The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer: Difference between revisions
APKnight25 (talk | contribs) Page 178 added. |
APKnight25 (talk | contribs) Added page 179. |
||
| Line 176: | Line 176: | ||
What gives pleasure to the critic in a reader may give anxiety to the poet in him, an anxiety we have learned, as readers, to neglect, to our own loss and peril. This anxiety, this mode of melancholy, is the anxiety of influence, the dark and daemonic ground upon which we now enter.{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=25}} | What gives pleasure to the critic in a reader may give anxiety to the poet in him, an anxiety we have learned, as readers, to neglect, to our own loss and peril. This anxiety, this mode of melancholy, is the anxiety of influence, the dark and daemonic ground upon which we now enter.{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=25}} | ||
</blockquote>{{pg|178|179}} | </blockquote>{{pg|178|179}} | ||
Elaborating further on it, he adds, “Poetic influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets—always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=30}} He stresses, “The history of fruitful poetic influence . . . is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=30}} | |||
These are strong arguments, well conceived and precisely stated. Far reaching in their ramifications, they sound severe, determinant, even formidable and daunting. All the same, I acknowledge their validity in a psychoanalytically inflected general theory of literary influence as Oedipal in its origin and unfolding in one of the multiplicity of forms. Bloom underlines as given the enormous influence writers undergo as they internalize their literary culture and the accompanying psychological guilt that it causes. Citing Mailer as an example, Bloom informs us, | |||
<blockquote> | |||
“The burden of government,” [Samuel] Johnson brooded,“is increased upon princes by the virtues of their immediate predecessors,” and he added: “He that succeeds a celebrated writer, has the same difficulties to encounter.” We know the rancid humor of this too well, and any reader of Advertisements for Myself may enjoy the frantic dances of Norman Mailer as he strives to evade his own anxiety that it is, after all, Hemingway all the way.{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=28}}, emphasis added. | |||
Oddly, in “First Advertisement for Myself,” the introductory piece to ''Advertisement for Myself,'' what Bloom perceives as “frantic dances” would seem like ritualistic dances. Mailer performs them as he prepares to affect a kind Jungian metanoia to re-form his divided psyche to bring about self-healing and renewed creative energy. The “rancid humor” of it derives from the struggles of the psyche of a writer torn apart between a sense of utter defeat and megalomania. “Defeat has left my nature divided,” declares Mailer, “my sense of timing is eccentric, and I contain within myself the bitter exhaustions of an old man, and the cocky arguments of a bright boy. So I am everything but my proper age of thirty-six, and anger has brought me to the edge of the brutal.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=17}} On the other hand, he immediately confesses, “In sitting down to write a sermon for this collection, I find arrogance in much of my mood,” which is an understatement.{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=17}} | |||
</blockquote>{{pg|179|180}} | |||
=== Notes === | === Notes === | ||