The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing: Difference between revisions

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 Mailer’s admission that he tries to capture the“disturbing”by“going to the root of what is written about”and capturing life“as it really is”(Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354)—which“is always disturbing if it is indeed seen”—not only echoes Hemingway’s philosophy of portraying“the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful”(qtd. in Baker 153), but Mailer’s focus on broadening readers’perceptions through art also recalls Hemingway’s focus on teaching his readers how to see the “danger,” “cruelty,” and the emotional experience of “life and death”in the bullfight as mere“parts”of the“whole” of the art of Spanish bullfighting (Hemingway, Death 2–9). For both Hemingway and Mailer, writing honestly not only assists in the creation of the emotional experience the writer hopes to capture or convey in his/her writing, honest writing can also alter readers’ perceptions, “serve as a gadfly to complacency, institution, and . . . public taste,” and thus bring readers to a heightened awareness of self and world (qtd. in Foster 40). Here we find what is at the core of Mailer and Hemingway’s artistic purposes: to shake us, wake us up, make us think, and make us change.
-According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,”“the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).
+According to both Hemingway and Mailer, their focus on the disturbing aspects of life—including war, death, violence, murder, suicide, and animalistic brutality—stands at the core of both authors’ philosophies of writing and of their artistic goals as writers. They strive to shake readers out of their normal ways of seeing, feeling, thinking, and being. In fact, they strive to get to the core, “the root,” “the purity,” “the real thing,” and present the “disturbing” (qtd. in Foster) and real in order to capture the “motion and fact”(Hemingway, ''Death'' 2) that creates the emotion, bring readers to experience the thing for themselves, and thus bring readers to see life, themselves, and their worlds more “clearly” and as a “whole” (8–9).
-Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” ). In fact,in the opening pages of Death in the Afternoon,Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (, ), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more“clearly”and as a“whole”(, –). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (). Mailer writes,
+Writers, as Hemingway and Mailer suggest, have a responsibility to their art, their“working morale,”and their readers to try to get to the core of experience and show readers how to see self, world, life, and even art more clearly, honestly, and truly—without illusions (Mailer, “Hazards” 399). In fact, in the opening pages of ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway urges readers to rely on their own “experience and observation,” to “only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel” (, ), to feel “what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel” (), to create their own standards—both moral and aesthetic—and come to see the bullfight (and correlatively life, death, and art) more“clearly”and as a“whole”(, –). Significantly, Hemingway’s focus on the writer’s purpose as clarifying Americans’vision of self and world is Mailer’s stated artistic purpose as well.In Cannibals and Christians, Mailer succinctly states this Hemingwayesque philosophy in his claim that the highest purpose of literature is“to clarify a nation’s vision of itself” (). Mailer writes,
 It is, I believe, the highest function a writer may serve, to see life (no matter by what means or form or experiment) as others do not see it, or only partially see it, and therefore open for the reader that literary experience which comes uniquely from the novel—the sense of having one’s perceptions deepened, and one’s illusions about oneself rendered even more untenable. For me, this is the highest function of art, precisely that it is disturbing, that it does not let man rest,and therefore forces him so far as art may force anything to enlarge the horizons of his life. (qtd. in Foster )
 Both Hemingway and Mailer’s goal of clarifying “a nation’s vision of itself” is consciously focused on capturing and conveying real emotion and experience that shakes readers out of their normal ways of thinking and being. This, according to Hemingway and Mailer, opens readers to differing perspectives, forces them to be honest with themselves,and helps them to break all illusions of self and world (Mailer, Cannibals ). Yet this philosophy of writing in which the author takes responsibility for enlarging readers’“horizons” through presenting life honestly,“as it really is” (Hemingway,“Letter to John”), is not exclusively bound to Hemingway or Mailer’s own, selfdeveloped philosophy of writing and art.