The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself: Difference between revisions

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-“Sometimes, you can tell in advance you’re headed for trouble. Obviously, with a book about ancient Egypt, everyone would have been happier if some unknown author had written it. There might have been then a lively curiosity about the author. Who is this unknown and most curious talent? One hurdle I had to overcome with Ancient Evenings was knowing in advance that a lot of people would pick it up and spend the first fifty pages saying, ‘What is Norman Mailer up to?’”
+“Sometimes, you can tell in advance you’re headed for trouble. Obviously, with a book about ancient Egypt, everyone would have been happier if some unknown author had written it. There might have been then a lively curiosity about the author. Who is this unknown and most curious talent? One hurdle I had to overcome with Ancient Evenings was knowing in advance that a lot of people would pick it up and spend the first fifty pages saying, ‘What is Norman Mailer up to?’” {{sfn |Mailer|2003| p= 54}}
+</blockquote>
+Hemingway, spurred on by Leach’s insulting request as well as Aldous Huxley’s derogatory critique of him as uneducated and boorish (“Foreheads Villainous
+Low”), twisted his book into something more, which critics felt rendered it less: a tangential descent into a wildly allusive and allegorical discussion of the problems with art production, specifically the distraction and alienation forced on a working writer who must function as author (a discursive role as well as an object for consumption) before an obtuse and increasingly hostile public. This discussion takes the form of nine Dantean dialogues between an Author who, if you distinguish him from the narrator and from Hemingway at all (which initial reviewers, with the exception of Malcolm Cowley, did not) seems to come out of nowhere in order to ridicule and verbally abuse a prudish and hypocritical Old Lady, who emerges out of an imagined “crowd” to become, temporarily, a character, who allegorically stands for “the public.” The dialogues intrude seemingly at random in the first third of the book, after which they disappear entirely, where upon Hemingway returns his focus to the writing/ bullfighting/ art/ production conceit for the remainder of the book.
+With the sudden intrusion of characters (the Old Lady and the Author her presence creates), the ostensibly non-fiction Death in the Afternoon takes on the first of several additional genres: dramatic fiction—more specifically, a morality play in nine acts (or nine circles) in which the Author, in return
+{{pg|263|264}}
+for being rendered schizophrenic by the presence of Old Lady, drags her through Hell. The characters are very much mutual and mutually interdependent constructs (without the Old Lady, there is no Author), something
+else the book’s initial critics missed, lacking access to Leach’s letter, or perhaps predisposed to agree with Huxley’s assessment of Hemingway’s lack of education and subtlety.
+''Death in the Afternoon’s'' nine Author/Old Lady dialogues function as a kind of Greek chorus, as each provides a space for reflection on the nonfiction bullfighting discussion that precedes it. These sections each describe a specific kind of danger to which both art and artist are susceptible within capitalist production; by content and structure these sections echo, with minimal fanfare, the nine circles of Hell from Dante’s ''Inferno''.
+The fanfare is minimal but literal. The entrance of the Old Lady and the descent into hell are heralded by a trumpeter at the end of Chapter 6: “[T]he trumpet sounds and the very serious, white-haired, wide old man, his name is Gabriel, in a sort of burlesque bullfighter’s suit . . . unlocks the door of the toril and pulling heavily on it runs backward to expose the low passageway" {{sfn |Hemingway |1932| p=61-2}} In the next chapters, Hemingway will literally burlesque the Armageddon wrought on art by the capitalist system of production, performing his erudition (in what he will reveal as a direct response to Huxley) by alluding to several dramatic forms and specific dramatic texts, including the morality play (one more burlesque than apostrophic), tragedy, and Romeo and Juliet (specifically the line “He jests at scars who never felt a
+wound”). His purpose, although never more overt than the passing reference to Gabriel and the Café Fornos (from forno, Italian for “Hell”) (105), is to illustrate that authorship (as opposed to writing) is a burlesque performance,
+a low-comedy, symptomatic of a system of decay and putrefaction. He invites the careful reader to compare his Author to Dante’s Virgil (addressed as “guide,” “Master,” and “Author” [1.85]) and to thus perceive the analogy and its scathing commentary on the degradation wrought on art and artist by the mechanisms of popular consumption. <sup>1</sup>
+Although Hemingway lifts the structure of his dialogues from Dante, the specific sins do not map exactly. Most of Hemingway’s “sins” correspond directly to those described in Inferno’s circles, but he orders them differently as required by his own analysis. Once past the “Limbo” of the uncommitted (Chapters 1–6) {{sfn |Dante|1994| ch=1-6}}, the narrator states that, “At this point it is necessary that you
+{{pg|264|265}}
+see a bullfight” (63), and the Old Lady emerges from the imaginary public “crowd,” and they begin their descent through the following circles:
+: Chapter 7: Decadent Artists (Dante 3: Gluttons)
+: Chapter 8: The Mean (Dante 4: Misers)
+: Chapter 9: False Messiahs, including Authors (Dante 6/8: Heretics/ Fraud)
+: Chapter 10: The Lustful (Dante 2: The Carnal)
+: Chapter 11: Husbands who lead dangerous lives (no correspondence)
+: Chapter 12: Literary Critics (Dante 5: The Wrathful/ Sullen)
+: Chapter 14: Impresarios, traitors to art (Dante 8/9: Flatterers/ Traitors)
+: Chapter 15: Crimes against nature (Dante 7: The Violent) <sup>2</sup>
-{{sfn |Mailer|2003| p= 54}}
-</blockquote>
 === Notes ===