The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer: Difference between revisions
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In my opinion, Mailer committed himself to a visionary fiction constituted by lived experience that was a sort of lingual religion, alchemy, and magic for him and Hemingway. Within such fiction, the body became the nodal point of psychosomatic phenomenon of lived experience, making possible an indissoluble subjective-objective union with the environing world. This ''corporeal'' comprehension presented a universal oneness that verges on the mystical for both writers. The human body as an indivisible continuum is the agency that makes lived experience possible. It legitimately permitted Hemingway and Mailer to go beyond the trappings of realism ''and'' solipsism. Such fiction miraculously invades the interstices of imaginal space-time through its inexhaustible connotative potential of language. Both writers, one after another, discovered in such vision of literature what Carl Jung has called alchemy’s “holy technique.”{{pg|188|189}} | In my opinion, Mailer committed himself to a visionary fiction constituted by lived experience that was a sort of lingual religion, alchemy, and magic for him and Hemingway. Within such fiction, the body became the nodal point of psychosomatic phenomenon of lived experience, making possible an indissoluble subjective-objective union with the environing world. This ''corporeal'' comprehension presented a universal oneness that verges on the mystical for both writers. The human body as an indivisible continuum is the agency that makes lived experience possible. It legitimately permitted Hemingway and Mailer to go beyond the trappings of realism ''and'' solipsism. Such fiction miraculously invades the interstices of imaginal space-time through its inexhaustible connotative potential of language. Both writers, one after another, discovered in such vision of literature what Carl Jung has called alchemy’s “holy technique.”{{pg|188|189}} | ||
'''X. MAILER’S INTERPRETATION OF THE CONCEPT OF MANHOOD HEMINGWAY’S “DISCIPLINE”''' | |||
In ''Advertisements for Myself,'' Mailer writes, | |||
<blockquote> | |||
I was one of few writers of my generation who was concerned with living in Hemingway’s discipline, by which I do not mean I was interested in trying for some second-rate imitation of the style, but rather that I shared with Papa the notion, arrived at slowly in my case, that even if one dulled one’s talent in the punishment of becoming a man, it was more important to be a man than a very good writer, that probably I could not become a very good writer unless I learned first how to keep my nerve, and what is more difficult, learned how to find more of it.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=265}} | |||
</blockquote> | |||
In this passage, Mailer offers an analysis of Hemingway’s “discipline” and makes it his own by living within its punishing demands. The Hemingway “discipline” as he sees it is a matter of existing “in-situation,” of being subject to the givens of a writer’s life, and of transcending them through keeping one’s nerves and engaging in lifelong creative and conciliation with it in sober give-and-take operations. From an existential standpoint, the most exigent aspect of being in-situation ''(in situ)'' describes the condition of unpredictability. Mailer was acutely aware of this condition and its attendant dread. In “Existential Aesthetics,” his interview with Laura Adams, Mailer points out, “we find ourselves in an existential situation whenever we are in a situation where we cannot foretell the end.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=213}} He apprehends being insituation as a courageous existential mode of engaging in acts of becoming a man. These are acts whose foremost quality is unpredictability, which require that our mind and body remain unbreakably whole in an unspeakably broken world. That wholeness comprises the secret of the emergence and survival of a very good writer. | |||
The mind-body continuum as the primal presence of the human presence in the world is then the essence of Hemingway’s discipline. I suspect that | |||
Mailer is empathetically projecting upon Hemingway what he himself already desires or possesses as a large but somewhat slumbering unconscious drive. Accordingly, Mailer believes that for a truly good male writer the most effective way of being a writer is to fulfill the highest potentials of his gender. His life revolves around becoming fully man, subjecting himself to{{pg|189|190}} | |||
=== Notes === | === Notes === | ||