The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer: Difference between revisions

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 Thus, killing of the father and partaking of his flesh were essentially rituals of embodying him in order to ''appropriate'' his magical powers as patrimony. Partaking of the totemic meal was then not an altogether negative and negating ritual, far from it. Parallel to patricide, but going in the opposite direction, another force lurked behind the bloody event, which paves the way for a wider hermeneutics of patricide among the primitive horde. The sons also interpreted the killing of the father as rituals of self-preservation and regeneration through corporeal appropriation, integration, and identification with him. Taking the father’s body and blood had all the identifying or distinguishing marks characteristic of the sacrificial and the sacramental.{{pg|182|183}}
+So the emphasis was not entirely on patricide; it rather emphasized rituals of sacral nourishment, embodiment, atonement, salvation, and continuation. At the center of it was, however, the principal of ''redemptive atonement,'' which approximated a mode of “sacrament of reconciliation,” to borrow a term from Catholicism. The redemptive atonement prevented their guilt from bordering on permanent paralysis and enslavement.
+In a parallel fashion, the permanence of the work of art establishes potent traditions that exercise massive powers. Specifically, the literary work of art within a linguistic community tends to firmly fix us within its scriptural power and authority. Such authority parallels that of the slain father of the primal horde, asMailer so astutely discerns in Hemingway.When allied with our own unconscious desires, this authority internalizes itself and becomes psychologically astonishingly potent. It is then likely to lock our literary creative impulses within its sway. More often than not, they succeed in doing so at the expense of our imaginative potentials. Literary traditions imbed and enclose us in clusters analogous to our given genetic matrix with their spider’s web of mysterious determinative effects.
+Consequently, what confronts a creative writer such as Mailer and Hemingway, both of whom desire to establish a new fictional world with its own epistemology. Such a goal can only realize itself through exploration of new themes and their attendant stylistics. The problematics of how to come concurrently into possession of the enormous inherited wealth of tradition and surpass it is a thorny one. For some writers, it becomes an insurmountable problem, because it demands an alchemical inner process of transformation of the writer’s literary inheritance. Ready acceptance or radical rejection of literary influence sets up psychological tensions that surface in a writer’s lived experience as Oedipal guilt and its inevitable anxiety, which Bloom has so brilliantly detected and elucidated.
+From this perspective, visionary hermeneutic appropriation, which through the alchemy of imagination in literature, allows a writer such as Mailer to now and then transform or at a minimum negotiate with the given as the received body of preceding literary works. In this fashion,Mailer could manage to be paradoxically both old and new and come to grips with the determinism of the Oedipal guilt. Symbolically, one might say Mailer appropriated the father’s body, mainly Hemingway’s, in order to support his own life of imagination. Accordingly, Mailer perceived the process not so much
+as emulation but rather what I have called interpretive appropriation.{{pg|183|184}}
+To put it somewhat differently, the warp and woof of influence may be at once ''determining and liberating.'' We are all rooted in this paradox, particularly artists as innovators. At one and the same time, we remain identifiable individuals while we undergo change and evolve or devolve biologically, psychologically cognitively, affectively, and creatively. In its most inclusive meaning, to be susceptible to hermeneutics of influence is tantamount to permitting the inflow of interpretive knowledge to inscribe itself on our consciousness and body, submitting the knowledge thus acquired to further processes of internalization for adoption or rejection.
+As a tribute to Mailer’s own instinctive talent for theorizing, I would imagine that the event of “poetic influence” also makes itself known to him as a specific and singularly privileged modality of rediscovery and reconfiguration of our world as well as remaining totally anchored in it. In Mailer’s case, beyond “poetic influence” there are also strong illuminating instances of reaffirmation of the self in acts of “active imagination,” as Carl Jung has put it. In Mailer’s situation, active imagination is capable of alchemically transforming the self from a state of hermeneutic appropriation to the ecstasy of conversion. In this context, one cannot but wonder if alchemy has not always been fundamentally about the psyche. I would suggest that such alchemical states in creativity are moments of integration of the derivative chronos (clock time) with inner time kairos, combining our present creative impulses and our collective literary past as it projects both into an imagined future. Kairos is the temporal dimension of our hermeneutic appropriation.
+'''IX. CONSTITUTIVE THEORETICAL COMPONENTS OF
+MAILER’S VISIONARY HERMENEUTIC APPROPRIATION'''
+As a relatively young writer, Hemingway wrote, “A thousand years make economics silly and a work of art endures forever, but it is very difficult to do and now it is not fashionable.” But he added, “those who practice it now wish to cease their work because it is too lonely, too hard to do, and it is not fashionable”{{sfn|Mailer|1935|p=109}}{{pg|184|185}}
 === Notes ===