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}}
+'''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}}
+punitive masculine trials such as boxing and everyday acts that he deems to manifest bravery. He deems courage, bravery and the honor they entail indispensable to attaining the primeval promise of being. As he clearly expresses it in ''Cannibals and Christians,'' “Masculinity is not something given to you, something you’re born with, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor,” that is, with courage.{{sfn|Mailer|1966|p=201}}
+Of course, by the same logic of gender potential, neither is femininity given. All writers, male or female, struggle to define themselves within their given gender. They make daunting forays into the vast mysterious terrains of the human condition through language and imagination housed in the unimaginable complex of the body. If authentic, these forays put all serious writers in extremis. It reminds one of Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that “[o]ne is not born a woman, but rather becomes, a woman.”{{sfn|Beauvoir|1993|p=267}} Admittedly, there may be differences between Mailer and Beauvoir’s statements, but the general thrust of them is identical. They basically attest that mere physiological givens or societal determinations of one’s sex do not totally determine one’s gender possibilities.
+From the depths of the preceding elucidation of Mailer’s interpretation of Hemingway’s discipline surfaces a specific philosophy of creative writing. I detect in it the upsurge of an integrative mind-body continuum, anchoring the writer squarely in our world and conferring upon him or her the courage to be and to write. The truth of mind-body wholeness belongs to the sphere of the writer’s lived experience and produces its own distinctive ontology and resultant epistemology.
+'''XI. THE BODY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS'''
+<blockquote>
+[T]he human being even as he or she dreamed or theorized was unmistakably a bag of guts, with motor devices and pleasure seeking organs attached.{{sfn|Bowie|1993|p=15}}
+</blockquote>
+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}}
+eaten by a lion on the banks of the Congo—who could fail to notice that it was Hemingway’s own lion waiting down these years for the flesh of Ernest until an appropriate substitute had at last arrived?”{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=92}}
+'''XII. CONCLUSION'''
+I trust I have shown Mailer’s visionary interpretation and appropriation of Hemingway comprises amode of influence whose thrust and effect are genuinely original and creative. As such, it is a theoretical influence. By theoretical I would like to communicate mainly the etymological sense of the adjective in Greek as ''theoria,'' which conveyed an act of viewing or beholding, of having a vision that entitles the beholder to holding or possessing what is beheld in his or her own way. So it may be “Hemingway all the way,” but magically in Mailer’s own entirely visionary interpretive way with all its startling twists and turns, leading us always to territories best known to him.
 === Notes ===