The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself: Difference between revisions

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 problem that those dialogues had the opposite of their intended effect), Mailer indulges in some gymnastic contortions of his own. Despite the fact that the “First Advertisement” does “steal” that page (topically and thematically, however un-self-consciously), and despite the fact that Mailer states how unsuited he is to that sort of self-advertisement, both happen within exactly that sort of advertisement in the service of that sort of advertisement.
-It seems evident that Mailer missed at least the “thinking” part that structured Hemingway’s burlesque according to Dante’s circles of Hell, yet one page further finds Mailer listing his own “sinners” or “criminals,”which map as neatly onto Hemingway’s as Hemingway’s do onto Dante’s: “I must get
+It seems evident that Mailer missed at least the “thinking” part that structured Hemingway’s burlesque according to Dante’s circles of Hell, yet one page further finds Mailer listing his own “sinners” or “criminals,” which map as neatly onto Hemingway’s as Hemingway’s do onto Dante’s: “I must get
 better at overriding the indifference which comes from the snobs, arbiters, managers and conforming maniacs who manipulate most of the world of letters."{{sfn |Mailer|1959| p=22}} Mailer further defines his struggle as wanting to “write so well and so strongly as to call my shot, but unfortunately I may have fatigued the earth of rich language beyond repair”{{sfn |Mailer|1959| p=22}}.Writing “so well and so strongly” was the ambition of both writers. Both discovered they could not call their shots (Hemingway in publishing ''A Farewell to Arms'' and after publishing ''Death in the Afternoon''; Mailer in trying to publish ''The Deer Park''). Both writers acknowledged the contamination and depletion of their central resource, language (Hemingway’s Author addresses this equally overtly, warning that “all our words from loose using have lost their edge."{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=71}} The six and a half declarative pages of Mailer’s First Advertisement thus provide an
 eerie echo of all nine Hemingway dialogues in both generalities (content) and specifics (language)—in the thirty years between their publication, nothing about authorial alienation had changed.
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 {{pg|269|270}}
+moment in Death in the Afternoon. In this “Second Advertisement,” Mailer recounts two experiences: the writing of and the alienation resulting from the success of The Naked and the Dead {{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=91}}. He situates his subject position during its writing as one of forever lost innocence in which writing was a space of “humility” and incredible creative fluidity in which he could “write twenty-five pages of first draft a week” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=91}}, feeling all the while that “it seems to be at dead center” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=92}}. Its success had the lasting effect of catapulting him abruptly into a role for which he was unprepared: “Naturally, I was blasted a considerable distance away from dead center by the size of its success. . .My farewell to an average man’s experience (which he had needed to write the novel to begin with) was too abrupt,” and “I had been moved from the audience to the stage—I was, on the instant, a man—I could arouse more emotion in others than they could arouse in me” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=92}}. Like Hemingway’s writer sitting in the stands, witnessing Hernandorena’s goring, Mailer figures the writer’s role as one of audience member; like Hemingway’s Author in his dramatic dialogue, Mailer figures authorship as a performative role that necessarily alienates author from writer by virtue of relative exposure to the raw materials of writing and the process of production. Both Hemingway and Mailer place tremendous value on the kind of clarity that being “in the audience” allows. But whereas in Hemingway’s time, the illusion remained that struggle could result in victory, by Mailer’s, that illusion had been shattered, at least for Mailer.
+The analog to Hemingway’s response to Huxley may be found in Mailer’s “Third Advertisement,” in which he discusses the mostly negative reviews for his second novel, ''Barbary Shore'' (105–107). The “Fourth Advertisement,” which recounts in substantial detail his experience trying to publish ''The Deer Park'', goes beyond the limits of Death in the Afternoon and serves as the central scene in which readers are finally shown, not told, what it means to be an author.
+The “Fourth Advertisement” stands as the pivotal act in Mailer’s ''Advertisements'', the act that elevates the collection from a “great wreck” and “ragtag collection” {{sfn|Castronovo|2003|p=179}}to a narrative that has its own intrinsic drama, identified by David Castronovo as the “symbolic tale of one tormented consciousness trying to stay alive” {{sfn|Castronovo|2003|p=180}}. Although Mailer’s use of dramatic form is never as overt as Hemingway’s, he too was a product of highly canon-centric literary exposure, and despite his anticipation of full-blown Postmodernism, he remained subjugated to his innate internalization
+{{pg|270|271}}
+of classical Western literary form, in which the physical center of any narrative contains the pivot moment: the moment at which things that were previously only possible become either inevitable or impossible.{{efn|This is perhaps most evident in Shakespeare’s plays, usually occurring in III.ii, and subsequent literary works pre dating Modernism (Dickens’ Bleak House contains a striking meta-example; its central pivot occurs in iambic pentameter), but the phenomenon is hegemonic and not limited to literary prose writing. Bullfights and symphonies work on the same sort of narrative arc.}}
+On the surface, the “Fourth Advertisement” presents in explicit detail the problems Mailer had selling—not writing, selling—''The Deer Park''. From an original editorial objection to six words stems an epic exposition of the underbelly of mid-century American publishing that encompasses eight major publishing houses, censorship, broken contracts, and the
+reverberations of that conflict back into the once-private space of writing in which Mailer experiences an epiphany regarding what is wrong with his novel to begin with—that it takes place in the wrong voice, the wrong tone—resulting in a complete rewrite in which those six words, once so important as to break a relationship with a publisher, ended up changed anyway—but in the service of art.
+The voice in which Mailer recounts this quietly ironic drama is thus the most gentle, most wry, most humble of any of his multiple voices that appear in ''Advertisement for Myself'', for it is in this Advertisement that the reader sees Mailer see the dirty underwear of mid-twentieth century American publishing, and his own implication within it, in stark, revealing contrast to the clean, clean, unbearably clean whiteness of his own commitment to his art. Whatever else one can say about Mailer or Hemingway—and there is much, and much of it not complimentary—the impact of such moments is what elevates words on a page to something more, something that one might imagine can, however briefly, transcend the process of publishing and render its endemic alienation invisible. That it will return is inevitable, but such moments reveal why both men persisted in their struggle.
+At least partially because of the way the profession of authorship worked in the American Twentieth Century, both men hit a point in their careers where they realized that they had surrendered a kind of control over their perceptions and voices, and they both struggled with it with similar formal havoc resulting from that struggle. It is in the very superficiality of their similarities that ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' reveal that they share one profound identity. Despite differing aesthetics and denotative purposes, in these works, both men say, “Wait”; both men say, “No” before giving the lie to their absolutes and saying, “Yes” by publishing these works at all. Both imperative and absolute are revealed by their respective structural forms, and this point serves as well as any as a place to understand
+{{pg|271|272}}
+Hemingway and Mailer as writers, as authors, as public figures, and as creative individuals. ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' are many things, but chief amongst them is this: both are way points of self-definition in a necessarily doomed struggle in which both self-styled heroes nonetheless conclude, “It matters.”
 === Notes ===