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

← Older edit Newer edit →

@@ Line 57: / Line 57: @@
 <blockquote>
 “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>
@@ Line 94: / Line 93: @@
 Once again in the voice of the singular, “I,” the text responds directly and specifically to Aldous Huxley’s accusation that Hemingway was too concerned with “Lower Things” and not nearly well educated enough to speak as a public authority (190). Countering Huxley’s critique, the narrator employs the words “writer” and “writing” twenty two times in the next two pages as though it offers an antidote to the poison of authorship (191–2). By comparison to the kind of performance required by Huxley and, by extension, the entire economic system of cultural capital, the “importance” the
-writer locates in the contrast between Domingo Hernandorena’s dirty underwear and the “clean, clean, unbearably clean "whiteness" of his exposed thighbone is a "higher thing" indeed.
+writer locates in the contrast between Domingo Hernandorena’s dirty underwear and the “clean, clean, unbearably clean "whiteness" of his exposed thighbone is a "higher thing" indeed (20).
+The generic complexity of ''Death in the Afternoon'' reflects that of the multiple roles played by the man, writer, author, authority, and public figure; Hemingway presents the problem of performative authorship in order to
+{{pg|265|266}}
+deconstruct it (and to provide a windmill for his initial critics, all of whom turned their lances on it). With the Author unmasked, ''Death in the Afternoon'' returns to non-fiction prose and remains non-fiction prose until the end. Within the text, at least, the author/writer alienation was resolved; in professional and capitalist practice, however, the problem was irresolvable, and Hemingway would wrestle with it for the remainder of his life.
+The structure of Mailer’s Advertisements forMyself owes nothing to classical literary forms or Western canonical works. Mailer presents his pieces more or less chronologically, asserting his independent authority over his own presentation and performance, his own alienation. Yet its very focus on alienation and concomitant generic hybridity thus seems to owe too much to the shifting terrain of ''Death in the Afternoon'', which is lauded in its opening pages. Whether Mailer borrowed consciously or unconsciously from the formal intricacy of Hemingway’s work, the correspondence of topic, theme, and structural complexity, combined with the early specific mention of ''Death in the Afternoon'', have compelling resonance.
+At the time of Advertisements for Myself, Mailer was in a very similar career moment to Hemingway at the time of ''Death in the Afternoon''. Mailer was slightly older (36; Hemingway was in his early 30s), and he had published three novels to Hemingway’s two. But, like Hemingway, he had fought to get his most recent novel into print the way he wanted it. Like Hemingway, Mailer had edited that novel at the behest of his publisher. Unlike Hemingway’s ''A Farwell to Arms'', which Hemingway and critics alike considered successful,
+even Mailer found his most recent novel, The Deer Park, less than successful. In some ways, The Deer Park’s effect on Mailer’s reputation was as adverse as Death in the Afternoon’s proved for Hemingway’s. For purposes of analysis, then, Advertisements can be considered analogous not to ''Death
+in the Afternoon'' as a whole, but rather to its Author/Old Lady dialogues.
+Mailer’s overt project in constructing ''Advertisements for Myself'' was more pointedly novel-oriented than Hemingway’s. Whereas Hemingway set out to write a bullfighting book and ended up simultaneously producing both that and a strange appendage on alienation, Mailer states that ''Advertisements’''
+purpose was to confront alienation head-on in order to “clear a ground” for his next novel, which was already underway {{sfn | Mailer|1959| p=8}}
+In the opening paragraph of his “Note to the Reader,” which precedes the two Tables of Contents, Mailer overtly distinguishes author and writer. “The author,” he says, “taken with an admirable desire to please his readers, has
+{{pg|266|267}}
+also added a set of advertisements, printed in italics” (7). In the next sentence,
+Mailer states that “[l]ike many another literary fraud, the writer has been known on occasion to read the Preface of a book instead of the book."{{sfn | Mailer|1959| p=7}} The distinction is subtle and probably instinctive; the role of the author involves production and requires awareness of his reader, whereas the writer is here presented as private consumer. That authorship is a fraught space is evident in Mailer’s ironic comment that he “will take the ''dangerous'' step of listing what I believe are the best pieces . . .” [emphasis added].{{sfn | Mailer|1959| p=7}}
+Mailer then addresses the book’s structure with an explanation of his decision to provide two Tables of Contents, one chronological, provided for “anyone wishing to read my book from beginning to end,” and a second, organized by genre, “to satisfy the specialist”.{{sfn | Mailer|1959| p=7}} That he considers formal decisions authorial, as opposed to writerly, is implicit in his overt conscious awareness of audience. It is thus not exceptional that a book concerned primarily with authorship reflects that concern in its structural form, and it therefore follows that its fractured structure reflects the shifting, multiple, and sometimes contradictory roles played by one man who is writer, author, authority (if only on himself), and celebrity. Further, as Mailer assigns interest in genre to “the specialist” (to whom he “offers” the second table of
+contents), his thinking implicitly extends alienation throughout other capitalistic roles—the “specialist,” or professional reader, will necessarily be always/
+already alienated from the text by virtue of its implication in their own labor. Mailer the professional writer thus extends a token of solidarity to the professional reader—that token being an acknowledgment that professionals must not relinquish awareness of hierarchies and protocols in the performance
+of their work, even when that work brings in a supposedly private space of consumption. Mailer’s conceptual thinking analogizes thus:
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+writer:author::reader:specialist
+</div>
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+and
+</div>
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+writer:reader::author:specialist
+</div>
+Further, Mailer implies that that the power of the author over the reader is distinctly unequal to the power of the author over the specialist, who asserts a different kind of ownership over the text, one necessarily implicated within capitalist production. Both general and professional readers are consumers, but the consumption that is leisure to one is labor to the other.
+{{pg|267|268}}
+Mailer’s seven “Advertisement for Myself” sections function analogously to Hemingway’s Author/Old Lady dialogues, but whereas Hemingway burlesques qualities of readers into a character, Mailer’s approach is more direct. Speaking as author, he addresses the reader throughout as “you” (as Hemingway does just prior to the entrance of the Old Lady and Author and immediately after their unceremonious ''exeunt''). Perceiving Mailer’s project thus does not require the mental acrobatics whereby one watches Hemingway’s Author judge quick and dead readers. The Harvard-educated Mailer, having
+other things to prove, simply tells the reader in his “specialist” table of contents that his “advertisements” comprise the “Biography of a Style”. {{sfn |Mailer|1959| p=15}} Mailer’s author is the author; Mailer acknowledges that his readers can and will decide their own roles for themselves.
+This acknowledgment, however, renders Mailer’s experience of authorship no less performative nor any less alienating than Hemingway’s. His “First Advertisement for Myself,” a lengthy if perhaps not entirely self conscious response to Hemingway generally and Death in the Afternoon in particular, establishes alienation as intrinsic to the writer/author distinction on its opening page:
+<blockquote>
+There was a time when Pirandello could tease a comedy of pain
+out of six characters in search of an author, but that is only a whiff of purgatory next to the yaws of conscience a writer learns to feel when he sets his mirrors face to face and begins to jiggle his Self for a style which will have some relation to him.{{sfn |Mailer|1959| p=17}}
+</blockquote>
+Mailer develops this point by describing his struggle with Hemingway and Hemingway’s struggle with himself, concluding that he has come “to have a great sympathy for The Master’s irrepressible tantrum that he is the champion writer of this time” because to be any less “is tiring, much too tiring."{{sfn |Mailer|1959| p=19}}
+Despite Mailer’s apparently visceral understanding of the struggle Hemingway dramatized in Death in the Afternoon, he, like Hemingway’s initial critics, seems to have missed the Dantean lens through which Hemingway refracts that struggle: “Hemingway has always been afraid to think, afraid of losing even a little popularity."{{sfn |Mailer|1959| p=20}} (This is especially ironic given that Hemingway’s popularity took a nose-dive because he thought.) Mailer does provide a caveat, giving “credit to the man, he’s known the value of his own
+{{pg|268|269}}
+work, and he fought to make his personality enrich his books,” especially in ''A Farewell to Arms'' and ''Death in the Afternoon'', both of which are exemplary of how “[a]n author’s personality can help or hurt the attention readers give
+to his books." {{sfn |Mailer|1959| p=21}}
 === Notes ===