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

''The course changed again.''

What is most curious is that both writers sought to address the question of authorship in such structurally complex, generically ambivalent works—so curious that the complexity and ambivalence themselves require critical scrutiny. Neither ''Death in the Afternoon'' nor ''Advertisements for Myself'' fit {{pg|260|261}} neatly into any particular generic category. Both can be described as “nonfiction,” although that classification is at best reductive. They are problematic, difficult-to-classify works whose generic hybridity is intrinsic to their internal and external logics; in both cases, though, that fundamental pertinence defies ready legibility.

''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''.

: Chapter 7: Decadent Artists (Dante 3: Gluttons)

: Chapter 8: The Mean (Dante 4: Misers)

: Chapter 12: Literary Critics (Dante 5: The Wrathful/ Sullen)

: Chapter 14: Impresarios, traitors to art (Dante 8/9: Flatterers/ Traitors)

The structure of Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' 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.

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.”{{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}}

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}}

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>

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.

Mailer’s identification of the stakes of the struggle against this alienation in his “Second Advertisement” echoes the pre-dialogue “unbearably clean”{{pg|269|270}}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.

The “Fourth Advertisement” stands as the pivotal act in Mailer’s ''Advertisements'', the act that elevates the collection from a “great wreck” and “ragtag collection”{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|p=179}} to a narrative that has its own intrinsic drama, identified by David Castronovo as the “symbolic tale of one tormented consciousness trying to stay alive.”{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|p=180}} Although Mailer’s use of dramatic form is never as overt as Hemingway’s, he too was a product of highly canon-centric literary exposure, and despite his anticipation of full-blown Postmodernism, he remained subjugated to his innate internalization{{pg|270|271}}of classical Western literary form, in which the physical center of any narrative contains the pivot moment: the moment at which things that were previously only possible become either inevitable or impossible.{{efn|This is perhaps most evident in Shakespeare’s plays, usually occurring in III.ii, and subsequent literary works pre dating Modernism (Dickens’ ''Bleak House'' contains a striking meta-example; its central pivot occurs in iambic pentameter), but the phenomenon is hegemonic and not limited to literary prose writing. Bullfights and symphonies work on the same sort of narrative arc.}}

The voice in which Mailer recounts this quietly ironic drama is thus the most gentle, most wry, most humble of any of his multiple voices that appear in ''Advertisement for Myself'', for it is in this Advertisement that the reader sees Mailer see the dirty underwear of mid-twentieth century American publishing, and his own implication within it, in stark, revealing contrast to the clean, clean, unbearably clean whiteness of his own commitment to his art. Whatever else one can say about Mailer or Hemingway—and there is much, and much of it not complimentary—the impact of such moments is what elevates words on a page to something more, something that one might imagine can, however briefly, transcend the process of publishing and render its endemic alienation invisible. That it will return is inevitable, but such moments reveal why both men persisted in their struggle.

=== Notes ===

===Citations===

===Works Cited===

*{{cite magazine |last= Castronovo|first= David|date= 2003|title= Norman Mailer as Mid-Century Advertisments|magazine= The New England Review|pages= 174-194|ref=harv }}

*{{cite book |last= Hemingway|first= Ernest|date= 1932 |title= Death in the Afternoon|location= New York|publisher= Scribner's|ref=harv }}

*{{cite book |last= Justice|first= Hilary K.|date= 2006|title= The Bones of the Others| location= Kent|publisher= Kent State UP|ref=harv }}

*{{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1959|title= Advertisements for Myself|location= New York|publisher= G.P. Putnam's Sons|ref=harv}}

*{{cite book |last= McGann|first= Jerome|date= 1993|title= A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism| location= Charlottesville| publisher= U of Virginia|ref=harv }}

{{Refend}}

[[Category:Articles (MR)]]