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{{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)?

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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|1970|p=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|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” (Vince 15)~~{{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.

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|1970|p=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|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}}}}

== BELOW NOT YET PASTED TO REAL PAGE ==

=== 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.

=== Notes ===

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* {{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 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 book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |location=4th ed. Princeton |publisher= Princeton University Press |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 }}

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* {{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=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=1974 |title=The Great War and Modern Memory |location=Cambridge |publisher= Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

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* {{cite book |last=Gellner |first=Ernest |date=1975 |title=Legitimation of Belief |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms|location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 2003 |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=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=1984 |title=Ernest Hemingway on Writing|location= Ed. Larry W. Phillips. New York |publisher= Touchstone |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |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=1925 |title=In Our Time|location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 2003 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=~~1925~~ |title=~~In Our Time~~|location=New York |publisher=Scribner~~, 2003~~ |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 ~~book~~ |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |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 |date=1926 |title=The Sun Also Rises |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 2006 |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 |location=Ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press |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 }}

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* {{cite book |last=Lucáks |first=George |date=1971 |title=The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Literature|location=Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge |publisher=MIT Press |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=Harlot's Ghost: A Novel |location=New York |publisher=Random House |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 |date=~~1948~~ |title=~~The Naked and the Dead~~ |location=New York |publisher=~~Rinehart and Co.~~ |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] |location=Ed. Samuel Sandmel. Oxford Study Edition. New York |publisher= Oxford University Press~~, 1970~~ |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 |location=New York |publisher= Oxford University Press~~, 1993~~ |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 }}

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* {{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. |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~~, 1988~~ |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 }}

@@ Line 6: / Line 6: @@
 {{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)?
@@ Line 58: / Line 57: @@
 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|1970|p=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|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” (Vince 15){{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.
+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|1970|p=Gen. 3.23}} that “Cain went out from the LORD’s presence,"{{sfn|1970|p=Gen. 4.16}} becoming a “vagrant and a wanderer on earth."{{sfn|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}}}}
+== BELOW NOT YET PASTED TO REAL PAGE ==
+=== 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.
 === Notes ===
@@ Line 71: / Line 129: @@
 {{Refbegin}}
+* {{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 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 book |last=Baker |first=Carlos  |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |location=4th ed. Princeton |publisher= Princeton University Press |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 }}
@@ Line 91: / Line 155: @@
 * {{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=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=1974 |title=The Great War and Modern Memory |location=Cambridge |publisher= Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}
@@ Line 96: / Line 162: @@
 * {{cite book |last=Gellner |first=Ernest |date=1975 |title=Legitimation of Belief |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |ref=harv }}
-* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1929 |title=A Farewell to Arms|location=New York |publisher= Scribner, 2003  |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=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=1984 |title=Ernest Hemingway on Writing|location= Ed. Larry W. Phillips. New York |publisher= Touchstone  |ref=harv }}
-* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |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=1925 |title=In Our Time|location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 2003  |ref=harv }}
-* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1925 |title=In Our Time|location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 2003  |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 book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |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 |date=1926 |title=The Sun Also Rises |location=New York |publisher=Scribner, 2006  |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 |location=Ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett. Oxford |publisher=Oxford University Press |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 }}
@@ Line 118: / Line 196: @@
 * {{cite book |last=Lucáks |first=George |date=1971 |title=The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Literature|location=Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge |publisher=MIT Press |pages= |ref=harv }}
-* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=Harlot's Ghost: A Novel |location=New York |publisher=Random House |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 |date=1948 |title=The Naked and the Dead |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart and Co. |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] |location=Ed. Samuel Sandmel. Oxford Study Edition. New York |publisher= Oxford University Press, 1970 |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 |location=New York |publisher= Oxford University Press, 1993 |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 }}
@@ Line 140: / Line 224: @@
 * {{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. |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, 1988 |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 }}