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

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 We have seen that in Mailer’s philosophy of the art of creative writing, the desired developmental process of becoming a man is one of battles fought well and honorably fought. Such freely chosen fights are adventures into the unknown; but whether won or lost they always bestow upon the fighter writer a brave new way of being human. Of the role of the body within such{{pg|190|191}}
+fights and its vicissitudes, Mailer wrote, “Writing impinges on that body; writing depends ultimately on that body.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=126}}“I believe that is one of the reasons I’ve been so interested in prizefighters,”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=125-6}} Mailer discloses. One may expand the import of his disclosure to bullfighters and other athletes where Hemingway’s well-known concept of courage as “grace under pressure” applies.
+I see the philosophical sense of the concepts of mind-body wholeness as ''embodiment'' in Hemingway’s “discipline” in Mailer’s work as having the signifying function of transcendence. It goes beyond what Mailer derisively thought would be “to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself,” which
+in and of itself, is an extraordinary activity.{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=125}} Mailer goes as far as saying, “I think one has to develop one’s physical grace. Writers who are possessed of some may tend to write better than writers who are physically clumsy. It’s my impression this is so.”{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=77}} And it may well be so, because one may advance the argument that the unconscious is well anchored in the body and regulates vital functions, including the brain.
+Mailer tells us “Hemingway suffered from the honorable need to be the equal of his male characters, particularly since he used the first person so much."{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=95}} I believe that is because the mind and body for Hemingway also acted as an indivisible whole within the context of lived experience. To a large extent, this is also true of Mailer’s fictional characters such as Stephen Rojack in ''An American Dream,'' even though Rojack is not directly drawn from his creator’s experiences. The psycho-philosophical inferences of the body in writing privilege it as a totally integrated psychosomatic agency of apprehension of our world. It would seem to me, in the inherent interest of rendering human existence more comprehensible, it may well be that on a certain plane of integration Hemingway and Mailer found the aim of their fiction was to recognize the indissoluble unity of the organic, the inorganic, and the psychical in our bodily presence as the fundamental of mode of human presence in the world. As French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu also has noted, the “body is the bedrock of the mind."{{sfn|Mailer|2003|p=61}} As such, the body calls forth an infinite series of corporeal relationships with the world between, which immensely enriches Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of fiction.
+It is of interest to note that even on the level of fantasy, for Mailer the body finds its nearly mystical expression in corporeal identification and communion with Hemingway in a roundabout way. In ''The Fight,'' his book on the Muhammad Ali-George Forman fight in Zaïre, Mailer writes, “To be{{pg|191|192}}
 === Notes ===