The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer: Difference between revisions

← Older edit Newer edit →

@@ Line 144: / Line 144: @@
 If Mailer thought of Hemingway as worthy of imitation as a way of life and a writer, on a particular plane of reflection one cannot altogether dismiss it as trivial. Literary imitation yields much that is of interest about the imitator and the imitated. Imitation as transformative action has none too simple an origin and a history of development. Imitative acts, literary or otherwise, exceed the pejorative notion of “aping” in the current vernacular; that is to say, mindless mimicking, passively embraced at a low level of intellectual and artistic engagement. Such prejudices or prejudgments still play a part in a hierarchical study of influence. Nevertheless, such received ideas{{pg|175|176}}
+ignore too much such as, for example, the psycho-philosophical and aesthetic sense of imitation as ''mimesis.''
+Mimetic activities have a well-defined origin and long developmental history of spontaneously assembling, organizing, and ordering our perception of the world’s realities. In relation to Mailer and Hemingway, they still fall within the purlieu of visionary hermeneutic appropriation. Imitation and influence follow us with their compelling biological and atavistic impact as our genetic and familial inheritance at the time of our conception and henceforth throughout our life. Embedded in our familial, religious, cultural, societal and educational patterns of life and in the deep structures of language, imitative behavior permeates our life.Indeed, extensive theories of learning and pedagogical practices derive from them. Imitation and influence relentlessly precede and proceed us wherever we go. They ally themselves with the force that Freud attributes to the super-ego, whose effects as educative processes remain mostly unconscious or at least quasi-conscious. Various patterns of imitations and influences in their aggregate track all the developmental stages of our life. We can only move beyond them in acts of genuine creativity, acts that at once confirm their existence and transcend them in appropriation.
+On the plane of the arts, ''Mimesis'' provided the philosophical and aesthetic matrix for classical and neo-classical paintings in the Renaissance period. Much later, as realism, naturalism, and impressionism they created new forms of artistic perception.It even sustained the foundational aesthetics of abstract impressionism and abstract painting as “non-figurative art,” or “non-objective art.” For instance, representations of moods and combinations of quasi-unconscious states of mind in the impressionism of Claude Monet, the post-impressionism of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and, later, Jackson Pollock are all mimetic operations. Abstraction in painting merely reverses the direction of the mimetic gaze from without to within and vice versa. Incidentally, Hemingway was acutely cognizant of such mimesis, particularly as he found it in the works of Paul Cézanne.
+Thus, one needs to be cautious in accusing Mailer of impersonating Hemingway or directly imitating him. As a writer he was interested in understanding the violence and brutality in such war and the so-called “contact sports.” For the trajectory of imitative behavior covers large and varied expanses, some of which are grounded in spirituality, which everyday language pejoratively relegates to “aping.” Imitation as a legitimate, indeed essential,{{pg|176|177}}
 === Notes ===