The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Jive-Ass Aficionado: Why Are We in Vietnam? and Hemingway's Moral Code: Difference between revisions
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As Laura Adams observes, “three of the most powerful influences on Mailer’s scheme of things have been war and Ernest Hemingway and the intersection of the two” (173). Mailer told an interviewer that Hemingway’s death made him feel “a little weaker” (''Conversations'' 71), no doubt because he had felt a connection. Like Hemingway, Mailer wrote about boxing, he | As Laura Adams observes, “three of the most powerful influences on Mailer’s scheme of things have been war and Ernest Hemingway and the intersection of the two” (173). Mailer told an interviewer that Hemingway’s death made him feel “a little weaker” (''Conversations'' 71), no doubt because he had felt a connection. Like Hemingway, Mailer wrote about boxing, he | ||
wrote about bullfighting, he talked tough, he hung out with tough friends, he went to war, he wrote about war, he backed the underdog, he infuriated feminists, he was suspicious of governmental structures, and he seemed to | wrote about bullfighting, he talked tough, he hung out with tough friends, he went to war, he wrote about war, he backed the underdog, he infuriated feminists, he was suspicious of governmental structures, and he seemed to | ||
{{pg|194|195#}} | |||
take special delight in writing fiction that shocked readers or showcased his “insider” knowledge. “Hemingway and Fitzgerald are important imaginative figures in my life,” Mailer told the ''Washington Post Book World'' in 1971, explaining that “in Hemingway and Fitzgerald, it’s the sensuous evocation of things. The effect on the gut is closer to poetry” (''Conversations'' 189). | |||
{{ | ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' Mailer seems to have borrowed a number of | ||
things from Hemingway, including the narrative structure for the novel, | |||
Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” of omission, the attempt to make the reader | |||
actually experience the fiction in his “gut,” and thematic elements that reflect the code and code heroes that Robert Penn Warren and Philip Young recognized during the early years of Hemingway scholarship. | |||
In the spring of 1924 Hemingway had written the lower-case in our time, | |||
which consisted of eighteen vignettes drawn from the young writer’s journalistic observations of political upheaval, war, and bullfighting, published in an edition of only 170 copies. For ''In Our Time'' (1925), which was released by a major publisher in a first edition of 1,335 copies, he elevated two of those vignettes to stories and used the other sixteen as interlocutory chapters inserted in front of each of the longer new stories that he had crafted, most of which involved a coming-of-age protagonist named Nick Adams. To solve the problem of having an extra vignette, Hemingway broke the last story—“Big Two-Hearted River”—into Parts I and II. Interestingly, as Michael Reynolds reminds, Hemingway later said he always intended the vignettes to function as “chapter headings,” explaining, “‘You get the close up very quietly but absolutely solid and the real thing but very close, and then through it all between every story comes the rhythm of the in our time chapters’” | |||
(qtd. in Reynolds 233). As Hemingway further clarified for critic Edmund | |||
Wilson, his intent was to “give the picture of the whole between examining | |||
it in detail” (Hemingway, ''Ernest'' 128). | |||
That’s exactly how Why Are We in Vietnam? is structured with similar effects that it has on the reader. Just as Hemingway’s short stories focused onNick and the personal lives of people “in his time,”while the vignettes served as newspaper-headline reminders of the violent, larger world that was affecting individual psyches, so, too, Mailer’s highly personalized and detailed narrative of sixteen-year-old D.J.’s hunting trip with his father, his father’s business associates, and his best friend Tex in the rugged Brooks Range of Alaska is intercut with “Intro Beeps” that serve the same function and add “rhythm” as did Hemingway’s vignettes. The chapters in ''Why Are We in'' | |||
{{pg|195|196#}} | |||
''Vietnam?'' focus on the story of the hunting trip, while the Intro Beeps are digressively vocal ''tour de forces'' that give Mailer the chance to evoke a broader world by allowing D.J. the freedom to rant about things outside the constraints of narrative. For one thing, the Intro Beeps feature the narrator as an eighteen-year-old, so there is a broader prospective already involved. D.J. at eighteen is wiser than D.J. at sixteen, who is recalled in the main narrative. In the Intro Beeps D.J. thinks and “speaks” in an even more pronounced stream-of-consciousness while at a dinner party his parents throw for him the night before he and Tex are scheduled to ship out to fight in Vietnam. It is in these numbered Intro Beeps where D.J., unfettered by storytelling, can rant and ramble about more general and abstract topics like the teachings of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher who warned that the media and the constant bombardment of pop culture messages would have a deleterious effect on the human condition (Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' 8). | |||
It is these big-picture concerns that surface mostly in the Intro Beeps and do indeed remind the reader of a world outside the hunting narrative of the novel, just as listening to a radio dee-jay makes one aware of the source and also other listeners—a “broadcast” that is simultaneously reaching a larger world. And that in itself can be unsettling. “As D.J. suggests,” one critic observes, “society acts as a kind ofsuccubus upon the unconscious of Americans so that ‘you never know what vision has been humping you through the night’” (Wenke 123). | |||