaces and line breaks; these mess up the formatting. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:29, 8 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} Thank you. I will get started on these revisions immediately. Thanks for the feedback and your time. :)[[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 11:30, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
::{{Reply to| Grlucas}} I have completed all the requested revisions and ready for review round 2. Thank you again![[User:DBond007|DBond007]] ([[User talk:DBond007|talk]]) 12:10, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:::{{Reply to|DBond007}} looking better! There are still items to be seen to, like titles on novels and magazines need to appear like they do in the original: if it's italicized in the PDF, it must be italicized on the web. I added the epigram for you and corrected that pesky citation. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:41, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed the remediation assignment ==

Good evening Dr. Lucas,

I hope I am doing this right. Here is the link for my completed Remediation article: [http://The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Encounters_with_Mailer Encounters with Mailer].

I look forward to reading your feedback.

All the best,

Patrick Riley
:{{Reply to|Priley1984}} thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:40, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project Submission: An Expected Encounter in an Unexpected Place ==

Link:

https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Norman_Mailer:_An_Expected_Encounter_in_an_Unexpected_Place

Winnie Verna
:{{Reply to|Wverna}} received, thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:51, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== E.Mosley ==

Good evening, @Grlucas. I have completed my Remediation Articles[[https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/On_Reading_Mailer_Too_Young]]. The article I had was " On Reading Mailer Too Young Volume 4, 2010
:{{Reply to| Essence903m}} thank you. I had to fix and clean-up quite a bit. Your saves also do not include summaries. When you move on to your next article, please be more careful and follow the instructions. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Kynndra Watson ==

Good Evening, @grlucas. i have completed my Remediation articles: Volume 5: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law and Volume 4: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Mailer,_Hemingway,_and_the_%E2%80%9CReds%E2%80%9D.

Thank you.
:{{Reply to| KWatson}} thank you, and this is a good start, but there are still many items that need to be cleaned up, like footnote indications (They go after punctuation), citation errors (all the red errors at the bottom need to be seen to), extra spaces and ALL CAPS need to be removed. Please see other completed articles for models. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:18, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/What Would Be the Fun of That?|"What Would Be the Fun of That?"]] by Peter Alson.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:33, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} awesome! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:21, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “Remembering Norris Church” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris Church|“Remembering Norris Church”]] by John Bowers.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 16:17, 9 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} and again, excellent! Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:22, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== “The Norris I Knew” Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/The Norris I Knew|“The Norris I Knew”]] by Christopher Busa.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:04, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} rockin’! 👍🏼 —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:24, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Norris Mailer" Tribute Remediation ==
Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Norris Mailer|"Norris Mailer"]] by Nancy Collins.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:35, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| JHadaway}} thanks again. You’re tearing it up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:32, 10 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Rise Above It" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Rise Above It|"Rise Above It"]] by David Ebershoff—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 11:12, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|JHadaway}} excellent. Many thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:15, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Completed Additional Articles ==

Hello, Dr. Lucas. I have remediated [https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/A_View_Through_the_Prism&oldid=18744|"A View Through the Prism"], [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Tributes_to_Norris_Church_Mailer/Lip_Liner|"Lip Liner"], and [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Living_Room_Show#|"The Living Room Show"] in Volume 5. They are ready for your review. Thank you!—[[User:ADavis|ADavis]] ([[User talk:ADavis|talk]]) 12:31, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|ADavis}} great work. Thank you! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:26, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Submission notification sent 29 March ==

@grlucas

Dr. Lucas - I sent a Talk Page notification that I had completed the page I remediated on 29 March. The table indicates I haven't done anything yet. I sent it from the Talk Page from the article site. I don't see a response from that notification, but I had received one from you earlier in the process.
I don't understand what happened.

[[User:LogansPop22|LogansPop22]] ([[User talk:LogansPop22|talk]]) 14:54, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{reply to|LogansPop22}} sorry if I missed that. [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works|this article]], right? It's looking great, though all the parenthetical citations must be converted to footnotes using {{tl|sfn}} and some of the author names in your notes should use {{tl|harvtxt}}. I added the "citations" section for you. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:39, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Making Masculinity and Unmaking Jewishness: Norman Mailer’s Voice in Wild 90 and Beyond the Law ==

@Grlucas, I have made some additional edits to this [https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Making_Masculinity_and_Unmaking_Jewishness:_Norman_Mailer%E2%80%99s_Voice_in_Wild_90_and_Beyond_the_Law article] in Volume 5 by correcting most of the citations. There are 2 that still do not work, but I think that is because the sources are incomplete.

[[User:TPoole|TPoole]] ([[User talk:TPoole|talk]]) 21:16, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to| TPoole}} Looking really good, and this is a complicated one. A couple of things: no spaces or line breaks before or after {{tl|pg}}; I removed the spaces before {{tl|sfn}}, but you might want to check them; there are some typos, like missing spaces before some parentheses; no footnotes should appear in the notes section: use {{tl|harvtxt}} instead. And all the red errors at the bottom need to be cleared up. Great work so far! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:00, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== Red Error-Gone ==

{{reply to|Grlucas}}I have deleted all the sfn's and the red error is gone. I don't know why I didn't think about this days ago.

[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/Piling_On:_Norman_Mailer’s_Utilization_of_Marilyn_Monroe|Gladstein-Monroe]]

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 23:07, 10 April 2025 (EDT)
:{{Reply to|MerAtticus}} getting closer. A few things: you should use <code>|author-mask=1</code> for repeated author names in your works cited; all parenthetical citations need to be replaced with footnotes using {{tl|sfn}}; must punctuation in your sources need to be removed as the templates do that for you; and you need to use {{tl|harvtxt}} for citations in your endnotes. Also, letters and films have their own templates. I did a couple of these for you as examples. Thanks! —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 08:14, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

== "Remembering Norris" Tribute Remediation ==

Dr. Lucas, I have finished [[The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Tributes to Norris Church Mailer/Remembering Norris|"Remembering Norris"]] by Margo Howard.—[[User:JHadaway|JHadaway]] ([[User talk:JHadaway|talk]]) 09:20, 12 April 2025 (EDT)

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-11T22:00:01Z

Sherrilledwards: fix to curly quotes in heading about scared stiff

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}}
{{byline |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's “A Clean Well-Lighted Place?” Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative “make sense of life?” Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04vin}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular.{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .” {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt. Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include {{harvtxt|Buske|2002}}, {{harvtxt|Stoneback|2003}}, {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}, {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Kroupi|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Bernstein|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Cappell|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Sipiora|2008}}, and {{harvtxt|Whalen-Bridge|Oon|2009}}.}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===
Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen {{harvtxt|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in {{harvtxt|Küng|1980}}. Spirituality and modern man are the focus of {{harvtxt|Jung|1955}}. ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by {{harvtxt|Gellner|1974}}, while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in {{harvtxt|Fussell|1975}}. ''Cognitive minority'' is used by {{harvtxt|Berger|1969}}, while {{harvtxt|Berger|Luckmann|1966|pp=98-100}} terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe''. ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}.}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box.”{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,”{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,”{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people.”{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people.” {{harvtxt|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality.” {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority.” {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’” {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: “Scared Stiff Looking at It” ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord.”{{sfn|Common|1993|p=31}} {{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal ''Book of Common Prayer'', {{harvtxt|Common|1993|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, ''peace'' and ''Lord'' are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.” {{harvtxt|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale.”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph, “You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever.”{{sfn|KJB|2008|loc=Ecc. 1:4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.” {{harvtxt|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.” {{harvtxt|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, but Henry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.” {{harvtxt|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities.” {{harvtxt|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth.”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself.” {{harvtxt|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .” {{harvtxt|NEB|1970|loc=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” {{harvtxt|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.” {{harvtxt|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology. {{harvtxt|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void.”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty.”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski {{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, “Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee,” we read this: “He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' “After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade.” {{harvtxt|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium.” This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows,” Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{harvtxt|Hemingway|1991b|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God, Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to “his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement.”{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman.” {{harvtxt|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . . “You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos.” {{harvtxt|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist.” {{harvtxt|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.” {{harvtxt|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity.” {{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

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

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin |indent=1 |20em}}
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{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}
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The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

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{{byline |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's “A Clean Well-Lighted Place?” Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative “make sense of life?” Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04vin}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular.{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .” {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt. Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include {{harvtxt|Buske|2002}}, {{harvtxt|Stoneback|2003}}, {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}, {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Kroupi|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Bernstein|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Cappell|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Sipiora|2008}}, and {{harvtxt|Whalen-Bridge|Oon|2009}}.}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===
Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen {{harvtxt|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in {{harvtxt|Küng|1980}}. Spirituality and modern man are the focus of {{harvtxt|Jung|1955}}. ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by {{harvtxt|Gellner|1974}}, while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in {{harvtxt|Fussell|1975}}. ''Cognitive minority'' is used by {{harvtxt|Berger|1969}}, while {{harvtxt|Berger|Luckmann|1966|pp=98-100}} terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe''. ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}.}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box.”{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,”{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,”{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people.”{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people.” {{harvtxt|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality.” {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority.” {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’” {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord.”{{sfn|Common|1993|p=31}} {{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal ''Book of Common Prayer'', {{harvtxt|Common|1993|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, ''peace'' and ''Lord'' are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.” {{harvtxt|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale.”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph, “You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever.”{{sfn|KJB|2008|loc=Ecc. 1:4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.” {{harvtxt|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.” {{harvtxt|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, but Henry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.” {{harvtxt|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities.” {{harvtxt|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth.”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself.” {{harvtxt|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .” {{harvtxt|NEB|1970|loc=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” {{harvtxt|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.” {{harvtxt|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology. {{harvtxt|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void.”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty.”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski {{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, “Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee,” we read this: “He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' “After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade.” {{harvtxt|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium.” This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows,” Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{harvtxt|Hemingway|1991b|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God, Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to “his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement.”{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman.” {{harvtxt|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . . “You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos.” {{harvtxt|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist.” {{harvtxt|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.” {{harvtxt|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity.” {{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

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

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin |indent=1 |20em}}
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* {{cite journal |last=Stolzfus |first=Ben |title=Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature Studies |volume=42 |issue=3 |date=2005 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoneback |first=H. R. |title=Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway's Sacred Landscapes |journal=Religion and Literature |volume=35 |issue=⅔ |date=2003 |pages=49-65 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |date=1988 |chapter=Alienation |title=New Dictionary of Theology |location=Downers Grove, IL |publisher=Inter-Varsity Press |editor1-first=Sinclair B. |editor1-last=Ferguson |editor2-first=David F. |editor2-last=Wright |editor3-first=J. I. |editor3-last=Packer |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Wagner-Martin |first=Linda |date=1987|title=Introduction |journal= New Essays on The Sun Also Rises |location= Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=Whalen-Bridge |first1=John |last2=Oon |first2=Angela |title=Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998-2008 |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=3 |date=2009 |pages=212-243 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Willey |first=Basil |date=1964 |title=Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold. |location= Harmondsworth:|publisher=Penguin |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Yancey |first=Philip |date=2002 |title=What's So Amazing About Grace? |location= Grand Rapids|publisher=Zondervan |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-11T02:54:28Z

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{{byline |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's “A Clean Well-Lighted Place?” Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative “make sense of life?” Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04vin}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular.{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .” {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt. Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include {{harvtxt|Buske|2002}}, {{harvtxt|Stoneback|2003}}, {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}, {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Kroupi|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Bernstein|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Cappell|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Sipiora|2008}}, and {{harvtxt|Whalen-Bridge|Oon|2009}}.}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===
Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen {{harvtxt|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in {{harvtxt|Küng|1980}}. Spirituality and modern man are the focus of {{harvtxt|Jung|1955}}. ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by {{harvtxt|Gellner|1974}}, while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in {{harvtxt|Fussell|1975}}. ''Cognitive minority'' is used by {{harvtxt|Berger|1969}}, while {{harvtxt|Berger|Luckmann|1966|pp=98-100}} terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe''. ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}.}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box.”{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,”{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,”{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people.”{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people.” {{harvtxt|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality.” {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority.” {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’” {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord.”{{sfn|Common|1993|p=31}} {{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal ''Book of Common Prayer'', {{harvtxt|Common|1993|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, ''peace'' and ''Lord'' are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.” {{harvtxt|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale.”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph, “You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever.”{{sfn|KJB|2008|loc=Ecc. 1:4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.” {{harvtxt|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.” {{harvtxt|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, but Henry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.” {{harvtxt|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities.” {{harvtxt|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth.”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself.” {{harvtxt|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .” {{harvtxt|NEB|1970|loc=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” {{harvtxt|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.” {{harvtxt|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology. {{harvtxt|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void.”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty.”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski {{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, “Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee,” we read this: “He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' “After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade.” {{harvtxt|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,"{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium.” This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows,” Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{harvtxt|Hemingway|1991b|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God, Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to “his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement.”{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman.” {{harvtxt|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . . “You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos.” {{harvtxt|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist.” {{harvtxt|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.” {{harvtxt|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity.” {{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

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

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin |indent=1 |20em}}
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* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |title=New English Bible, The [NEB] | date=1970 |editor-first=Samuel |editor-last=Sandmel |location=New York |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref={{harvid|NEB|1970}} }}
* {{cite journal |last=Sipiora |first=Phillip |title=Norman Mailer: Metaphysician at Work |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2 |date=2008 |pages=502-506 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stewart |first=Matthew |date=2001 |title=Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway's ''In Our Time'' |location= Rochester|publisher=Camden House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Stolzfus |first=Ben |title=Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature Studies |volume=42 |issue=3 |date=2005 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoneback |first=H. R. |title=Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway's Sacred Landscapes |journal=Religion and Literature |volume=35 |issue=⅔ |date=2003 |pages=49-65 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |date=1988 |chapter=Alienation |title=New Dictionary of Theology |location=Downers Grove, IL |publisher=Inter-Varsity Press |editor1-first=Sinclair B. |editor1-last=Ferguson |editor2-first=David F. |editor2-last=Wright |editor3-first=J. I. |editor3-last=Packer |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Wagner-Martin |first=Linda |date=1987|title=Introduction |journal= New Essays on The Sun Also Rises |location= Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=Whalen-Bridge |first1=John |last2=Oon |first2=Angela |title=Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998-2008 |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=3 |date=2009 |pages=212-243 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Willey |first=Basil |date=1964 |title=Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold. |location= Harmondsworth:|publisher=Penguin |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Yancey |first=Philip |date=2002 |title=What's So Amazing About Grace? |location= Grand Rapids|publisher=Zondervan |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-11T02:48:58Z

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{{byline |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's “A Clean Well-Lighted Place?” Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative “make sense of life?” Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04vin}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular.{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .” {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt. Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include {{harvtxt|Buske|2002}}, {{harvtxt|Stoneback|2003}}, {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}, {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Kroupi|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Bernstein|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Cappell|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Sipiora|2008}}, and {{harvtxt|Whalen-Bridge|Oon|2009}}.}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===
Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen {{harvtxt|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in {{harvtxt|Küng|1980}}. Spirituality and modern man are the focus of {{harvtxt|Jung|1955}}. ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by {{harvtxt|Gellner|1974}}, while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in {{harvtxt|Fussell|1975}}. ''Cognitive minority'' is used by {{harvtxt|Berger|1969}}, while {{harvtxt|Berger|Luckmann|1966|pp=98-100}} terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe''. ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}.}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box.”{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,”{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,”{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people.”{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people.” {{harvtxt|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality” {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=53}}.}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority.” {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’” {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord.”{{sfn|Common|1993|p=31}} {{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal ''Book of Common Prayer'', {{harvtxt|Common|1993|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, ''peace'' and ''Lord'' are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.” {{harvtxt|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale.”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph, “You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever.”{{sfn|KJB|2008|loc=Ecc. 1:4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.” {{harvtxt|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.” {{harvtxt|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, but Henry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.” {{harvtxt|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities.” {{harvtxt|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth.”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself.” {{harvtxt|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .” {{harvtxt|NEB|1970|loc=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” {{harvtxt|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.” {{harvtxt|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology. {{harvtxt|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void.”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty.”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski {{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, “Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee,” we read this: “He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' “After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade.” {{harvtxt|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,"{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium.” This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows,” Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{harvtxt|Hemingway|1991b|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God, Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to “his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement.”{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman.” {{harvtxt|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . . “You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos.” {{harvtxt|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist.” {{harvtxt|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.” {{harvtxt|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity.” {{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

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

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin |indent=1 |20em}}
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* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |title=New English Bible, The [NEB] | date=1970 |editor-first=Samuel |editor-last=Sandmel |location=New York |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref={{harvid|NEB|1970}} }}
* {{cite journal |last=Sipiora |first=Phillip |title=Norman Mailer: Metaphysician at Work |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2 |date=2008 |pages=502-506 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stewart |first=Matthew |date=2001 |title=Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway's ''In Our Time'' |location= Rochester|publisher=Camden House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Stolzfus |first=Ben |title=Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature Studies |volume=42 |issue=3 |date=2005 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoneback |first=H. R. |title=Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway's Sacred Landscapes |journal=Religion and Literature |volume=35 |issue=⅔ |date=2003 |pages=49-65 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |date=1988 |chapter=Alienation |title=New Dictionary of Theology |location=Downers Grove, IL |publisher=Inter-Varsity Press |editor1-first=Sinclair B. |editor1-last=Ferguson |editor2-first=David F. |editor2-last=Wright |editor3-first=J. I. |editor3-last=Packer |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Wagner-Martin |first=Linda |date=1987|title=Introduction |journal= New Essays on The Sun Also Rises |location= Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=Whalen-Bridge |first1=John |last2=Oon |first2=Angela |title=Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998-2008 |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=3 |date=2009 |pages=212-243 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Willey |first=Basil |date=1964 |title=Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold. |location= Harmondsworth:|publisher=Penguin |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Yancey |first=Philip |date=2002 |title=What's So Amazing About Grace? |location= Grand Rapids|publisher=Zondervan |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-11T02:42:22Z

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{{byline |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's “A Clean Well-Lighted Place?” Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative “make sense of life?” Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04vin}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular.{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .” {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt. Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include {{harvtxt|Buske|2002}}, {{harvtxt|Stoneback|2003}}, {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}, {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Kroupi|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Bernstein|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Cappell|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Sipiora|2008}}, and {{harvtxt|Whalen-Bridge|Oon|2009}}.}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===
Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen {{harvtxt|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in {{harvtxt|Küng|1980}}. Spirituality and modern man are the focus of {{harvtxt|Jung|1955}}. ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by {{harvtxt|Gellner|1974}}, while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in {{harvtxt|Fussell|1975}}. ''Cognitive minority'' is used by {{harvtxt|Berger|1969}}, while {{harvtxt|Berger|Luckmann|1966|pp=98-100}} terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe''. ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}.}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box.”{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,”{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,”{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people.”{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people.” {{harvtxt|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality” {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority.” {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’” {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord.”{{sfn|Common|1993|p=31}} {{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal ''Book of Common Prayer'', {{harvtxt|Common|1993|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, ''peace'' and ''Lord'' are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.” {{harvtxt|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale.”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph, “You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever.”{{sfn|KJB|2008|loc=Ecc. 1:4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.” {{harvtxt|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.” {{harvtxt|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, but Henry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.” {{harvtxt|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities.” {{harvtxt|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth.”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself.” {{harvtxt|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .” {{harvtxt|NEB|1970|loc=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” {{harvtxt|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.” {{harvtxt|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology. {{harvtxt|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void.”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty.”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski {{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, “Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee,” we read this: “He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' “After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade.” {{harvtxt|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,"{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium.” This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows,” Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{harvtxt|Hemingway|1991b|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God, Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to “his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement.”{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman.” {{harvtxt|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . . “You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos.” {{harvtxt|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist.” {{harvtxt|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.” {{harvtxt|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity.” {{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

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

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin |indent=1 |20em}}
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* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |title=New English Bible, The [NEB] | date=1970 |editor-first=Samuel |editor-last=Sandmel |location=New York |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref={{harvid|NEB|1970}} }}
* {{cite journal |last=Sipiora |first=Phillip |title=Norman Mailer: Metaphysician at Work |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2 |date=2008 |pages=502-506 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stewart |first=Matthew |date=2001 |title=Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway's ''In Our Time'' |location= Rochester|publisher=Camden House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Stolzfus |first=Ben |title=Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature Studies |volume=42 |issue=3 |date=2005 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoneback |first=H. R. |title=Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway's Sacred Landscapes |journal=Religion and Literature |volume=35 |issue=⅔ |date=2003 |pages=49-65 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |date=1988 |chapter=Alienation |title=New Dictionary of Theology |location=Downers Grove, IL |publisher=Inter-Varsity Press |editor1-first=Sinclair B. |editor1-last=Ferguson |editor2-first=David F. |editor2-last=Wright |editor3-first=J. I. |editor3-last=Packer |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Wagner-Martin |first=Linda |date=1987|title=Introduction |journal= New Essays on The Sun Also Rises |location= Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=Whalen-Bridge |first1=John |last2=Oon |first2=Angela |title=Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998-2008 |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=3 |date=2009 |pages=212-243 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Willey |first=Basil |date=1964 |title=Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold. |location= Harmondsworth:|publisher=Penguin |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Yancey |first=Philip |date=2002 |title=What's So Amazing About Grace? |location= Grand Rapids|publisher=Zondervan |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-11T01:36:51Z

Sherrilledwards: putting spaces prior to harvtxts

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{{byline |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place"? Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative "make sense of life?" Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04vin}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot's Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular.{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .” {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include {{harvtxt|Buske|2002}}, {{harvtxt|Stoneback|2003}}, {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}, {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Kroupi|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Bernstein|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Cappell|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Sipiora|2008}}, and {{harvtxt|Whalen-Bridge|Oon|2009}}.}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===
Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen {{harvtxt|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in {{harvtxt|Küng|1980}}. Spirituality and modern man are the focus of {{harvtxt|Jung|1955}}. ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by {{harvtxt|Gellner|1974}}, while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in {{harvtxt|Fussell|1975}}. ''Cognitive minority'' is used by {{harvtxt|Berger|1969}}, while {{harvtxt|Berger|Luckmann|1966|pp=98-100}} terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe''. ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}.}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box."{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,"{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,"{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people." {{harvtxt|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality” {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’” {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord.”{{sfn|Common|1993|p=31}} {{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal ''Book of Common Prayer'', {{harvtxt|Common|1993|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, ''peace'' and ''Lord'' are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.” {{harvtxt|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling."{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,"{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale."{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|KJB|2008|loc=Ecc. 1:4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.” {{harvtxt|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.” {{harvtxt|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, butHenry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.” {{harvtxt|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities." {{harvtxt|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance
as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace
in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,"{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself." {{harvtxt|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .” {{harvtxt|NEB|1970|loc=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” {{harvtxt|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.” {{harvtxt|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology. {{harvtxt|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski {{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee," we red this: "He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' "After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade." {{harvtxt|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them."{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,"{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift."{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium." This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows," Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{harvtxt|Hemingway|1991b|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God,Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to“his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement."{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.” {{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman." {{harvtxt|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . .“ You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos." {{harvtxt|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist." {{harvtxt|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back."{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.” {{harvtxt|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity."{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

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

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin |indent=1 |20em}}
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* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |title=New English Bible, The [NEB] | date=1970 |editor-first=Samuel |editor-last=Sandmel |location=New York |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref={{harvid|NEB|1970}} }}
* {{cite journal |last=Sipiora |first=Phillip |title=Norman Mailer: Metaphysician at Work |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2 |date=2008 |pages=502-506 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stewart |first=Matthew |date=2001 |title=Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway's ''In Our Time'' |location= Rochester|publisher=Camden House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Stolzfus |first=Ben |title=Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature Studies |volume=42 |issue=3 |date=2005 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoneback |first=H. R. |title=Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway's Sacred Landscapes |journal=Religion and Literature |volume=35 |issue=⅔ |date=2003 |pages=49-65 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |date=1988 |chapter=Alienation |title=New Dictionary of Theology |location=Downers Grove, IL |publisher=Inter-Varsity Press |editor1-first=Sinclair B. |editor1-last=Ferguson |editor2-first=David F. |editor2-last=Wright |editor3-first=J. I. |editor3-last=Packer |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Wagner-Martin |first=Linda |date=1987|title=Introduction |journal= New Essays on The Sun Also Rises |location= Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=Whalen-Bridge |first1=John |last2=Oon |first2=Angela |title=Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998-2008 |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=3 |date=2009 |pages=212-243 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Willey |first=Basil |date=1964 |title=Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold. |location= Harmondsworth:|publisher=Penguin |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Yancey |first=Philip |date=2002 |title=What's So Amazing About Grace? |location= Grand Rapids|publisher=Zondervan |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-11T01:31:59Z

Sherrilledwards: Another try at fixing sins into harvtxt

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{{byline |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place"? Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative "make sense of life?" Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04vin}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot's Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular.{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .”{{harvtxt|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include {{harvtxt|Buske|2002}}, {{harvtxt|Stoneback|2003}}, {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}, {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Kroupi|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Bernstein|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Cappell|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Sipiora|2008}}, and {{harvtxt|Whalen-Bridge|Oon|2009}}.}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===
Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen {{harvtxt|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in {{harvtxt|Küng|1980}}. Spirituality and modern man are the focus of {{harvtxt|Jung|1955}}. ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by {{harvtxt|Gellner|1974}}, while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in {{harvtxt|Fussell|1975}}. ''Cognitive minority'' is used by {{harvtxt|Berger|1969}}, while {{harvtxt|Berger|Luckmann|1966|pp=98-100}} terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe''. ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}.}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box."{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,"{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,"{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people."{{harvtxt|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality”{{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’”{{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord.”{{sfn|Common|1993|p=31}} {{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal ''Book of Common Prayer'',{{harvtxt|Common|1993|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, ''peace'' and ''Lord'' are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{harvtxt|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling."{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,"{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale."{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|KJB|2008|loc=Ecc. 1:4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.”{{harvtxt|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.”{{harvtxt|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, butHenry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.”{{harvtxt|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities." {{harvtxt|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance
as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace
in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,"{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself."{{harvtxt|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .”{{harvtxt|NEB|1970|loc=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{harvtxt|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.”{{harvtxt|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology.{{harvtxt|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee," we red this: "He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' "After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade."{{harvtxt|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them."{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,"{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift."{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium." This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows," Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{harvtxt|Hemingway|1991b|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God,Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to“his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement."{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman."{{harvtxt|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . .“ You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos."{{harvtxt|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist."{{harvtxt|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back."{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.”{{harvtxt|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity."{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

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

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin |indent=1 |20em}}
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* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |title=New English Bible, The [NEB] | date=1970 |editor-first=Samuel |editor-last=Sandmel |location=New York |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref={{harvid|NEB|1970}} }}
* {{cite journal |last=Sipiora |first=Phillip |title=Norman Mailer: Metaphysician at Work |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2 |date=2008 |pages=502-506 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stewart |first=Matthew |date=2001 |title=Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway's ''In Our Time'' |location= Rochester|publisher=Camden House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Stolzfus |first=Ben |title=Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature Studies |volume=42 |issue=3 |date=2005 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoneback |first=H. R. |title=Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway's Sacred Landscapes |journal=Religion and Literature |volume=35 |issue=⅔ |date=2003 |pages=49-65 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |date=1988 |chapter=Alienation |title=New Dictionary of Theology |location=Downers Grove, IL |publisher=Inter-Varsity Press |editor1-first=Sinclair B. |editor1-last=Ferguson |editor2-first=David F. |editor2-last=Wright |editor3-first=J. I. |editor3-last=Packer |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Wagner-Martin |first=Linda |date=1987|title=Introduction |journal= New Essays on The Sun Also Rises |location= Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=Whalen-Bridge |first1=John |last2=Oon |first2=Angela |title=Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998-2008 |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=3 |date=2009 |pages=212-243 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Willey |first=Basil |date=1964 |title=Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold. |location= Harmondsworth:|publisher=Penguin |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Yancey |first=Philip |date=2002 |title=What's So Amazing About Grace? |location= Grand Rapids|publisher=Zondervan |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-11T00:25:10Z

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{{byline |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place"? Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative "make sense of life?" Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04vin}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot's Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular.{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .”{{harvtxt|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include {{harvtxt|Buske|2002}}, {{harvtxt|Stoneback|2003}}, {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}, {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Kroupi|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Bernstein|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Cappell|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Sipiora|2008}}, and {{harvtxt|Whalen-Bridge|Oon|2009}}.}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===
Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen {{harvtxt|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in {{harvtxt|Küng|1980}}. Spirituality and modern man are the focus of {{harvtxt|Jung|1955}}. ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by {{harvtxt|Gellner|1974}}, while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in {{harvtxt|Fussell|1975}}. ''Cognitive minority'' is used by {{harvtxt|Berger|1969}}, while {{harvtxt|Berger|Luckmann|1966|pp=98-100}} terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe''. ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}.}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box."{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,"{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,"{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people."{{harvtxt|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality”{{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’”{{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord.”{{sfn|Common|1993|p=31}} {{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal ''Book of Common Prayer'',{{harvtxt|Common|1993|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, ''peace'' and ''Lord'' are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{harvtxt|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling."{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,"{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale."{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|KJB|2008|loc=Ecc. 1:4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.”{{harvtxt|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.”{{harvtxt|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, butHenry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.”{{harvtxt|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities." {{harvtxt|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance
as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace
in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,"{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself."{{harvtxt|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .”{{harvtxt|NEB|1970|loc=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.”{{harvtxt|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology.{{harvtxt|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee," we red this: "He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' "After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade."{{harvtxt|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them."{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,"{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift."{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium." This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows," Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{harvtxt|Hemingway|1991b|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God,Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to“his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement."{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman."{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . .“ You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back."{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity."{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

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

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin |indent=1 |20em}}
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* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |title=New English Bible, The [NEB] | date=1970 |editor-first=Samuel |editor-last=Sandmel |location=New York |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref={{harvid|NEB|1970}} }}
* {{cite journal |last=Sipiora |first=Phillip |title=Norman Mailer: Metaphysician at Work |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2 |date=2008 |pages=502-506 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stewart |first=Matthew |date=2001 |title=Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway's ''In Our Time'' |location= Rochester|publisher=Camden House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Stolzfus |first=Ben |title=Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature Studies |volume=42 |issue=3 |date=2005 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoneback |first=H. R. |title=Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway's Sacred Landscapes |journal=Religion and Literature |volume=35 |issue=⅔ |date=2003 |pages=49-65 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |date=1988 |chapter=Alienation |title=New Dictionary of Theology |location=Downers Grove, IL |publisher=Inter-Varsity Press |editor1-first=Sinclair B. |editor1-last=Ferguson |editor2-first=David F. |editor2-last=Wright |editor3-first=J. I. |editor3-last=Packer |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Wagner-Martin |first=Linda |date=1987|title=Introduction |journal= New Essays on The Sun Also Rises |location= Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=Whalen-Bridge |first1=John |last2=Oon |first2=Angela |title=Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998-2008 |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=3 |date=2009 |pages=212-243 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Willey |first=Basil |date=1964 |title=Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold. |location= Harmondsworth:|publisher=Penguin |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Yancey |first=Philip |date=2002 |title=What's So Amazing About Grace? |location= Grand Rapids|publisher=Zondervan |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-11T00:23:50Z

Sherrilledwards: Fix efn harvtxt in God Language Hemingway

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{{byline |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place"? Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative "make sense of life?" Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04vin}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot's Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular.{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .”{{harvtxt|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include {{harvtxt|Buske|2002}}, {{harvtxt|Stoneback|2003}}, {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}, {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Kroupi|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Bernstein|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Cappell|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Sipiora|2008}}, and {{harvtxt|Whalen-Bridge|Oon|2009}}.}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===
Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen {{harvtxt|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in {{harvtxt|Küng|1980}}. Spirituality and modern man are the focus of {{harvtxt|Jung|1955}}. ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by {{harvtxt|Gellner|1974}}, while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in {{harvtxt|Fussell|1975}}. ''Cognitive minority'' is used by {{harvtxt|Berger|1969}}, while {{harvtxt|Berger|Luckmann|1966|pp=98-100}} terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe''. ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}.}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box."{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,"{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,"{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people."{{harvtxt|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality”{{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’”{{harvtxt|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord.”{{sfn|Common|1993|p=31}} {{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal ''Book of Common Prayer'',{{harvtxt|Common|1993|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, ''peace'' and ''Lord'' are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{harvtxt|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling."{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,"{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale."{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|KJB|2008|loc=Ecc. 1:4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.”{{harvtxt|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.”{{harvtxtn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, butHenry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.”{{harvtxt|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities." {{harvtxt|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance
as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace
in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,"{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself."{{harvtxt|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .”{{harvtxt|NEB|1970|loc=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.”{{harvtxt|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology.{{harvtxt|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee," we red this: "He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' "After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade."{{harvtxt|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them."{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,"{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift."{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium." This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows," Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{harvtxt|Hemingway|1991b|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God,Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to“his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement."{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{harvtxt|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman."{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . .“ You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back."{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity."{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

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

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin |indent=1 |20em}}
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* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |title=New English Bible, The [NEB] | date=1970 |editor-first=Samuel |editor-last=Sandmel |location=New York |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref={{harvid|NEB|1970}} }}
* {{cite journal |last=Sipiora |first=Phillip |title=Norman Mailer: Metaphysician at Work |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2 |date=2008 |pages=502-506 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stewart |first=Matthew |date=2001 |title=Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway's ''In Our Time'' |location= Rochester|publisher=Camden House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Stolzfus |first=Ben |title=Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature Studies |volume=42 |issue=3 |date=2005 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoneback |first=H. R. |title=Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway's Sacred Landscapes |journal=Religion and Literature |volume=35 |issue=⅔ |date=2003 |pages=49-65 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |date=1988 |chapter=Alienation |title=New Dictionary of Theology |location=Downers Grove, IL |publisher=Inter-Varsity Press |editor1-first=Sinclair B. |editor1-last=Ferguson |editor2-first=David F. |editor2-last=Wright |editor3-first=J. I. |editor3-last=Packer |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Wagner-Martin |first=Linda |date=1987|title=Introduction |journal= New Essays on The Sun Also Rises |location= Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=Whalen-Bridge |first1=John |last2=Oon |first2=Angela |title=Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998-2008 |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=3 |date=2009 |pages=212-243 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Willey |first=Basil |date=1964 |title=Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold. |location= Harmondsworth:|publisher=Penguin |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Yancey |first=Philip |date=2002 |title=What's So Amazing About Grace? |location= Grand Rapids|publisher=Zondervan |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-11T00:18:00Z

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{{byline |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place"? Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative "make sense of life?" Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04vin}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot's Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular.{{sfn|Lukács|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .”{{harvtxt|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include {{harvtxt|Buske|2002}}, {{harvtxt|Stoneback|2003}}, {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}, {{harvtxt|Stolzfus|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Adamowski|2005}}, {{harvtxt|Kroupi|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Bernstein|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Cappell|2008}}, {{harvtxt|Sipiora|2008}}, and {{harvtxt|Whalen-Bridge|Oon|2009}}.}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===
Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen {{harvtxt|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in {{harvtxt|Küng|1980}}. Spirituality and modern man are the focus of {{harvtxt|Jung|1955}}. ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by {{harvtxt|Gellner|1974}}, while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in {{harvtxt|Fussell|1975}}. ''Cognitive minority'' is used by {{harvtxt|Berger|1969}}, while {{harvtxt|Berger|Luckmann|1966|pp=98-100}} terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe''. ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in {{harvtxt|Lewis|2004}}.}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box."{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,"{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,"{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord.”{{sfn|Common|1993|p=31}} {{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal ''Book of Common Prayer'',{{sfn|Common|1993|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, ''peace'' and ''Lord'' are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling."{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,"{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale."{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|KJB|2008|loc=Ecc. 1:4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, butHenry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.”{{sfn|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities." {{sfn|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance
as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace
in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,"{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself."{{sfn|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{sfn|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.”{{sfn|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology.{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|NEB|1970|loc=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee," we red this: "He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' "After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991a|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade."{{sfn|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them."{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,"{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift."{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium." This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows," Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1991b|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God,Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to“his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement."{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman."{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . .“ You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist."{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back."{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity."{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

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

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

===Works Cited===
{{Refbegin |indent=1 |20em}}
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* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |title=New English Bible, The [NEB] | date=1970 |editor-first=Samuel |editor-last=Sandmel |location=New York |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref={{harvid|NEB|1970}} }}
* {{cite journal |last=Sipiora |first=Phillip |title=Norman Mailer: Metaphysician at Work |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2 |date=2008 |pages=502-506 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Stewart |first=Matthew |date=2001 |title=Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway's ''In Our Time'' |location= Rochester|publisher=Camden House |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Stolzfus |first=Ben |title=Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature Studies |volume=42 |issue=3 |date=2005 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Stoneback |first=H. R. |title=Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway's Sacred Landscapes |journal=Religion and Literature |volume=35 |issue=⅔ |date=2003 |pages=49-65 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |date=1988 |chapter=Alienation |title=New Dictionary of Theology |location=Downers Grove, IL |publisher=Inter-Varsity Press |editor1-first=Sinclair B. |editor1-last=Ferguson |editor2-first=David F. |editor2-last=Wright |editor3-first=J. I. |editor3-last=Packer |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last=Wagner-Martin |first=Linda |date=1987|title=Introduction |journal= New Essays on The Sun Also Rises |location= Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}
* {{cite journal |last1=Whalen-Bridge |first1=John |last2=Oon |first2=Angela |title=Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998-2008 |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=3 |date=2009 |pages=212-243 |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Willey |first=Basil |date=1964 |title=Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold. |location= Harmondsworth:|publisher=Penguin |ref=harv }}
* {{cite book |last=Yancey |first=Philip |date=2002 |title=What's So Amazing About Grace? |location= Grand Rapids|publisher=Zondervan |ref=harv }}
{{Refend}}

{{Review}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

User talk:Grlucas

2025-04-07T00:18:08Z

Sherrilledwards: /* Vol. 4: Rumors of Grace article remediated */ new section

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

== 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)

== 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)
:{{reply to|Tbara4554}} thank you. I made some corrections and removed the banner. You might want to have another look over it. Please move on to something else. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 09:53, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

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

Dr. Lucas,

The following article is ready for your review. Thanks.

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

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

== I am done with this ==

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

== Final Review PM Article ==

Hi Dr. Lucas, [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Hemingway_to_Mailer_—_A_Delayed_Response_to_The_Deer_Park|here]] is my remediated article, ready for review![[User:Hobbitonya|Hobbitonya]] ([[User talk:Hobbitonya|talk]]) 12:21, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Project ==

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

Thanks,

[[User:MerAtticus|MerAtticus]] ([[User talk:MerAtticus|talk]]) 13:04, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

== Remediation Submission ==

Hello!
Here's my remediated article; [[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_5,_2011/The_Devil's_Party:_Reading_and_Wreaking_Vengeance_in_The_Castle_in_the_Forest|The Devil's Party: Reading and Wreaking Vengeance in ''The Castle in the Forest'']].
Thanks! Please let me know if there's anything I can review or correct.
[[User:Maggiemrogers|Maggiemrogers]] ([[User talk:Maggiemrogers|talk]]) 13:23, 6 April 2025 (EDT)

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

I believe I have completed remediation of ''[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_4,_2010/Rumors_of_Grace:_God-Language_in_Hemingway_and_Mailer|Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer]]'', vol. 4. I was having last-minute trouble with sfn errors for sources without authors, but Justin Kilchenmann helped me out, so I think they are fixed.

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-06T22:29:43Z

Sherrilledwards: Fix sfn Mailer and Lennon

{{DISPLAYTITLE:{{BASEPAGENAME}}/{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
{{Working}}
{{MR04}}
{{byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place"? Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative "make sense of life?" Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Raymond_M._Vince}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot's Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lucáks|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular. {{sfn|Lucáks|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .”{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include Buske,{{sfn|Buske|2002}} Stoneback,{{sfn|Stoneback|2003}} Lewis,{{sfn|Lewis|2004}} Stolzfus,{{sfn|Stolzfus|2005}} Adamowski,{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} Kroupi,{{sfn|Kroupi|2008}} Bernstein,{{sfn|Bernstein|2008}} Cappell,{{sfn|Cappell|2008}} Sipioria,{{sfn|Sipiora|2008}} and Whalen-Bridge and Oon.{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2009}}}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===

Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen Chadwick{{sfn|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in Hans Küng.{{sfn|Küng|1980}} Spirituality and modern man are the focus of Carl Jung.{{sfn|Jung|1955}} ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by Ernest Gellner,{{sfn|Gellner|1975}} while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in Paul Fussell.{{sfn|Fussell|1975}} ''Cognitive minority'' is used by Peter Berger,{{sfn|Berger|1969}} while Berger & Luckmannuse terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe.'' {{sfn|Berger|1966|p=98-100}} ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in Lewis.{{sfn|Lewis|2004}}}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box."{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,"{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,"{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord” (1928 31).{{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer,{{sfn|1928 Book of Common Prayer|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling."{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,"{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale."{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|King James Bible|2008|p=Ecc. 1.4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, butHenry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.”{{sfn|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities." {{sfn|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. {{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance
as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace
in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself."{{sfn|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{sfn|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.”{{sfn|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology.{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee," we red this: "He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' "After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade."{{sfn|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them."{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,"{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift."{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium." This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows," Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God,Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to“his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement."{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman."{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . .“ You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back."{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity."{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

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* {{cite journal |last=Auden |first=W.H. |title=September 1, 1939. |journal=Selected Poems |date=2007 | location=Ed. Edward Mendelson. Expanded ed. New York |publisher=Princeton University Press |pages=95-97|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |location=4th ed. Princeton |publisher= Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Bawer |first=Bruce |date=1998 |title=Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity |location=New York |publisher= Three Rivers |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Begiebing |first=Robert |title=Castle Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1.1 |date=2007 |pages=215-222 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Berger |first=Peter L. |date=1969 |title=A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural |location=Garden City |publisher= Doubleday |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Berger |first=Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann |date=1966 |title=The Social Construction of Reality |location=Garden City |publisher= Doubleday |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Bernstein |first=Mashey |title=Jewish Values in the Fiction of Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2.1 |date=2008 |pages=376-384 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Born |first=Max |date=1951 |title=The Restless Universe |location=New York |publisher=Dover |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Brooks |first=Cleanth |date=1963 |title=The Hidden God: Studies in Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Eliot, and Warren |location=New York |publisher=Yale University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Brown |first=Colin |date=1969 |title=Philosophy and the Christian Faith |location=London |publisher=Tyndale Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Buechner |first=Frederick |date=1983 |title=Now and Then |location=San Francisco |publisher=Harper |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Bultmann |first=Rudolf |date=1984 |title=New Testament & Mythology and Other Basic Writings |location= Ed. Schubert M. Ogden. Philadelphia |publisher=Fortress Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Buske |first=Morris |title=Hemingway Faces God |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=22.1 |issue= |date=2002 |pages=72-87 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Cappell |first=Ezra |title=Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of the Book |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2.1 |date=2008 |pages=97-99 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Chadwick |first=Owen |date=1975 |title=The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century|location=Cambridge |publisher= Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Civello |first=Paul |date=1994 |title=American Literary Naturalism and its Twentieth-Century Transformation |location=Athens |publisher=University of Georgia Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |date=2008 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |location=Ed. Cedric Watts. Oxford |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Delbanco |first=Andrew |date=1995 |title=The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil |location=New York |publisher= Farrar, Stauss and Giroux |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Donne |first=John |date=2003 |title=John Donne's Sermons on the Psalms and Gospels |location=Ed. Evelyn M. Simpson. Berkeley |publisher= University of California Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Fussell |first=Paul |date=1975 |title=The Great War and Modern Memory |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press, 2000|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Gellner |first=Ernest |date=1975 |title=Legitimation of Belief |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Gribbin |first=John |date=1995 |title=Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality: Solving the Quantum Mysteries |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown & Co |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Hassan |first=Ihab |date=1987 |title=Hemingway: Valor against the Void |journal=American Fiction 1915-1945 |location=Ed. Harold Bloom. New York |publisher= Chelsea House |pages=285-299 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1991 |title=A Clean, Well-Lighted Place |journal=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages=29-33 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=2003 |title=The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Finca Vigia ed. New York |publisher= Scribner |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1984 |title=Ernest Hemingway on Writing|location=Ed. Larry W. Phillips. New York |publisher= Touchstone |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms|location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 2003 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1940 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls|location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 2003 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1986 |title=The Garden of Eden|location=New York |publisher= Scribner |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1925 |title=In Our Time|location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1995 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=2009 |title=A Moveable Feast|location=Ed. Sean Hemingway. Restored ed. New York |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1991 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro |journal=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages=3-28 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1926 |title=The Sun Also Rises |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 2006 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=Geraint Vaughan |date=1964 |title=The Art and Truth of the Parables: A Study in Their Literary Form and Modern Interpretation |location=London |publisher=S.P.C.K |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Jung |first=Carl |date=1955 |title=Man in Search of a Soul |location=New York |publisher=Harcourt |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |title=King James Bible |date=2008 |location=Ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press | ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Kroupi |first=Agori |title=The Religious Implications of Fishing and Bullfighting in Hemingway's Work |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=28.1 |date=2008 |pages=107-121 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Kucich |first=John |title=Intellectual Debate in the Victorian Novel: Religion, Science, and the Professional |journal=The Victorian Novel|date=2001| location=Ed. Deirdre David. Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=212-233 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Küng |first=Hans |date=1980 |title=Does God Exist: An Answer for Today |location=Garden City |publisher=Doubleday |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Lewis |first=Pericles |title=Churchgoing in the Modern Novel |journal=Modernisn/mondernity |volume=11.4 |date=2004 |pages=669-694 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lucáks |first=Georg |date=1971 |title=The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature|location=Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge |publisher=MIT Press |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=1997 |title=The Gospel According to the Son |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=1991 |title=Harlot's Ghost: A Novel |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Co. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=2003 |title=The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman and Michael Lennon |date=2007 |title=On God: An Uncommon Conversation |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Marx |first=Karl |date=1975 |title=''A Contribution of the Critique of Hegel's'' Philosophy of Right. ''Introduction.'' |journal=Early Writings |location=Ed. Lucio Colletti. London |publisher=Penguin |pages=243-258 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |title=New English Bible, The [NEB] | date=1970 | location=Ed. Samuel Sandmel. Oxford Study Edition. New York |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |title=The 1928 Book of Common Prayer | date= 1993 |location=New York |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Popkin |first=Richard H. |date=2003 |title=The History of Skepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Sipiora |first=Phillip |title=Norman Mailer: Metaphysician at Work |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2.1 |date=2008 |pages=502-506 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Stewart |first=Matthew |date=2001 |title=Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway's In Our Time |location= Rochester|publisher=Camden House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Stolzfus |first=Ben |title=Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature Studies |volume=42.3 |date=2005 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Stoneback |first=H.R. |title=Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway's Sacred Landscapes |journal=Religion and Literature |volume=35.2/3 |issue= |date=2003 |pages=49-65 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |date=1988 |title=Alienation |journal=New Dictionary of Theology |location= Ed. Sinclair B. Ferguson, David F. Wright, and J.I. Packer. Downers Grove, IL |publisher=Inter-Varsity Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Wagner-Martin |first=Linda |date=1987|title=Introduction |journal= New Essays on The Sun Also Rises |location= Cambridge|publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Whalen-Bridge |first=John and Angela Oon |title=Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998-2008 |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=3.1 |date=2009 |pages=212-243 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Yancey |first=Philip |date=2002 |title=What's So Amazing About Grace? |location= Grand Rapids|publisher=Zondervan |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}

[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-06T22:22:02Z

Sherrilledwards: Fixing Mailer and Lennon sfn

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{{byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place"? Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative "make sense of life?" Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Raymond_M._Vince}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot's Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lucáks|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular. {{sfn|Lucáks|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .”{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include Buske,{{sfn|Buske|2002}} Stoneback,{{sfn|Stoneback|2003}} Lewis,{{sfn|Lewis|2004}} Stolzfus,{{sfn|Stolzfus|2005}} Adamowski,{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} Kroupi,{{sfn|Kroupi|2008}} Bernstein,{{sfn|Bernstein|2008}} Cappell,{{sfn|Cappell|2008}} Sipioria,{{sfn|Sipiora|2008}} and Whalen-Bridge and Oon.{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2009}}}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===

Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen Chadwick{{sfn|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in Hans Küng.{{sfn|Küng|1980}} Spirituality and modern man are the focus of Carl Jung.{{sfn|Jung|1955}} ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by Ernest Gellner,{{sfn|Gellner|1975}} while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in Paul Fussell.{{sfn|Fussell|1975}} ''Cognitive minority'' is used by Peter Berger,{{sfn|Berger|1969}} while Berger & Luckmannuse terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe.'' {{sfn|Berger|1966|p=98-100}} ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in Lewis.{{sfn|Lewis|2004}}}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box."{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,"{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,"{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord” (1928 31).{{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer,{{sfn|1928 Book of Common Prayer|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling."{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,"{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale."{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|King James Bible|2008|p=Ecc. 1.4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, butHenry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.”{{sfn|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities." {{sfn|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. {{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance
as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace
in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself."{{sfn|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{sfn|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.”{{sfn|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology.{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee," we red this: "He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' "After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade."{{sfn|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them."{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,"{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift."{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium." This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows," Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God,Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to“his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement."{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer and Lennon|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman."{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . .“ You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back."{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity."{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

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* {{cite journal |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1991 |title=A Clean, Well-Lighted Place |journal=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages=29-33 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=2003 |title=The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Finca Vigia ed. New York |publisher= Scribner |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1984 |title=Ernest Hemingway on Writing|location=Ed. Larry W. Phillips. New York |publisher= Touchstone |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms|location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 2003 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1940 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls|location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 2003 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1986 |title=The Garden of Eden|location=New York |publisher= Scribner |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1925 |title=In Our Time|location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1995 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=2009 |title=A Moveable Feast|location=Ed. Sean Hemingway. Restored ed. New York |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1991 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro |journal=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages=3-28 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1926 |title=The Sun Also Rises |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 2006 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=Geraint Vaughan |date=1964 |title=The Art and Truth of the Parables: A Study in Their Literary Form and Modern Interpretation |location=London |publisher=S.P.C.K |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Jung |first=Carl |date=1955 |title=Man in Search of a Soul |location=New York |publisher=Harcourt |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |title=King James Bible |date=2008 |location=Ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press | ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Kroupi |first=Agori |title=The Religious Implications of Fishing and Bullfighting in Hemingway's Work |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=28.1 |date=2008 |pages=107-121 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Kucich |first=John |title=Intellectual Debate in the Victorian Novel: Religion, Science, and the Professional |journal=The Victorian Novel|date=2001| location=Ed. Deirdre David. Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=212-233 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Küng |first=Hans |date=1980 |title=Does God Exist: An Answer for Today |location=Garden City |publisher=Doubleday |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Lewis |first=Pericles |title=Churchgoing in the Modern Novel |journal=Modernisn/mondernity |volume=11.4 |date=2004 |pages=669-694 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lucáks |first=Georg |date=1971 |title=The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature|location=Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge |publisher=MIT Press |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=1997 |title=The Gospel According to the Son |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=1991 |title=Harlot's Ghost: A Novel |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Co. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=2003 |title=The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman and Michael Lennon |date=2007 |title=On God: An Uncommon Conversation |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Marx |first=Karl |date=1975 |title=''A Contribution of the Critique of Hegel's'' Philosophy of Right. ''Introduction.'' |journal=Early Writings |location=Ed. Lucio Colletti. London |publisher=Penguin |pages=243-258 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |title=New English Bible, The [NEB] | date=1970 | location=Ed. Samuel Sandmel. Oxford Study Edition. New York |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |title=The 1928 Book of Common Prayer | date= 1993 |location=New York |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Popkin |first=Richard H. |date=2003 |title=The History of Skepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Sipiora |first=Phillip |title=Norman Mailer: Metaphysician at Work |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2.1 |date=2008 |pages=502-506 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Stewart |first=Matthew |date=2001 |title=Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway's In Our Time |location= Rochester|publisher=Camden House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Stolzfus |first=Ben |title=Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature Studies |volume=42.3 |date=2005 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Stoneback |first=H.R. |title=Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway's Sacred Landscapes |journal=Religion and Literature |volume=35.2/3 |issue= |date=2003 |pages=49-65 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |date=1988 |title=Alienation |journal=New Dictionary of Theology |location= Ed. Sinclair B. Ferguson, David F. Wright, and J.I. Packer. Downers Grove, IL |publisher=Inter-Varsity Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Wagner-Martin |first=Linda |date=1987|title=Introduction |journal= New Essays on The Sun Also Rises |location= Cambridge|publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Whalen-Bridge |first=John and Angela Oon |title=Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998-2008 |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=3.1 |date=2009 |pages=212-243 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Yancey |first=Philip |date=2002 |title=What's So Amazing About Grace? |location= Grand Rapids|publisher=Zondervan |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}

[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-06T22:15:23Z

Sherrilledwards: Fix work cited for Auden

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{{byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place"? Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative "make sense of life?" Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Raymond_M._Vince}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot's Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lucáks|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular. {{sfn|Lucáks|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .”{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include Buske,{{sfn|Buske|2002}} Stoneback,{{sfn|Stoneback|2003}} Lewis,{{sfn|Lewis|2004}} Stolzfus,{{sfn|Stolzfus|2005}} Adamowski,{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} Kroupi,{{sfn|Kroupi|2008}} Bernstein,{{sfn|Bernstein|2008}} Cappell,{{sfn|Cappell|2008}} Sipioria,{{sfn|Sipiora|2008}} and Whalen-Bridge and Oon.{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2009}}}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===

Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen Chadwick{{sfn|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in Hans Küng.{{sfn|Küng|1980}} Spirituality and modern man are the focus of Carl Jung.{{sfn|Jung|1955}} ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by Ernest Gellner,{{sfn|Gellner|1975}} while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in Paul Fussell.{{sfn|Fussell|1975}} ''Cognitive minority'' is used by Peter Berger,{{sfn|Berger|1969}} while Berger & Luckmannuse terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe.'' {{sfn|Berger|1966|p=98-100}} ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in Lewis.{{sfn|Lewis|2004}}}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box."{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,"{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,"{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord” (1928 31).{{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer,{{sfn|1928 Book of Common Prayer|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling."{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,"{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale."{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|King James Bible|2008|p=Ecc. 1.4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, butHenry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.”{{sfn|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities." {{sfn|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. {{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance
as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace
in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself."{{sfn|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{sfn|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.”{{sfn|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology.{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee," we red this: "He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' "After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade."{{sfn|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them."{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,"{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift."{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium." This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows," Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God,Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to“his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer and Lennon|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement."{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer and Lennon|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman."{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . .“ You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back."{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity."{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite journal |last=Adamowski |first=T.H. |title=Out on Highway 61: Existentialism in America |journal=University of Toronto Quarterly |volume=74.4 |date=2005 |pages=913-933 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Auden |first=W.H. |title=September 1, 1939. |journal=Selected Poems |date=2007 | location=Ed. Edward Mendelson. Expanded ed. New York |publisher=Princeton University Press |pages=95-97|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |location=4th ed. Princeton |publisher= Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Bawer |first=Bruce |date=1998 |title=Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity |location=New York |publisher= Three Rivers |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Begiebing |first=Robert |title=Castle Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1.1 |date=2007 |pages=215-222 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Berger |first=Peter L. |date=1969 |title=A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural |location=Garden City |publisher= Doubleday |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Berger |first=Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann |date=1966 |title=The Social Construction of Reality |location=Garden City |publisher= Doubleday |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Bernstein |first=Mashey |title=Jewish Values in the Fiction of Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2.1 |date=2008 |pages=376-384 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Born |first=Max |date=1951 |title=The Restless Universe |location=New York |publisher=Dover |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Brooks |first=Cleanth |date=1963 |title=The Hidden God: Studies in Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Eliot, and Warren |location=New York |publisher=Yale University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Brown |first=Colin |date=1969 |title=Philosophy and the Christian Faith |location=London |publisher=Tyndale Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Buechner |first=Frederick |date=1983 |title=Now and Then |location=San Francisco |publisher=Harper |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Bultmann |first=Rudolf |date=1984 |title=New Testament & Mythology and Other Basic Writings |location= Ed. Schubert M. Ogden. Philadelphia |publisher=Fortress Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Buske |first=Morris |title=Hemingway Faces God |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=22.1 |issue= |date=2002 |pages=72-87 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Cappell |first=Ezra |title=Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of the Book |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2.1 |date=2008 |pages=97-99 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Chadwick |first=Owen |date=1975 |title=The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century|location=Cambridge |publisher= Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Civello |first=Paul |date=1994 |title=American Literary Naturalism and its Twentieth-Century Transformation |location=Athens |publisher=University of Georgia Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |date=2008 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |location=Ed. Cedric Watts. Oxford |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Delbanco |first=Andrew |date=1995 |title=The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil |location=New York |publisher= Farrar, Stauss and Giroux |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Donne |first=John |date=2003 |title=John Donne's Sermons on the Psalms and Gospels |location=Ed. Evelyn M. Simpson. Berkeley |publisher= University of California Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Fussell |first=Paul |date=1975 |title=The Great War and Modern Memory |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press, 2000|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Gellner |first=Ernest |date=1975 |title=Legitimation of Belief |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Gribbin |first=John |date=1995 |title=Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality: Solving the Quantum Mysteries |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown & Co |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Hassan |first=Ihab |date=1987 |title=Hemingway: Valor against the Void |journal=American Fiction 1915-1945 |location=Ed. Harold Bloom. New York |publisher= Chelsea House |pages=285-299 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1991 |title=A Clean, Well-Lighted Place |journal=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages=29-33 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=2003 |title=The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Finca Vigia ed. New York |publisher= Scribner |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1984 |title=Ernest Hemingway on Writing|location=Ed. Larry W. Phillips. New York |publisher= Touchstone |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms|location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 2003 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1940 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls|location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 2003 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1986 |title=The Garden of Eden|location=New York |publisher= Scribner |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1925 |title=In Our Time|location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1995 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=2009 |title=A Moveable Feast|location=Ed. Sean Hemingway. Restored ed. New York |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1991 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro |journal=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages=3-28 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1926 |title=The Sun Also Rises |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 2006 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=Geraint Vaughan |date=1964 |title=The Art and Truth of the Parables: A Study in Their Literary Form and Modern Interpretation |location=London |publisher=S.P.C.K |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Jung |first=Carl |date=1955 |title=Man in Search of a Soul |location=New York |publisher=Harcourt |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |title=King James Bible |date=2008 |location=Ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press | ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Kroupi |first=Agori |title=The Religious Implications of Fishing and Bullfighting in Hemingway's Work |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=28.1 |date=2008 |pages=107-121 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Kucich |first=John |title=Intellectual Debate in the Victorian Novel: Religion, Science, and the Professional |journal=The Victorian Novel|date=2001| location=Ed. Deirdre David. Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=212-233 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Küng |first=Hans |date=1980 |title=Does God Exist: An Answer for Today |location=Garden City |publisher=Doubleday |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Lewis |first=Pericles |title=Churchgoing in the Modern Novel |journal=Modernisn/mondernity |volume=11.4 |date=2004 |pages=669-694 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lucáks |first=Georg |date=1971 |title=The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature|location=Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge |publisher=MIT Press |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=1997 |title=The Gospel According to the Son |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=1991 |title=Harlot's Ghost: A Novel |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Co. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=2003 |title=The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman and Michael Lennon |date=2007 |title=On God: An Uncommon Conversation |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Marx |first=Karl |date=1975 |title=''A Contribution of the Critique of Hegel's'' Philosophy of Right. ''Introduction.'' |journal=Early Writings |location=Ed. Lucio Colletti. London |publisher=Penguin |pages=243-258 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |title=New English Bible, The [NEB] | date=1970 | location=Ed. Samuel Sandmel. Oxford Study Edition. New York |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |title=The 1928 Book of Common Prayer | date= 1993 |location=New York |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Popkin |first=Richard H. |date=2003 |title=The History of Skepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Sipiora |first=Phillip |title=Norman Mailer: Metaphysician at Work |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2.1 |date=2008 |pages=502-506 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Stewart |first=Matthew |date=2001 |title=Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway's In Our Time |location= Rochester|publisher=Camden House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Stolzfus |first=Ben |title=Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature Studies |volume=42.3 |date=2005 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Stoneback |first=H.R. |title=Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway's Sacred Landscapes |journal=Religion and Literature |volume=35.2/3 |issue= |date=2003 |pages=49-65 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |date=1988 |title=Alienation |journal=New Dictionary of Theology |location= Ed. Sinclair B. Ferguson, David F. Wright, and J.I. Packer. Downers Grove, IL |publisher=Inter-Varsity Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Wagner-Martin |first=Linda |date=1987|title=Introduction |journal= New Essays on The Sun Also Rises |location= Cambridge|publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Whalen-Bridge |first=John and Angela Oon |title=Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998-2008 |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=3.1 |date=2009 |pages=212-243 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Yancey |first=Philip |date=2002 |title=What's So Amazing About Grace? |location= Grand Rapids|publisher=Zondervan |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}

[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-06T22:12:17Z

Sherrilledwards: ore trying to fix sfn for NEB

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{{byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place"? Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative "make sense of life?" Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Raymond_M._Vince}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot's Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lucáks|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular. {{sfn|Lucáks|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .”{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include Buske,{{sfn|Buske|2002}} Stoneback,{{sfn|Stoneback|2003}} Lewis,{{sfn|Lewis|2004}} Stolzfus,{{sfn|Stolzfus|2005}} Adamowski,{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} Kroupi,{{sfn|Kroupi|2008}} Bernstein,{{sfn|Bernstein|2008}} Cappell,{{sfn|Cappell|2008}} Sipioria,{{sfn|Sipiora|2008}} and Whalen-Bridge and Oon.{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2009}}}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===

Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen Chadwick{{sfn|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in Hans Küng.{{sfn|Küng|1980}} Spirituality and modern man are the focus of Carl Jung.{{sfn|Jung|1955}} ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by Ernest Gellner,{{sfn|Gellner|1975}} while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in Paul Fussell.{{sfn|Fussell|1975}} ''Cognitive minority'' is used by Peter Berger,{{sfn|Berger|1969}} while Berger & Luckmannuse terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe.'' {{sfn|Berger|1966|p=98-100}} ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in Lewis.{{sfn|Lewis|2004}}}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box."{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,"{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,"{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord” (1928 31).{{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer,{{sfn|1928 Book of Common Prayer|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling."{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,"{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale."{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|King James Bible|2008|p=Ecc. 1.4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, butHenry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.”{{sfn|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities." {{sfn|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. {{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance
as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace
in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself."{{sfn|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{sfn|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.”{{sfn|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology.{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee," we red this: "He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' "After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade."{{sfn|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them."{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,"{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift."{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium." This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows," Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God,Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to“his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer and Lennon|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement."{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer and Lennon|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman."{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . .“ You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back."{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity."{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite journal |last=Adamowski |first=T.H. |title=Out on Highway 61: Existentialism in America |journal=University of Toronto Quarterly |volume=74.4 |date=2005 |pages=913-933 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Auden |first=W.H. |title=September 1, 1939. |journal=Selected Poems |date=1972 | location=Ed. Edward Mendelson. Expanded ed. New York |publisher=Princeton University Press |pages=95-97|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |location=4th ed. Princeton |publisher= Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Bawer |first=Bruce |date=1998 |title=Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity |location=New York |publisher= Three Rivers |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Begiebing |first=Robert |title=Castle Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1.1 |date=2007 |pages=215-222 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Berger |first=Peter L. |date=1969 |title=A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural |location=Garden City |publisher= Doubleday |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Berger |first=Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann |date=1966 |title=The Social Construction of Reality |location=Garden City |publisher= Doubleday |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Bernstein |first=Mashey |title=Jewish Values in the Fiction of Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2.1 |date=2008 |pages=376-384 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Born |first=Max |date=1951 |title=The Restless Universe |location=New York |publisher=Dover |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Brooks |first=Cleanth |date=1963 |title=The Hidden God: Studies in Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Eliot, and Warren |location=New York |publisher=Yale University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Brown |first=Colin |date=1969 |title=Philosophy and the Christian Faith |location=London |publisher=Tyndale Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Buechner |first=Frederick |date=1983 |title=Now and Then |location=San Francisco |publisher=Harper |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Bultmann |first=Rudolf |date=1984 |title=New Testament & Mythology and Other Basic Writings |location= Ed. Schubert M. Ogden. Philadelphia |publisher=Fortress Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Buske |first=Morris |title=Hemingway Faces God |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=22.1 |issue= |date=2002 |pages=72-87 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Cappell |first=Ezra |title=Norman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of the Book |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2.1 |date=2008 |pages=97-99 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Chadwick |first=Owen |date=1975 |title=The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century|location=Cambridge |publisher= Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Civello |first=Paul |date=1994 |title=American Literary Naturalism and its Twentieth-Century Transformation |location=Athens |publisher=University of Georgia Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |date=2008 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |location=Ed. Cedric Watts. Oxford |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Delbanco |first=Andrew |date=1995 |title=The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil |location=New York |publisher= Farrar, Stauss and Giroux |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Donne |first=John |date=2003 |title=John Donne's Sermons on the Psalms and Gospels |location=Ed. Evelyn M. Simpson. Berkeley |publisher= University of California Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Fussell |first=Paul |date=1975 |title=The Great War and Modern Memory |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press, 2000|ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Gellner |first=Ernest |date=1975 |title=Legitimation of Belief |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Gribbin |first=John |date=1995 |title=Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality: Solving the Quantum Mysteries |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown & Co |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Hassan |first=Ihab |date=1987 |title=Hemingway: Valor against the Void |journal=American Fiction 1915-1945 |location=Ed. Harold Bloom. New York |publisher= Chelsea House |pages=285-299 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1991 |title=A Clean, Well-Lighted Place |journal=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages=29-33 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=2003 |title=The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Finca Vigia ed. New York |publisher= Scribner |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1984 |title=Ernest Hemingway on Writing|location=Ed. Larry W. Phillips. New York |publisher= Touchstone |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms|location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 2003 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1940 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls|location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 2003 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1986 |title=The Garden of Eden|location=New York |publisher= Scribner |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1925 |title=In Our Time|location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1995 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=2009 |title=A Moveable Feast|location=Ed. Sean Hemingway. Restored ed. New York |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1991 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro |journal=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages=3-28 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1926 |title=The Sun Also Rises |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 2006 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=Geraint Vaughan |date=1964 |title=The Art and Truth of the Parables: A Study in Their Literary Form and Modern Interpretation |location=London |publisher=S.P.C.K |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Jung |first=Carl |date=1955 |title=Man in Search of a Soul |location=New York |publisher=Harcourt |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |title=King James Bible |date=2008 |location=Ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press | ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Kroupi |first=Agori |title=The Religious Implications of Fishing and Bullfighting in Hemingway's Work |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=28.1 |date=2008 |pages=107-121 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Kucich |first=John |title=Intellectual Debate in the Victorian Novel: Religion, Science, and the Professional |journal=The Victorian Novel|date=2001| location=Ed. Deirdre David. Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=212-233 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Küng |first=Hans |date=1980 |title=Does God Exist: An Answer for Today |location=Garden City |publisher=Doubleday |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Lewis |first=Pericles |title=Churchgoing in the Modern Novel |journal=Modernisn/mondernity |volume=11.4 |date=2004 |pages=669-694 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lucáks |first=Georg |date=1971 |title=The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature|location=Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge |publisher=MIT Press |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=1997 |title=The Gospel According to the Son |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=1991 |title=Harlot's Ghost: A Novel |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Co. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=2003 |title=The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman and Michael Lennon |date=2007 |title=On God: An Uncommon Conversation |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Marx |first=Karl |date=1975 |title=''A Contribution of the Critique of Hegel's'' Philosophy of Right. ''Introduction.'' |journal=Early Writings |location=Ed. Lucio Colletti. London |publisher=Penguin |pages=243-258 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |title=New English Bible, The [NEB] | date=1970 | location=Ed. Samuel Sandmel. Oxford Study Edition. New York |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |title=The 1928 Book of Common Prayer | date= 1993 |location=New York |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Popkin |first=Richard H. |date=2003 |title=The History of Skepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Sipiora |first=Phillip |title=Norman Mailer: Metaphysician at Work |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2.1 |date=2008 |pages=502-506 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Stewart |first=Matthew |date=2001 |title=Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway's In Our Time |location= Rochester|publisher=Camden House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Stolzfus |first=Ben |title=Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature Studies |volume=42.3 |date=2005 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Stoneback |first=H.R. |title=Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway's Sacred Landscapes |journal=Religion and Literature |volume=35.2/3 |issue= |date=2003 |pages=49-65 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |date=1988 |title=Alienation |journal=New Dictionary of Theology |location= Ed. Sinclair B. Ferguson, David F. Wright, and J.I. Packer. Downers Grove, IL |publisher=Inter-Varsity Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Wagner-Martin |first=Linda |date=1987|title=Introduction |journal= New Essays on The Sun Also Rises |location= Cambridge|publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Whalen-Bridge |first=John and Angela Oon |title=Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998-2008 |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=3.1 |date=2009 |pages=212-243 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Yancey |first=Philip |date=2002 |title=What's So Amazing About Grace? |location= Grand Rapids|publisher=Zondervan |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}

[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-06T22:09:15Z

Sherrilledwards: Trying to fix NEB references in endnote n

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{{byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place"? Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative "make sense of life?" Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Raymond_M._Vince}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot's Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lucáks|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular. {{sfn|Lucáks|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .”{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include Buske,{{sfn|Buske|2002}} Stoneback,{{sfn|Stoneback|2003}} Lewis,{{sfn|Lewis|2004}} Stolzfus,{{sfn|Stolzfus|2005}} Adamowski,{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} Kroupi,{{sfn|Kroupi|2008}} Bernstein,{{sfn|Bernstein|2008}} Cappell,{{sfn|Cappell|2008}} Sipioria,{{sfn|Sipiora|2008}} and Whalen-Bridge and Oon.{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2009}}}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===

Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen Chadwick{{sfn|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in Hans Küng.{{sfn|Küng|1980}} Spirituality and modern man are the focus of Carl Jung.{{sfn|Jung|1955}} ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by Ernest Gellner,{{sfn|Gellner|1975}} while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in Paul Fussell.{{sfn|Fussell|1975}} ''Cognitive minority'' is used by Peter Berger,{{sfn|Berger|1969}} while Berger & Luckmannuse terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe.'' {{sfn|Berger|1966|p=98-100}} ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in Lewis.{{sfn|Lewis|2004}}}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box."{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,"{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,"{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord” (1928 31).{{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer,{{sfn|1928 Book of Common Prayer|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling."{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,"{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale."{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|King James Bible|2008|p=Ecc. 1.4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, butHenry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.”{{sfn|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities." {{sfn|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. {{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance
as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace
in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself."{{sfn|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{sfn|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.”{{sfn|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology.{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|1970|p=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee," we red this: "He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' "After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade."{{sfn|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them."{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,"{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift."{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium." This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows," Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God,Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to“his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer and Lennon|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement."{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer and Lennon|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman."{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . .“ You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back."{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity."{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

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* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |location=4th ed. Princeton |publisher= Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Bawer |first=Bruce |date=1998 |title=Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity |location=New York |publisher= Three Rivers |ref=harv }}

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* {{cite book |last=Berger |first=Peter L. |date=1969 |title=A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural |location=Garden City |publisher= Doubleday |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Berger |first=Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann |date=1966 |title=The Social Construction of Reality |location=Garden City |publisher= Doubleday |ref=harv }}

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* {{cite book |last=Delbanco |first=Andrew |date=1995 |title=The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil |location=New York |publisher= Farrar, Stauss and Giroux |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Donne |first=John |date=2003 |title=John Donne's Sermons on the Psalms and Gospels |location=Ed. Evelyn M. Simpson. Berkeley |publisher= University of California Press |ref=harv }}

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* {{cite journal |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1991 |title=A Clean, Well-Lighted Place |journal=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages=29-33 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=2003 |title=The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway|location=Finca Vigia ed. New York |publisher= Scribner |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1984 |title=Ernest Hemingway on Writing|location=Ed. Larry W. Phillips. New York |publisher= Touchstone |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms|location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 2003 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1940 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls|location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 2003 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1986 |title=The Garden of Eden|location=New York |publisher= Scribner |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1925 |title=In Our Time|location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 1995 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=2009 |title=A Moveable Feast|location=Ed. Sean Hemingway. Restored ed. New York |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1 |date=1991 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro |journal=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |location=New York |publisher= Scribner |pages=3-28 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-mask=1|date=1926 |title=The Sun Also Rises |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 2006 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Jones |first=Geraint Vaughan |date=1964 |title=The Art and Truth of the Parables: A Study in Their Literary Form and Modern Interpretation |location=London |publisher=S.P.C.K |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Jung |first=Carl |date=1955 |title=Man in Search of a Soul |location=New York |publisher=Harcourt |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |title=King James Bible |date=2008 |location=Ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press | ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Kroupi |first=Agori |title=The Religious Implications of Fishing and Bullfighting in Hemingway's Work |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=28.1 |date=2008 |pages=107-121 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Kucich |first=John |title=Intellectual Debate in the Victorian Novel: Religion, Science, and the Professional |journal=The Victorian Novel|date=2001| location=Ed. Deirdre David. Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |pages=212-233 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Küng |first=Hans |date=1980 |title=Does God Exist: An Answer for Today |location=Garden City |publisher=Doubleday |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Lewis |first=Pericles |title=Churchgoing in the Modern Novel |journal=Modernisn/mondernity |volume=11.4 |date=2004 |pages=669-694 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lucáks |first=Georg |date=1971 |title=The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature|location=Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge |publisher=MIT Press |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2007 |title=The Castle in the Forest |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=1997 |title=The Gospel According to the Son |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=1991 |title=Harlot's Ghost: A Novel |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Co. |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1|date=2003 |title=The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman and Michael Lennon |date=2007 |title=On God: An Uncommon Conversation |location=New York |publisher=Random House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Marx |first=Karl |date=1975 |title=''A Contribution of the Critique of Hegel's'' Philosophy of Right. ''Introduction.'' |journal=Early Writings |location=Ed. Lucio Colletti. London |publisher=Penguin |pages=243-258 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |title=New English Bible, The [NEB] | date=1970 | location=Ed. Samuel Sandmel. Oxford Study Edition. New York |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |title=The 1928 Book of Common Prayer | date= 1993 |location=New York |publisher= Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Popkin |first=Richard H. |date=2003 |title=The History of Skepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle |location=Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1976 |title=Hemingway's First War |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Sipiora |first=Phillip |title=Norman Mailer: Metaphysician at Work |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=2.1 |date=2008 |pages=502-506 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Stewart |first=Matthew |date=2001 |title=Modernism and Tradition in Hemingway's In Our Time |location= Rochester|publisher=Camden House |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Stolzfus |first=Ben |title=Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature Studies |volume=42.3 |date=2005 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Stoneback |first=H.R. |title=Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway's Sacred Landscapes |journal=Religion and Literature |volume=35.2/3 |issue= |date=2003 |pages=49-65 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Vince |first=Raymond M. |date=1988 |title=Alienation |journal=New Dictionary of Theology |location= Ed. Sinclair B. Ferguson, David F. Wright, and J.I. Packer. Downers Grove, IL |publisher=Inter-Varsity Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Wagner-Martin |first=Linda |date=1987|title=Introduction |journal= New Essays on The Sun Also Rises |location= Cambridge|publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Whalen-Bridge |first=John and Angela Oon |title=Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998-2008 |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=3.1 |date=2009 |pages=212-243 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Yancey |first=Philip |date=2002 |title=What's So Amazing About Grace? |location= Grand Rapids|publisher=Zondervan |ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

{{Review}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}

[[Category:Articles (MR)]]

The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer

2025-04-06T22:04:12Z

Sherrilledwards: 3rd try fix NEB

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{{byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|abstract=In both Ernest Hemingway and [[Norman_Mailer|Norman Mailer]], their rhetoric announces a new beginning, a new Genesis. But, unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of God, providence, a rational universe. But how does the residual God-language in Hemingway and Mailer actually work? Is grace—a crucial Judeo-Christian reality—to be replaced by ''nada'', signaled in Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place"? Or, in an absurd post-human world, does narrative "make sense of life?" Is God-language part of the rhetoric of modernity—or its antithesis? Paradoxically, both may be true.|url=https://projectmailer.net/pm/Raymond_M._Vince}}

{{cquote|This book is fiction. But there is always a chance that such a work of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.|author=Ernest Hemingway|source=''A Moveable Feast''{{sfn|Hemingway|2009|p=230}}}}

{{cquote|[I]t is the author’s contention that good fiction—if the writer can achieve it—is more real, that is, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than non-fiction. . . . novelists have a unique opportunity—they can create superior histories out of an enhancement of the real, the unverified, and the wholly fictional.|author=Norman Mailer|source=''Harlot's Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1287-8}}}}

{{dc|dc=W|hat is the rhetoric of modernism?}} Is the Modern novel “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God?”{{sfn|Lucáks|1971|p=88}} If so, why do religious themes still appear? Are they the Cheshire Cat’s grin, nostalgic echoes of a vanished age, cosmic footprints left in the wasteland of Modernity? Or are they rumors of grace? How does God-language function in the work of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and Norman Mailer (1923–2007)?

This issue could be a problem in narrative theory, constructing modernity, contemporary religion, or all three. In any case, why does religion persist? Why is some God-language compatible with Modernity—and some not? I shall first discuss the rhetoric of Modernism, then Modernity and disenchantment, before moving on to my selection of God-language of Hemingway and Mailer. I briefly emphasize the sacred, indeterminacy, and grace.{{pg|331|332}}
=== The Rhetoric of Modernism ===

The epigraphs speak of the role of fiction in our lives. For Mailer, paradoxically, good fiction nourishes “our sense of reality.” For Hemingway, fiction “may throw some light” on the facts. The strange relationship between fiction and fact seems linked with Modernism—and the problematic nature of “reality.” I call this the ''rhetoric'' of Modernism. But is that rhetoric—seen in the Modern novel—necessarily linked with secularization? Pericles Lewis suggests that it may be the following:

<blockquote>If the novel is indeed the art form of secularization, “the representative art-form of our age” in Lukács’s words, and if modernity is indeed a secular age, then we could expect the modern novel to be doubly secular. {{sfn|Lucáks|1971|p=93}} Many major novels of the early twentieth century do in fact seem to represent a “world that has been abandoned by God,” inasmuch as virtually none of their characters expresses any concrete religious faith and no gods intervene in the course of the action.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}}{{efn|“Novels of the period that do address theological themes more directly seem to be excluded from the modernist canon precisely because of their express interest in religion . . .”{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=690}}}} </blockquote>

But does the novel represents a world “abandoned by God”—or is this statement more hyperbole than argument? Either way, how do we explain these vestiges of God-language? Is this merely etymology—like using ''Wednesday'' without necessarily invoking the god ''Woden?'' I suggest that God-language has more significance than that. But what is the rhetoric of Modernism? Here are two samples.

We start with Hemingway and ''In Our Time.''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} At the end of chapter two’s vignette, we read three sentences: “There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} The impact of war, fragmenting of form, juxtaposing of birth and death, distancing of trauma, the phrase ''scared sick looking'' stripped of its subject, the absence of any clear antecedent to the pronoun ''it,'' the naturalistic symbol of rain—combine in Hemingway’s language. Shaped by modern warfare, in a collage of disturbing images, here is Hemingway’s innovative rhetoric. In its way, ''In Our Time'' is as significant culturally as T. S. Eliot’s ''The Waste Land'' (1922), published three years earlier. Matthew Stewart suggests that this “remains the most insistently experimental of all his books because it is the product of the one {{pg|332|333}}period of his life when he participated intently in a literary scene, and the temper of that milieu was distinctly modernist.”{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=12}}

Two decades later, a parallel to Hemingway’s rhetoric is Norman Mailer’s ''The Naked and the Dead.''{{sfn|Mailer|1948}} Toward the end of the novel, we find two sentences: “Quite naturally he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”{{sfn|Mailer|1948|p=602}} Like Hemingway, the language is sparse and fragmented, the tone objective. There is human rationality in one sentence and violent, irrational death in the next. Yet, the irrationality of Lt.Hearn’s death comes through the exercise of all too rational choices by others—those who designed and manufactured the machine-gun and bullet, the Japanese soldier who fired the fatal shot, and the murderous machinations of Staff Sergeant Croft that led Hearn to that particular point.

The Great War was to be “the war to end all wars.” History demonstrated that proposition to be false. World War Two extrapolated dramatically the horrors of 1914–1918, particularly in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Here is revealed a demonic rationality, applied with supreme efficiency to the killing of human beings—on a scale not before seen. Label it postmodern, post-Christian, or post-human, there is no doubt that the world described by Hemingway had—by the time of Mailer—become ''more'' irrational, sinister, and far darker. As goes the world, so goes literary form.

These vignettes, a quarter century apart, illustrate the Modernist rhetoric of Hemingway and Mailer. For both authors, they mark a beginning, a revelation, a new Genesis. One thing is clear: unlike the biblical Genesis, there is an absence of traditional concepts of God, a sense of Providence, a rational universe. We have ''left'' the Garden. Many have written on religious themes in Hemingway and in Mailer: certainly, the themes exist and can be discussed.{{efn|Recent articles include Buske,{{sfn|Buske|2002}} Stoneback,{{sfn|Stoneback|2003}} Lewis,{{sfn|Lewis|2004}} Stolzfus,{{sfn|Stolzfus|2005}} Adamowski,{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} Kroupi,{{sfn|Kroupi|2008}} Bernstein,{{sfn|Bernstein|2008}} Cappell,{{sfn|Cappell|2008}} Sipioria,{{sfn|Sipiora|2008}} and Whalen-Bridge and Oon.{{sfn|Whalen-Bridge|2009}}}} But I would like to examine the overall ''matrix'' of Modernity in which those themes are embedded, focusing on the ''disenchantment'' of the world.

=== Modernity and Disenchantment ===

Lewis says the modern novel is “doubly secular,” representing a world vacated by God.{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=673}} The representation is both thematic and formal. Much has been written about the changing status of religion in the era of Modernity—a period, shall we say, from roughly 1900 to the present day—and many{{pg|333|334}} concepts have been used, such as secularization, loss of faith, ironic cultures, cognitive minorities, the disenchantment of the world, the sacred and the profane, and modernist literature as religion substitute. As one might expect, the literature is considerable.{{efn|Owen Chadwick{{sfn|Chadwick|1975}} is a useful introduction to ''secularization.'' Modernity and Christianity are discussed in Hans Küng.{{sfn|Küng|1980}} Spirituality and modern man are the focus of Carl Jung.{{sfn|Jung|1955}} ''Ironic cultures'' are dealt with by Ernest Gellner,{{sfn|Gellner|1975}} while ''irony'' as a product of the Great War is in Paul Fussell.{{sfn|Fussell|1975}} ''Cognitive minority'' is used by Peter Berger,{{sfn|Berger|1969}} while Berger & Luckmannuse terms such as ''deviance, heresy,'' and ''symbolic universe.'' {{sfn|Berger|1966|p=98-100}} ''Disenchantment of the world'' goes back to Max Weber in the 1940s. Weber, ''sacred'' and ''profane,'' and modernism as ''religion substitute'' are described in Lewis.{{sfn|Lewis|2004}}}} After all, Modernity and the disenchantment of the world is a thing of complexity.{{efn|Secularization in England, for instance, involves Darwin’s ''The Origin of Species'' (1859) and the literary responses: including Tennyson’s ''In Memoriam'' (1850), Arnold’s ''Dover Beach'' (1867), and the novels of George Eliot such ''Silas Marner'' (1861) and ''Middlemarch'' (1871–72). Eliot translated two works of German radical theology, D. F. Strauss’ ''Life of Jesus'' (1835, ET 1846) and Feuerbach’s ''The Essence of Christianity'' (1841, ET 1854). Willey (1964), Brown (1969) and Chadwick (1975) are useful guides, as is Kucich (2001).}} But it cannot be undone.

For Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud onwards,“disenchanting” the world spelt the end of religion—the “death” of God—a process thought to be inevitable. The journey begins with Martin Luther in 1517, or earlier in Renaissance humanism. The rise of modern science, symbolized by ''On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres'' by Copernicus in 1543, is crucial: science advanced as it was able to provide mathematical explanations for phenomena attributed to God or magic. That reality is the heart of disenchantment. Skepticism, a rationalistic response to the Wars of Religion, was also significant. No wonder Popkin says, “Luther had indeed opened a Pandora’s box."{{sfn|Lewis|2004|p=15}}

During the Enlightenment, the American and French revolutions attacked the Divine Right of Kings. While their respective revolutionary documents retain a “veneer of religion,"{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=39}} this effectively begins the modern secular state. In 1843, Karl Marx, following Feuerbach in arguing that “Man makes religion,"{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243}} in memorable phrases described religion as “the heart of a heartless world” and “the opium of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=244}}{{efn| “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the ''opium'' of the people."{{sfn|Marx|1975|p=243-244, emphasis in original}}}} After 1917, the Soviet Union mandated the “death” of God. A host of epistemological challenges—Descartes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg—obviously contributed to this process we call modernity.

But religion persisted. Partly, this was an aggressive counter-revolution, including Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), with his ''Syllabus of Errors'' (1864) and Definition of Papal Infallibility (1871), and Protestant fundamentalism, seen in ''The Fundamentals'' (1910–1915) and proclaiming another form of infallibility—an inerrant text. Within the infallible world of Marxist-Leninism, religion grew, maybe because it was attacked. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,Marx’s critique of religion has lost much, but not all, of its potency. The secularization thesis requires modification.

An example of such modification is Peter Berger’s book, ''A Rumor of Angels.''{{sfn|Berger|1969}} My title alludes to his book, and to a recent usage by Philip Yancey (1997). Berger suggests that there exist certain “signals of transcendence”—such as the human desire for order—that point beyond a purely naturalistic reality.{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}{{efn| “By signals of transcendence I mean phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=53}}}} However, as Berger recognizes, for most people the{{pg|334|335}} predominant reality is still that secular mind-set. Thus, religious language is used by a “cognitive minority." {{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}{{efn| “By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society. Put differently, a cognitive minority is a group formed around a body of deviant ‘knowledge.’”{{sfn|Berger|1969|p=6}}}} This position is uncomfortable, needing to be buttressed socially and epistemologically. But the position exists.

Today, the relationship between religion and modernity is more nuanced than in the naturalistic Nineteenth Century. We recognize a wide spectrum from faith through doubt to atheism. But at the risk of simplification, there seem to be two main approaches. For conservative Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be expressed as a ''rejection'' of modernity, using an either/or approach to truth. For those with liberal perspectives on Christianity and Judaism, religious commitment may be regarded as ''complementary'' to modernity, utilizing a both/and approach to truth. That complementary perspective may remind us of wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics. This is not simply a literary trope.{{efn| Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg revealed the inescapable reality of indeterminacy in our world.}} In both humanities and physical sciences, there will be no return to rigid determinism.

=== God-Language in Hemingway: "Scared Stiff Looking at It" ===

It is easy to list God-language in Hemingway: deciding significance is harder. The title of ''In Our Time''{{sfn|Hemingway|1925}} came perhaps unconsciously from an English Prayer: “Give us peace in our time, O Lord” (1928 31).{{efn|“Give us peace in our time, O Lord” can be found in the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer,{{sfn|1928 Book of Common Prayer|p=31}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}}}} In this work, however, there is little overt God-language, maybe the awkwardness of Krebs with his mother’s sentimentalism in a “A Soldier’s Home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=76}} or the unnamed soldier’s fearful bargaining with God in the accompanying vignette.{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=67}} Perhaps the final story, “Big Two-Hearted River,” with Nick Adams dealing with an indeterminate trauma by returning to Nature, has echoes of Genesis in its simple declarative sentences, “It was a good camp” and “It was a good feeling."{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=147}} The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it,"{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} could be seen as a ''signifier'' of modernism, much as the final words of Kurtz, “The horror, the horror”{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=178}} from ''Heart of Darkness.'' Conrad’s words, Cedric Watts suggests, “serve as a thematic nexus, a climatic but highly ambiguous utterance which sums up, without resolving, several of the paradoxical themes of the tale."{{sfn|Conrad|2008|p=215}} A quarter century later, Hemingway’s ''In Our Time'' offers yet another such thematic nexus.

In ''The Sun Also Rises,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1926}} two themes are balanced. One epigraph,“You are all a lost generation,” from Gertrude Stein, suggests that the narrative is a war novel, although the war seems absent. The other epigraph from Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most secular passage in the bible, includes the words, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth {{pg|335|336}}abideth for ever."{{sfn|King James Bible|2008|p=Ecc. 1.4–7}} This theme, the continuation of the earth, is a metonymy for the continuation of humanity. Linda Wagner-Martin suggests this theme “maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}{{efn|“Considering the two epigraphs in tandem, no reader could stay focused for long on the ‘lost generation’ image. The tone of the second epigraph is clearly positive; it is much longer; it maintains its dominance.”{{sfn|Wagner-Martin|1987|p=6}}}} but presumably Hemingway knew it from the 1662 English BCP. Significantly, peace and Lord are not in Hemingway’s title: certainly, his parents saw little traditional faith in this work. In 1932, Hemingway admits “Ezra Pound discovered I lifted from the English Book of Common Prayer.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1984|p=90}} Maybe this motif is an attenuated form of providence.

There is a kind of balance in Jake and Brett’s conversation following the Romero ''debacle.'' Brett’s decision “not to be a bitch” represents she claims, “sort of what we have instead of God."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} Jake counters, “Some people have God, quite a lot,” but Brett replies, “He never worked very well with me."{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=249}} The famous ending is poised among irony, ambiguity, and pessimism. Partly a verdict on Jake and Brett’s tragic relationship, it becomes a larger evaluation of life. With Brett, we like to believe we can have “a damned good time;" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}} we hope the world is a place of order. But in answer, the novel offers only indeterminacy: a delicate balance between covert God-language and hard-boiled modernism. We are left with Jake’s summary: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?" {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=251}}

''A Farewell to Arms''{{sfn|Hemingway|1929}} marks a new skepticism, with Hemingway’s famous dismissal of war’s high diction as “obscene.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=185}} It was also a low point for Hemingway, considering his divorce from Hadley in 1927 and his father’s suicide in 1928. As Reynolds argues, Hemingway frames the Italian retreat from Caporetto as a ''synecdoche'' of a larger human defeat.{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=274}} This, says Reynolds, was the “final conclusion” of the war generation {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}{{efn|“Some discovered such a truth in the trenches during the war; others discovered it in war prisons or in front of firing squads. Hemingway did not finally understand it until ten years after the war.”{{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=282}}}} But what of the priest in ''A Farewell to Arms:'' is the Abruzzi a kind of sacred space? It might be, butHenry cannot seem to get there. As a modern man, he seems to be “banished.”{{sfn|Civello|1994|p=78}}{{efn|“The Abruzzi, however, is an anomaly in the modern world, and the Christian order it represents no longer exists beyond its boundaries. Frederick Henry, the epitome of the modern displaced hero, yearns nostalgically for that ‘other country’ yet finds himself ‘banished’ from it by his own modern sensibilities." {{sfn|Civello|1994|p=77-78}}}} Heroism still exists, but the irrationality of modern warfare—or the cruelty of Fate—renders it tragically absurd. Toward the end, we read

<blockquote>If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterwards many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. {{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=249}} </blockquote>

There is a foreshadowing of Catherine’s death, but the words have more resonance
as a statement on human destiny. Yes, there may be a rumor of grace
in the phrase, “many are strong at the broken places,” but the pervasive tone{{pg|336|337}} is bleak. There seems an ''absence'' of God-language, providence, any orderly universe. So, have we not left the Garden for the wasteland?

Indeed we have. But this diction is ''still'' theological language. Mankind’s estrangement from the Garden may be part of Modernism, but it is at the heart of the biblical story—and another element in ''disenchantment.'' In Genesis, we read that “the LORD God drove [Adam] out of the garden of Eden,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|New English Bible, The [NEB]|1970|p=Gen. 4.12}} Here is ''alienation''—being a stranger, a fugitive. Linked with Hegel and early Marx, alienation has deep biblical roots. In God-language, all are sons of Adam and brothers to Cain.{{efn|“Alienation is the experience of being a stranger, ‘away from home,’ estranged from others and from oneself . . . Alienation is also a theme of the Scriptures as a whole. Adam’s eviction from Eden, Cain’s wandering as a fugitive, Israel’s servitude in Egypt and later exile in Babylon. All symbolize an alienation that is the lot of mankind. . . . from the 1940s, the word was used increasingly to describe social and cultural estrangement. Influences include the vast disorientation caused by World War II, and the writings of Weber, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. A major source was the newly discovered Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Marx. . . . Alienation, an important concept in social psychology, has its roots in a basic theological reality: that mankind is alienated from God, his fellows, and himself."{{sfn|Vince|1988|p=15}}}} Here, the rhetoric of modernism and Genesis intersect: Garden and wasteland belong ''both'' to a biblical vocabulary and ''also to'' the vocabulary of modernity.

Among Hemingway’s short stories from the 1930s, we have a profound existential parable, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In the café, old man and waiters stave off life’s ''nada'' experience. In his own, each character faces his ''nada'' or emptiness, seen in other Hemingway stories from the period.{{efn|“Nowhere is this ''nada'' (the void, emptiness, meaninglessness) more insistent than in Hemingway’s two African stories, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ and ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro.’” {{sfn|Stolzfus|2005|p=206}}}} The story echoes Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son—and Cain’s angry question to God.{{efn|The Parable begins, “There was once a man who had two sons . . .”{{sfn|1970|p=Luke 15.11}} Both stories have simplicity and profundity. Both seem answers to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Both have strong Existentialist perspectives. “The parable, then, is a microcosm of the human situation . . . a picture of man’s alienation from his essential self, from the world, and from society, and is a crystallization of our human condition.”{{sfn|Jones|1964|p=184}}}} The “clean, well-lighted place” seems a poignant ''synecdoche'' for the Garden, representing the search for a lost home, the quest for order. By story’s end, the older waiter better understands the old man’s despair, answering positively Cain’s ancient question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 4.9}} Yet, the waiter ''demythologizes'' the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary, central to the God-language of Catholicism.{{efn|In a 1941 essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) introduced ''demythologizing,'' influential in the post-war theology.{{sfn|Brown|1969|p=187}}}} Surely, this representation is the ''absence'' of God-language? After all, absence is said to be characteristic of modernism—we think of Hemingway’s iceberg motif. The waiter has replaced ''grace''—and every other theologically significant word—with ''nada,'' nothingness, emptiness. God is dead. Grace has left the building. Nihilism rules.

Yet, two points may be made. First, the Judeo-Christian tradition yields many parallels to the ''nada'' experience: the reflections of Job; the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53; the ocean as symbol of chaos, “the dark night of the soul” from the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross; the ''via negativa'' of medieval theology; the abandonment of Christ on the Cross; creation as the transforming of an earth “without form and void."{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 1.1–2}} Before Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes, we read, “Emptiness, emptiness, says the Speaker, emptiness, all is empty."{{sfn|1970|p=Ecc. 1.2}} Much of modern{{pg|337|338}} theology has a strong existentialist flavor.{{efn|Shaped by Heidegger, Sartre and post-war anomie, Existentialism has earlier sources in the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and is seen in theologians Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. On American Existentialism, Adamowski{{sfn|Adamowski|2005}} is crucial.}} Yes, two different “language games” are being played here, but they are not necessarily incompatible with one another.

The second point on the ''nada'' experience concerns the structure of the story. Several times the bleakness of ''nada'' seems mitigated. Immediately following the stark words, "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee," we red this: "He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=33}} A smile and steaming coffee chase away the ''nada'' experience—for a moment. Then the waiter reaches home, ''nada'' reappears and kills his sleep until daylight. But again, a form of rhetorical balance, for the older waiter dismisses the severity of ''nada.'' "After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it."{{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=33}} So, the presence of ''nada'' is not necessarily the negation of God-language.

In For ''Whom the Bell Tolls,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1940}} title and epigraph are from poet priest, John Donne (1572–1631), but God-language again is infrequent. Written close to Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our Time” speech (September 1938), Hemingway rejects appeasement.{{efn|“As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade."{{sfn|Auden|2007|p=95}}}} Quoting Donne, “No man is an ''Iland,'' intire of it self . . . I am involved in ''Mankinde,''” Hemingway commits to the struggle of the Spanish people.{{sfn|Donne|2003|p=243}} Baker describes the novel as “a study of the betrayal of the Spanish people both by what lay within them and what had been thrust upon them."{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=241}} By 1940, the battle against Fascism in Spain was lost: the greater war was just beginning. Hemingway’s narrative has relevance for both.

The religious context of the Spanish War was tragic: the Church was allied with the Fascists. Anselmo, the old man, hopes to be forgiven for the sin of killing. But forgiven by whom? “‘Who knows?’” he says, “‘Since we do not have God here anymore, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.’”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} Jordan asks, “‘You have not God anymore?’” Anselmo refers not to the Left’s “death” of God but to the ancient problem of ''theodicy,'' replying,

<blockquote>“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.
“They claim Him.”
“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=41}} </blockquote>{{pg|338|339}}

After making love with Maria, Jordan criticizes his political ''clichés.''{{efn|“Hard-shell Baptist” was applied to the Primitive Baptists, a group dating from early nineteenth century splits.}} “He had gotten to be as bigoted and hide-bound about his politics as a hardshelled Baptist. . . . Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=164}} Finally, in the novel’s last few pages, Jordan reflects on facing death “with religion” and “taking it straight.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}} Here Jordan’s perspective, echoing Feuerbach and Freud, is typical of the rhetoric of modernism. “Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1940|p=468}}

There is more God-language that could be quoted. The child’s prayer in “Now I Lay Me,"{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=276-282}} the Crucifixion told by the Roman soldiers in “Today Is Friday,”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=271-273}} the quest for an original paradise in ''The Garden of Eden,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1986}} but these examples may be sufficient. In summary, what can be said? The rhetoric of Modernism is integral to Hemingway’s writing: always and everywhere, his God-language is embedded in that cognitive framework. Inherently, modernism is interrogative and indeterminate—suspicious of dogma, skeptical of organized religion. The fragment, “Scared stiff looking at it”{{sfn|Hemingway|1925|p=21}} may serve as a signifier of modernity, revealing Hemingway’s vision of a world “that was adrift."{{sfn|Stewart|2001|p=113}} Modernism presents a hard-boiled picture of the world, stripped of traditional certainties, bereft of religion’s “opium." This was the world of which, like the dying Harry in “Snows," Hemingway must write.{{efn|“Harry thinks, “There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events . . . He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1991|p=17}}}} This is the world we have inherited.

But what is the ''cognitive'' status of Hemingway’s God-language? Is it merely an ironic use of ancient myths—seen in T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and others—with no underlying substance? Hemingway had little sympathy with the moralistic faith of his parents, leaving their Congregationalism for Catholicism. Morris Buske suggests that his father’s “corporal punishment with a religious orientation” may have contributed to his “psychic difficulties.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=86}} Indeed. We might also envisage some religious impact. Perhaps there is a psychoanalytic link between the Liberal Protestant Fatherhood of God,Nietzsche’s “death of God,” and the suicide of Hemingway’s father.{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} So, is Hemingway’s God-language ironic, emotional and bereft of cognitive reality?{{pg|339|340}}
Following Buske and Stoneback, I suggest not. Buske suggests that Hemingway’s early experiences “led him to embrace Catholicism.” {{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}} H. R. Stoneback denies that Hemingway’s Catholicism was only nominal:

<blockquote>Hemingway’s personal religious pilgrimage takes him through a rejection of Puritanism, and far beyond the social-gospel brand of Protestantism, into an ever-deepening discovery of Catholicism. This personal faith-journey is manifest . . . with the aesthetic and historical and spiritual sensibility centered in ritual and ceremony (e.g., most obviously, as in the world of ''Toreo,'' or the bullfight; and, less obviously, in the vision of life-as-pilgrimage). Hemingway’s rootedness in the sacramental sense of experience, in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity, grows ever deeper.{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} </blockquote>

Stoneback’s argument is plausible. Yes, Hemingway’s rhetoric is always unsentimental, open-ended, embedded in modernity: that is hard to dispute. Cleanth Brooks said Hemingway confined himself to“his secular terms.”{{efn|“The doctor’s suicide shook Hemingway: it added another painful memory to those from years of powerful mixed emotions. As in other times of need he turned to the faith he had embraced, rather than to that of his father, for support.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=87-88}}}} I think that he went further. Granted, in Hemingway there is no parallel to T. S. Eliot’s pilgrimage from the agnosticism of ''The Waste Land'' (1922) to the faith of ''Four Quartets'' (1943). But then most of the Modernists felt unable to follow Eliot in his particular journey. Nor is there any equivalent to Mailer’s final book, ''On God,''{{sfn|Mailer and Lennon|2007}} his “quest into the nature and context of ‘reality,’ particularly non-material entities”—in effect “Mailer’s metaphysics.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2008|p=503}}

If Hemingway had not encountered physical and psychological problems, if his memory had not been gravely impaired, what at the end would he have written? We can never know what ''might'' have been. But Stoneback puts it well, “Pilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel, is at the center of Hemingway’s religious vision and his work from his earliest stories to the final, unfinished and posthumously published novels and memoirs.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=49}} With great skill, and with a high degree of indeterminacy,Hemingway’s rhetoric appears poised between the language-game of God and that of modernism. Some claim the two games are inherently incompatible. I argue otherwise.

Hemingway did struggle against nihilism, at times teetering on the edge of chaos. Of his writing, Ihab Hassan says, “literary statement approaches{{pg|340|341}} the edge; language implies the abolition of statement."{{sfn|Hassan|1987|p=299}} Yet, Hemingway also redefines the ''sacred,'' reformulating ''grace'' beyond the borders of organized religion. Without ceasing to be a modernist, he is also deeply rooted, as Stoneback claims, “in the incarnational paradigms of Catholic Christianity.”{{sfn|Stoneback|2003|p=50}} Like Kierkegaard, his God-language is covert and subtle; but it does exist.{{efn|“It was long believed in many quarters that Hemingway’s early Protestantism made him a “nominal” Catholic, pressured by Pauline into joining the Church. The opposite may be true: his early experiences led him to embrace Catholicism. He had found his father’s faith cold and unsatisfying; he had known his grandfather’s belief in a God of warmth and trust and now sought it for himself.”{{sfn|Buske|2002|p=85}}}}

=== God-Language in Mailer: Protagonist in the Cosmic Struggle ===

With Norman Mailer, we have a different rhetorical situation. Partly, this difference is a time shift: Hemingway was shaped by the Great War, Mailer by World War II, the generation haunted by the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Hence, there is a religious shift: Hemingway grew up in Oak Park Protestantism before moving to Catholicism, whereas Mailer’s roots were in the Judaism of Brooklyn. To characterize Mailer’s God-language, I use the phrase ''protagonist in the cosmic struggle.'' J. Michael Lennon says that Mailer’s writing is “shot through with his ideas on God and the Devil and the struggle in which they are locked.”{{sfn|Mailer and Lennon|2007}}

''Harlot’s Ghost''{{sfn|Mailer|1991}} has myriad themes: betrayals ideological and sexual, haunting of sons by fathers, the “compartmentalization of the heart.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=13}} Using the CIA as a ''synecdoche'' for a world of modernity, Mailer shows the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to be extraordinarily indeterminate. That indeterminacy applies to language but also to the ''realpolitic'' world of intelligence. But perhaps the most fascinating example of God-language appears in the last few pages of ''Harlot’s Ghost.'' It comes from Hugh Montague, codename “Harlot”—a mysterious protagonist loosely based on a real person, the enigmatic onetime poet and chief of CIA Counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917–1987).{{efn|There is no consensus on Angleton. Was he the greatest practitioner of counter-intelligence, or, like Kim Philby in British Intelligence, was he a Russian mole? Mailer describes him as “a most complex and convoluted gentleman."{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1132}}}} Harlot speculates that the whole cosmos revealed in modernity fossils, evolution, solar system—to be God’s “‘majestic cover story,’”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280}} an exercise in ''disinformation'' and misdirection from the Lord of Spies, Jehovah.

<blockquote>“‘What would I do if I were Jehovah . . . . I have created him, after all, in My image, so he will wish to discover My nature in order to seize My throne. Would I ever have permitted such a contract in the first place, therefore, if I had not taken the wise precaution to fashion a cover story?’ . . . .“ You can say the universe is a splendidly worked-up system of disinformation calculated to make{{pg|341|342}}us believe in evolution and so divert us away from God. Yes, that is exactly what I would do if I were the Lord and could not trust My own creation.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1280-1}} </blockquote>

Mailer presents an astonishing degree of humor, irony, and ambiguity, worthy of Nabokov. Can we take Harlot’s speculation seriously? Mailer provides a complex play of ''metaphor, metonymy,'' and ''metaphysics'' in three arenas—character and plot in the modern novel; theology and cosmology in the universe; and the quest for meaning among the contingencies of life.

Sixteen years later, Mailer returns to these themes in his final book, ''On God.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} There, among other topics, he discusses modern science, fundamentalism, and intelligent design, bringing insight into the nature of plot in the novels of Henry James, Hemingway, James Joyce, and others.{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=143-161}} He suggests, for example, that James and Hemingway were “avatars of Intelligent Design”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=150}} whereas Joyce “plays at the very edge of chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=151}} It is no coincidence that Mailer moves smoothly between God-language and an analysis of plot in the modern novel—for two reasons.

First, his central theological motif is that God is an ''artist''—a limited Creator doing the best he can. At the start of ''On God,'' Mailer says, “I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=5}} He draws, therefore, an analogy between the Creator and the creative artist—like Hemingway, James, Joyce, or himself. Second, Mailer recognizes that literary ''plot'' is a synecdoche for the larger search for meaning, religion being only one manifestation of that search. Just as Mailer is suspicious of a ''plot'' that is too contrived in a novel, so he is also wary of a ''faith'' in God that is too dogmatic, not sufficiently aware of the indeterminacy and chaos of existence.{{efn|“The reason I don’t like plots to prevail is that they don’t allow the figures in the book, the characters, to push their own limits to the point where they make the plot unacceptable and so throw the design into chaos."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=151}}}} Such fundamentalism misreads the nature of the world, keeping human beings infantile, even dog-like.{{efn|“The worst to be said about Fundamentalism is that it reduces people to the reflexes of a good dog. . . . No great writer ever came out of Fundamentalism, nor any great scientist."{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71-72}}}}

Mailer’s ''The Gospel According to the Son''{{sfn|Mailer|1997}} is an intriguing work. Rewriting the gospel in first person, he retells the story of Jesus, ''focalizing'' the inner thoughts of the Son of God. To call this narrative bold is an understatement, but the book is more successful than many critics allow. Here, implicitly comparing gospel and story, Jesus compares his account with the canonical gospels:

<blockquote>While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and {{pg|342|343}}John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage. Their words were written many years after I was gone and only repeat what old men told them. Very old men. Such tales are to be leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows about in the wind.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=3-4}}</blockquote>

A kind of mirror image to Gospel is Mailer’s ''The Castle in the Forest.''{{sfn|Mailer|2007}} In reconstructing the beginning of Hitler, Mailer explores two opposing entities—God and the Devil—and their cosmic struggle. Like ''Gospel,'' this work questions the boundaries of language, plumbing deep realms of cosmology. Mailer is writing literature, but he is also writing theology. Not all theology arises in seminary, church, or synagogue: God-language may emerge even in the world of modernity.

But here we may find a cognitive divide on the nature of language. Theological fundamentalists believe language to be essentially literal, ''determined'' for all time, even restricted to the letters of the King James Bible of 1611. Theological liberals, on the other hand, will see language as metaphorical, ''indeterminate,'' always in flux. As with Hemingway, Mailer’s God language would seem incompatible with that fundamentalist perspective, but compatible with a more liberal viewpoint.

Mailer asks hard questions. In ''Gospel,'' he asks if there is a God who is more than nostalgia enshrined in ancient words. In ''Castle,'' he asks if we shall avoid the lure of Fascism and another Hitler. Is there a God who speaks to modernity and the evils of the Holocaust? With D.T. as narrator in ''Castle,'' we encounter a Nazi officer in the SS. Then we discover he is also “an officer of the Evil One.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Mailer recognizes the risk that he runs, “Given the present authority of the scientific world, most well-educated people are ready to bridle at the notion of such an entity as the Devil.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=71}} Robert Begiebing comments, “The suspension of disbelief required is audacious.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} But Mailer reminds us that our modern world has little understanding of Hitler, “the most mysterious human being of the century.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=72}}

As in ''Gospel'' ten years earlier, ''The Castle'' in the Forest operates in two distinct realms, “the metaphysical and the mundane.”{{sfn|Begiebing|2007|p=216}} Metaphysical language is hard to decode. In fact, in the 1920s Logical Positivists denied ''any'' meaning to such metaphysical language, a view later modified by{{pg|343|344}} Karl Popper. God and Satan “appear” in a strange No Man’s Land, at the frontiers of human experience. But thinkers from Augustine to Einstein have recognized that strangeness, using tropes of analogy and metaphor.

However, boundaries are always problematic, be they political, racial, or metaphysical. God-language is found at the ''liminal'' places of life, border regions of indeterminacy and danger. Such language is disturbing, even dangerous. It disturbs our expectations, confusing our maps of modernity. Max Born the physicist said, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe, and the vaguer and cloudier.”{{sfn|Born|1951|p=277}} If that be true of physics, other disciplines certainly share that mystery. If all human language exhibits indeterminacy, then religious language will have it in spades.

Since the days of the Puritans, the place of Satan in American culture has become drastically attenuated, the current strength of Fundamentalism notwithstanding. A survey of this trend in American Literature is Andrew Delbanco’s ''The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost their Sense of Evil.'' {{sfn|Delbanco|1995}} He speaks of a dialectic in our culture “between the dispossession of Satan under the pressure of modernity and the hunger to get him back."{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=234}} Whatever our beliefs on his ''being,'' Satan’s ''function'' in society is fairly easily charted, as America moved from belief to irony. Mailer is a protagonist in this cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, but using the metaphors of modernity.{{efn|Delbanco suggests that modernity “has doomed us to see the world through metaphors that cannot be ratified by any appeal to transcendence.”{{sfn|Delbanco|1995|p=224}}}} However, Mailer leaves us with indeterminacy. We learn that what “enables devils to survive is that we are wise enough to understand that there are no answers—there are only questions.”{{sfn|Mailer|2007|p=467}}

=== Conclusions: The Sacred, Indeterminacy, and Grace ===

There is still much left to explore. Both men redefine the realm of the ''sacred'' outside the boundaries of the Church. They also redefine the profane, in language and belief. There are theological precedents, but much of organized religion finds such redefinition problematic, particularly fundamentalists. For Hemingway, the sacred is found particularly in the natural world—rumors maybe of the original Garden? In Mailer, I am not sure: maybe the sacred is found in the moral struggle—the eternal battle between God and the Devil.

''Indeterminacy'' and suspicion of rigid dogma are also at the heart of both men’s writing, as in Modernity itself. ''Grace,'' however, is a problem within{{pg|344|345}} modernity: “The world starves for grace,” says Yancey.{{sfn|Yancey|2002|p=40}} But grace is a problem also for contemporary religion, as Bawer and Yancey demonstrate. Grace may have its antonym in Hemingway's ''nada'' or Mailer’s “absurdity” of life. Grace may be implicit in Mailer’s belief that, “stories bring order to the absurdity."{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=156-157}} Good fiction, says Mailer, is “nourishing to our sense of reality.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=1299}} Stories, after all, have always been part of our lives. Novelist and theologian Fred Buechner has said, “Listen to your life . . . in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”{{sfn|Buechner|1983|p=87}} In this world of modernity, maybe it is through fiction and narrative that we still hear rumors of grace.

=== Notes ===

{{notelist}}

===Citations===

{{Reflist}}

===Works Cited===

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{{Refend}}

{{Review}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rumors of Grace: God-Language in Hemingway and Mailer}}

[[Category:Articles (MR)]]