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{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer}} | {{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer}} | ||
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{{Byline |last=Nakjavani |first=Erik |abstract=An examination of influence theory making intelligible the nature of Hemingway's unusual influence over Mailer’s imagination. This analysis shows how Hemingway’s influence on Mailer characterizes itself as a highly differentiated case. Mailer’s speculation on the nature of Hemingway’s freely chosen, everyday exposure to death is reminiscent of Martin Heidegger’s notion of “being-toward-death.” It does not connote a morbid obsession with death but rather a maximally authentic “way-of-being” human. Imagination constituting the highest faculty of the mind in romanticism, Mailer's lament for Hemingway turns out to be a vibrant imaginative song of life but in a different register, Hemingway’s own. |url=http://prmlr.us/mr04nak}} | |||
{{ | {{Quote|[T]here is nothing in the critical field that should be of greater philosophical interest or prove more rewarding to analysis than the progressive modification of one mind by the work of another.{{sfn|Valéry|1972|p=241}} }} | ||
==I. Prologue== | |||
{{dc|dc=N|orman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway.}} This phrase brings into proximity two prominent twentieth-century American writers. The phrasal contiguity of the two names suggests an arrangement that at first glance conceals more than it reveals. For, upon reflection, their proximity sketches out areas that often tend toward more pronounced darkness rather than light. One repeatedly thinks about Hemingway’s influence on other writers. Colleagues at various academic conferences refer to it. It appears in scholarly journals, popular magazines, and newspapers. Still one does not readily see what might constitute Hemingway’s influence on Mailer, that is, aside from what amounts to and is derided by some critics as Mailer’s imitative behavior in the worst meaning of the adjective. | |||
mean, then, that the conjunction “and” in my initial verbless and therefore as yet inactive sentence misleadingly sets forth commonalities between the two writers? I think not. Because I would expect one may at least adumbrate a theoretical common ground between them. The conjunctive “and” will exceed its usual grammatical function and eventually carry out an exceptional task. The promise of latent and multiple vistas of the connection between Mailer and Hemingway, which as yet remain unknown, will still become known. However, the fulfillment of this promise requires wide-ranging conceptual meditations and may take a long and nonlinear course. The meditative approach I am proposing will offer an inkling of possible signifying links between Mailer and Hemingway. | Mailer’s imaginal thematics,which often touches on the phantasmagoric, his baroque stylistics, and his distinctive intellectual concerns, all seem to be divergent from those developed and practiced by Hemingway. Does this {{pg|163|164}} mean, then, that the conjunction “and” in my initial verbless and therefore as yet inactive sentence misleadingly sets forth commonalities between the two writers? I think not. Because I would expect one may at least adumbrate a theoretical common ground between them. The conjunctive “and” will exceed its usual grammatical function and eventually carry out an exceptional task. The promise of latent and multiple vistas of the connection between Mailer and Hemingway, which as yet remain unknown, will still become known. However, the fulfillment of this promise requires wide-ranging conceptual meditations and may take a long and nonlinear course. The meditative approach I am proposing will offer an inkling of possible signifying links between Mailer and Hemingway. | ||
Clearly, Hemingway and Mailer’s names are heavily laden with literary, cultural,religious, educational, and socio-political implications. They often connote factual differences, even inevitable conflicts. Consequently, now and again, the differences may seem to be unbridgeable and militate against the prospect of serious comparative studies of the commonalities between the two writers. Since such study endeavors to go beyond wading in the shallows of mere superficial similarities and comparisons, the complexity of its conceptual framework will also proportionally increase. But I would like to go straight to my conclusion and confirm that such a study is indeed realizable, in spite of undeniable obscurities, or paradoxically because of them. For such seemingly impenetrable areas force us to rethink our theoretical guiding principles of literary influence and reconfigure constitutive elements. | Clearly, Hemingway and Mailer’s names are heavily laden with literary, cultural,religious, educational, and socio-political implications. They often connote factual differences, even inevitable conflicts. Consequently, now and again, the differences may seem to be unbridgeable and militate against the prospect of serious comparative studies of the commonalities between the two writers. Since such study endeavors to go beyond wading in the shallows of mere superficial similarities and comparisons, the complexity of its conceptual framework will also proportionally increase. But I would like to go straight to my conclusion and confirm that such a study is indeed realizable, in spite of undeniable obscurities, or paradoxically because of them. For such seemingly impenetrable areas force us to rethink our theoretical guiding principles of literary influence and reconfigure constitutive elements. | ||
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<blockquote> | <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 | “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 (emphasis added).{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=28}} | ||
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}} | 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}} | ||
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Later, as it was his inclination, Mailer extravagantly predicts, “it is my present and future work which will have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=17}} His contradictory statements make intelligible a psychological swing between defeat and a sense of manic exaltation, a type of bipolar depression that he may have shared for sometime and to some degree with Hemingway. They detract from his confidence in his claim of eventual superior influence and puts it in question. But I would say his vacillations in self-assurance are much to his credit. Because, sad to say for him and for us, Mailer came to acknowledge later in life that his prediction that his work will have “the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years” did not transpire—at least not in any appreciable way. | Later, as it was his inclination, Mailer extravagantly predicts, “it is my present and future work which will have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=17}} His contradictory statements make intelligible a psychological swing between defeat and a sense of manic exaltation, a type of bipolar depression that he may have shared for sometime and to some degree with Hemingway. They detract from his confidence in his claim of eventual superior influence and puts it in question. But I would say his vacillations in self-assurance are much to his credit. Because, sad to say for him and for us, Mailer came to acknowledge later in life that his prediction that his work will have “the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years” did not transpire—at least not in any appreciable way. | ||
On a certain plane of critical thought, one may argue ''Advertisements for Myself'' constitutes Mailer’s own treatise on influence. In a letter to George Plimpton, Hemingway refers to the book as “the sort of ragtag assembly of his [Mailer’s] rewrites, second thoughts and ramblings ''shot through with occasional brilliance”'' | On a certain plane of critical thought, one may argue ''Advertisements for Myself'' constitutes Mailer’s own treatise on influence. In a letter to George Plimpton, Hemingway refers to the book as “the sort of ragtag assembly of his [Mailer’s] rewrites, second thoughts and ramblings ''shot through with occasional brilliance”'' (emphasis added).{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=912}} If by “ragtag” Hemingway meant that the books contents were diverse and lacking in cohesion in appearance or composition, that might well have been true. But the fact remains that Mailer intentionally structured it as such, as he did, say, in ''Cannibals and Christians.'' But Hemingway’s remark on the text being “shot through with occasional brilliance” is right on the mark. Hardly noticeable, Mailer’s attempts in this text culminate in discovering and establishing a viable, working out a dialectical synthesis between himself and Hemingway as men and writers. Mailer’s articulation of the subject falls into that hard earned occasional brilliance of the text. Did Hemingway realize this in his own way? It is entirely possible. | ||
Mailer’s own sense of “defeat” will not cease tormenting him unless and until this Hemingway matter is truly settled once and for all. “Every American writer,” writes Mailer plainly, “who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=19}} “Faena” is an unusual but pertinent word to use here in connection to Hemingway and the way Mailer proposes to deal with his contemporaries. Faena denotes a series of final ritual passes at the bull that a matador carries out in bullfighting. It occurs immediately before the ''kill,'' the moment of truth, to highlight a matador’s skill. On the other hand, to perform “a faena which borrows from the self-love of a{{pg|180|181}} | Mailer’s own sense of “defeat” will not cease tormenting him unless and until this Hemingway matter is truly settled once and for all. “Every American writer,” writes Mailer plainly, “who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=19}} “Faena” is an unusual but pertinent word to use here in connection to Hemingway and the way Mailer proposes to deal with his contemporaries. Faena denotes a series of final ritual passes at the bull that a matador carries out in bullfighting. It occurs immediately before the ''kill,'' the moment of truth, to highlight a matador’s skill. On the other hand, to perform “a faena which borrows from the self-love of a{{pg|180|181}} | ||
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Hemingway style” connotes at the same time a moment of pride in the truth of accomplishment as well as exhibition narcissism and a touch of brutality. | Hemingway style” connotes at the same time a moment of pride in the truth of accomplishment as well as exhibition narcissism and a touch of brutality. | ||
The main point, however, is Mailer laying claim to Hemingway’s vision through the agency of his own interpretation of it. It will make it possible for him to identify with Hemingway for better or worse and for good and for keeps. Mailer tells his readers, “I have come finally to have a great sympathy for The Master’s irrepressible tantrum that he is the champion writer of this time, and of all time, and that if anyone can pin Tolstoy, it is Ernest H.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=19}} | The main point, however, is Mailer laying claim to Hemingway’s vision through the agency of his own interpretation of it.It will make it possible for him to identify with Hemingway for better or worse and for good and for keeps. Mailer tells his readers, “I have come finally to have a great sympathy for The Master’s irrepressible tantrum that he is the champion writer of this time, and of all time, and that if anyone can pin Tolstoy, it is Ernest H.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=19}} | ||
Confined to the framework of this essay, I would propose that ''Advertisements for Myself'' is Mailer’s valiant form of confession and initiation into a visionary hermeneutic appropriation, which approaches a kind of literary conversion. It represents a writer’s self-transformation and regeneration as a genuine response to another writer’s thought and work. It does so, however, without any illusion, compromise, and least of all sentimentality. In no way such conversion implies loss of creative uniqueness and integrity, just the contrary. | Confined to the framework of this essay, I would propose that ''Advertisements for Myself'' is Mailer’s valiant form of confession and initiation into a visionary hermeneutic appropriation, which approaches a kind of literary conversion. It represents a writer’s self-transformation and regeneration as a genuine response to another writer’s thought and work. It does so, however, without any illusion, compromise, and least of all sentimentality. In no way such conversion implies loss of creative uniqueness and integrity, just the contrary. | ||
In relation to Bloom’s general theory of influence, I would relegate Mailer’s hermeneutic appropriation to the “state of exception,” as Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Agamben defines the “state of exception” in reference to Saint Paul’s word “katarego,” roughly translated as “I deactivate” in his First Letter to the Corinthians. Agamben calls it “messianic katarg sis,” or messianic deactivation.{{sfn|Agamben|2005|p=104}} He further clarifies it as a “law that is simultaneously suspended and fulfilled.”{{sfn|Agamben|2005|p=104}} I find it useful to compare “messianic katarg sis” and visionary hermeneutic appropriation, because both concepts fully connote fidelity and flexibility. As Agamben points out, “In our tradition, a metaphysical concept, which takes as its prime focus a moment of foundation and origin, coexists with a messianic concept, which focuses on a moment of fulfillment.”{{sfn|Agamben|2005|p=103-4}} What sanctions such coexistence “is the idea that fulfillment is possible by retrieving and revoking the foundation, by coming to terms with it.”{{sfn|Agamben|2005|p=104}} | |||
'''VIII. MAILER’S VISIONARY INTERPRETIVE APPROPRIATION AND THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX: “THE STATE OF EXCEPTION”''' | '''VIII. MAILER’S VISIONARY INTERPRETIVE APPROPRIATION AND THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX: “THE STATE OF EXCEPTION”''' | ||
In an interview, Mailer scholar and critic Michael Lennon elicited from Mailer the following keen remarks on the perception of his relationship to Hemingway:{{pg|181|182}} | In an interview, Mailer scholar and critic Michael Lennon elicited from Mailer the following keen remarks on the perception of his relationship to Hemingway:{{pg|181|182}} | ||
<blockquote> | |||
The more I know about writing, the more of an achievement Hemingway’s style becomes to me. I know his flaws inside out. I’ve loved and hated him ''as if he were my own father'' for years. There is so much he did for one, so much he didn’t do. ''Truly the relationship you have to him is as a father.'' But he is a remarkable writer. His sense of the English language, I’d say, is virtually primitive in its power to evoke mood and stir the senses (emphasis added).{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=161}} | |||
</blockquote> | |||
Now, one needs to pose the question: Are there detectable traces of an Oedipal guilt and anxiety in visionary hermeneutics appropriation that I attribute to Mailer in relation to Hemingway? My answer is a modified yes. Freudian psychoanalysis teaches us that the Oedipus complex is a universal concept, not merely a limited and localized ''notion.'' As such, it affects us all. However, it would be justifiable to remind ourselves that the degrees of the intensity of Oedipal complex and Oedipal guilt vary widely. The differentials of extent and intensity affect the quality and acuity of the Oedipal complex and therefore its consequences. As Freud in ''Totem and Taboo'' so perceptively recognized, the ritual slaying of the father and the birth of Oedipal guilt among the primitive horde were not the only result or the most consequential of patricide among them. The sons also engaged in vital subsequent rituals of atonement for their irreversible and unforgivable act. So the killing of the primal Father was an immensely ambivalent act. They partook of the totemic meal as an act of atonement. It was not in the least purely a revengeful, cannibalistic devouring of the father’s body. The totemic meal set in motion an unending series of significant revitalizing, self-generating imaginative powers. | |||
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|Hemingway|1935|p=109}}{{pg|184|185}} | |||
oneself within the long line of language artists and still remain free and work out one’s own identity as a unique creative writer. Furthermore, Mailer could not remain passive to the pressure of new visual arts such as the cinema and particularly television and later the internet, all vying for popular attention. They have tended to make serious creative writing less fashionable. | |||
Mailer was most desirous to do creative writing that would simultaneously find a large readership and still shed light on matters hitherto unknown, therefore incomprehensible, even the unknowable.His tendencies to tackle such phenomena generate a knotty problematics for any writer. I would propose that Mailer’s solution to the problematics as well as the troublesome notions of the new versus the traditional was to conceive literature as a type of advanced evolutionary process. There would be stages of development within which each writer finds himself or herself, working out a proper strategy of creative survival. From his vantage point, what would set apart such developmental stages was the difficulty to choose between essential and nonessential among the constitutive elements of the inherited | |||
literary culture and the present literary trends. Therefore, in tandem, he would take from tradition what was essential to him as a starting point. He would then embark upon remaking the inherited literary tradition in his own novel ways. It is a bit similar to the ways that one may receive and dispense of one’s inheritance. In ''Advertisements for Myself,'' Mailer writes, | |||
<blockquote> | |||
[I]f I have one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoyevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read, for it would carry what they had to tell another part of the way.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=477}} | |||
</blockquote> | |||
His gratuitous quick jab at Hemingway not withstanding, in this passage Mailer makes an effort to position himself in the canonical ranks of his literary forbearers and contemporaries. Persuasively, they also include the historian Oswald Spengler and two towering figures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual history—Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. There is an evident suggestion in this selection of illustrious names of the necessity Mailer finds in having a vision of the human world as an integral whole. In the interview “Literary Ambitions,” he tells Lennon,{{pg|185|186}} | |||
<blockquote> | |||
I grew up under the shadow of Marx and Freud. Both men, independently, created an entire world system. They had a vision of all existence. That impressed me immensely. I was nothing if intellectually ambitious when I was young and wanted to come up with similar vision that would comprehend everything (emphasis added).{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=169}} | |||
</blockquote> | |||
Here, Mailer the creative writer meets Mailer the intellectual and putative theoretician. Be that as it may, he was neither a philosopher nor a psychoanalyst, certainly not in their restrictive academic classifications. But as a novelist, he discovered the imaginative unity of the world of fiction, with its unifying imaginative logic and “worldmaking” powers, to use Nelson Goodman’s apt language. In Tolstoy and Stendhal, the imaginal geographies and histories of Russia and France found their well-integrated expressions in the melancholy accounts of war and peace. Spengler traced the history of the Western world in what he considered to be its downward spiral. Proust made the rich domain of memory of things past his own. James Joyce made Dublin the capital of the world through lingual, linguistic, and fictional magic. Karl Marx attributed to the dialectics of matter and history materialism Godlike powers; and Sigmund Freud rendered the unconscious the all but supernatural ruling principle of the psyche. | |||
Each one of the writers cited by Mailer attempted to “totalize” their world, to use a more technical term introduced by Jean-Paul Sartre. In one way or | |||
another, they all allowed Mailer to have a steady view of the world in its totality albeit on the plane of the fictional. In this way, for Mailer, the logic of this literary conception is at one with that of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and history. He believed he had “a coherent philosophy,” as he told Lennon, | |||
adding, “I believe we could start talking about virtually anything, and before we were done I could connect our subject to almost anything in my universe.”{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=170}} For Mailer, this coherent literary philosophy eventually shapes up as a cosmology in ''On God: An Uncommon Conversation.'' | |||
Among his contemporaries, Mailer mentions novelists William Faulkner and Hemingway. They too, each in his own way, valiantly sought to create an imaginal vision of the world that was entire onto itself. Faulkner’s goal was to represent the entire history of a region, the American South, by his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, which simultaneously transcended all historical and geographical boundaries and became universal in its wide array{{pg|186|187}} | |||
of its human implications. And, specifically, there was Hemingway, who as a young writer believed | |||
<blockquote> | |||
[t]he great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after. Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=278}} | |||
</blockquote> | |||
I should think that this passage would be magical music to Mailer’s ears. In my mind I hear the voice of the young Hemingway reaching out to Mailer like a keening over the years and putting a powerful spell on him. It is direct hard-hitting talk about an unspeakably tough profession, which Mailer may well have noticed and admired. For the young Hemingway, it was all a matter of the senses and the comprehension that precedes understanding. It made a fragmented and constantly changing world whole. All that remained for a writer to do was getting it down on paper and making the world whole and entire. It represents the great totalizing function of a writer of fictional knowledge. It is a world in which a writer attempts to capture in language the human way of being. As Martin Heidegger reminds us “language belongs to the closest neighborhood of man’s being.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=189}} | |||
One might speculate that for Mailer the phenomenon of language as omnipresent and in exhaustible matrix of all significations makes the “lifeworld,” ''Lebenswelt'' of German phenomenology, translatable into fiction. The interweave of language and the lifeworld are proportionately boundless. One may judge the enigmatic nature of the affect Hemingway has on Mailer to emanate mostly from his fictional world as total lifeworld. What Mailer wanted was to ''embody'' as much as possible Hemingway’s vision of this lifeworld on various levels of his own psyche and its interpretive work. He did so concurrently as ''viva activa'' and as ''viva contemplativa.'' | |||
Thus Mailer could speak of ''his own world,'' of ''his own philosophy,'' and finally of ''his own cosmology'' and mean it. Writing fiction offered both Hemingway and Mailer means of synthesizing their lived experiential vision. No matter how compressed or dilatory their style might be, or how distinct their thematics the practice of a new aesthetics of lived experience seems to give their{{pg|187|188}} | |||
fiction its unity. In “The Existential Aesthetic,”Mailer maintained that “of all of the philosophies, existentialism approaches experience with the greatest awe: it says we can’t categorize experience before we have experienced it. The only way we’re going to be able to discover what the truth about anything might be is to submit ourselves to the reality of the experience.”{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=187}} Mailer’s statement is true whether one is a religious or an atheistic existentialist, because it is rooted in the phenomenology of experience, within which religious or atheistic experiences also dwell. Similarly, it is true whether the experience is physical, psychical or psychosomatic, as I am convinced all experiences are. This new experiential aesthetic theoretically approximated the Quantum Mechanics of the fictional discourse for Hemingway and Mailer. | |||
Lived experience appears to be an unchangeable given of the human condition, which would fall within the concept of “facticity” ''(facticité)'' of Sartrean philosophy. Paradoxically however, lived experience, ''le vécu'' of French phenomenology, bursts upon creative intentional human consciousness and can turn into the ground of an alternative world of literary alchemy through interpretive activities. Hemingway and Mailer fully comprehended that fiction emerging from lived experience was the Tao of fiction, as it were, dealing as it did with ''the real of the real.'' I believe they both trusted the validity and efficacy of this alternative fictional truth. Mailer found in such fiction what was the possibility of expressing the inexpressible and of comprehending the seemingly incomprehensible in the diverse, specialized conceptual discourses of his time that fragmented our world.{{efn|Please see my essay “The Prose of Life: Lived Experience in the Fiction of Hemingway, Sartre, and Beauvoir.”}} | |||
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 === | === Notes === | ||
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* {{cite book |last=Heidegger |first=Martin |date=1935 |title=Poetry, Language, Thought |translator-last=Hofstadter |translator-first=Albert |location=New York |publisher=Harper Colophon Books}} | * {{cite book |last=Heidegger |first=Martin |date=1935 |title=Poetry, Language, Thought |translator-last=Hofstadter |translator-first=Albert |location=New York |publisher=Harper Colophon Books}} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |chapter=The Art of Fiction |title=Writers at Work |editor-last=Plimpton |editor-first=George |location=New York |publisher=The Viking Press |year=1965 |pages=217–39}} | * {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |chapter=The Art of Fiction |title=Writers at Work |editor-last=Plimpton |editor-first=George |location=New York |publisher=The Viking Press |year=1965 |pages=217–39}} | ||
* {{cite book |last= | * {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-link= Norman Mailer| date=1932 |title=Death in the Afternoon |location=New York |publisher=Scribner}} | ||
* {{cite book |last= | * {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest | title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961 |editor-last=Baker |editor-first=Carlos |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |date=1981}} | ||
* {{cite book |last= | * {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=Green Hills of Africa |location=New York |publisher=Scribner |date=1935}} | ||
*{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam's Sons |date=1959}} | *{{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=Advertisements for Myself |location=New York |publisher=G.P. Putnam's Sons |date=1959}} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=Cannibals and Christians |location=New York |publisher=Dial |date=1966}} | * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-link= Norman Mailer| title=Cannibals and Christians |location=New York |publisher=Dial |date=1966}} | ||