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

“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}}

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”) {{sfn |Hemingway |1932| p=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” {{sfn |Dante|1994| p=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. {{efn|The specifics of how, why, and to what effect Hemingway constructs this allegory are presented in full in Justice, “A Pilgrim’s Progress into Hell: Death in the Afternoon and the Problem of Authorship” in The Bones of the Others, 92–118.}}

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}}

also added a set of advertisements, printed in italics.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=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:

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.

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}}

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

to his books." {{sfn |Mailer|1959| p=21}}  

Mailer’s preliminary conclusion regarding the problem of alienation is, again ironically, that “[t]he way to save your work and reach more readers is to advertise yourself, steal your own favorite page out of Hemingway’s unwritten ''Notes From Papa On How The Working Novelist Can Get Ahead''." {{sfn |Mailer|1959| p=21}} Seemingly unaware of the problem that those “unwritten” notes are implicit in ''Death in the Afternoon’s'' Author/Old Lady dialogues (and the consequent problem that those dialogues had the opposite of their intended effect), Mailer indulges in some gymnastic contortions of his own. Despite the fact that the “First Advertisement” does “steal” that page (topically and thematically, however un-self-consciously), and despite the fact that Mailer states how unsuited he is to that sort of self-advertisement, both happen within exactly that sort of advertisement in the service of that sort of advertisement.

better at overriding the indifference which comes from the snobs, arbiters, managers and conforming maniacs who manipulate most of the world of letters."{{sfn |Mailer|1959| p=22}} Mailer further defines his struggle as wanting to “write so well and so strongly as to call my shot, but unfortunately I may have fatigued the earth of rich language beyond repair.”{{sfn |Mailer|1959| p=22}} Writing “so well and so strongly” was the ambition of both writers. Both discovered they could not call their shots (Hemingway in publishing ''A Farewell to Arms'' and after publishing ''Death in the Afternoon''; Mailer in trying to publish ''The Deer Park''). Both writers acknowledged the contamination and depletion of their central resource, language (Hemingway’s Author addresses this equally overtly, warning that “all our words from loose using have lost their edge."{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=71}} The six and a half declarative pages of Mailer’s First Advertisement thus provide an

moment in ''Death in the Afternoon''. In this “Second Advertisement,” Mailer recounts two experiences: the writing of and the alienation resulting from the success of ''The Naked and the Dead'' {{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=91}}. He situates his subject position during its writing as one of forever lost innocence in which writing was a space of “humility” and incredible creative fluidity in which he could “write twenty-five pages of first draft a week,” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=91}} feeling all the while that “it seems to be at dead center.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=92}} Its success had the lasting effect of catapulting him abruptly into a role for which he was unprepared: “Naturally, I was blasted a considerable distance away from dead center by the size of its success. . .My farewell to an average man’s experience (which he had needed to write the novel to begin with) was too abrupt,” and “I had been moved from the audience to the stage—I was, on the instant, a man—I could arouse more emotion in others than they could arouse in me.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=92}} Like Hemingway’s writer sitting in the stands, witnessing Hernandorena’s goring, Mailer figures the writer’s role as one of audience member; like Hemingway’s Author in his dramatic dialogue, Mailer figures authorship as a performative role that necessarily alienates author from writer by virtue of relative exposure to the raw materials of writing and the process of production. Both Hemingway and Mailer place tremendous value on the kind of clarity that being “in the audience” allows. But whereas in Hemingway’s time, the illusion remained that struggle could result in victory, by Mailer’s, that illusion had been shattered, at least for Mailer.