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

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 Mailer’s own sense of “defeat” will not cease tormenting him unless and until this Hemingway matter is truly settled once and for all. “Every American writer,” writes Mailer plainly, “who takes himself to be both major and macho must sooner or later give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=19}} “Faena” is an unusual but pertinent word to use here in connection to Hemingway and the way Mailer proposes to deal with his contemporaries. Faena denotes a series of final ritual passes at the bull that a matador carries out in bullfighting. It occurs immediately before the ''kill,'' the moment of truth, to highlight a matador’s skill. On the other hand, to perform “a faena which borrows from the self-love of a{{pg|180|181}}
+Hemingway style” connotes at the same time a moment of pride in the truth of accomplishment as well as exhibition narcissism and a touch of brutality.
+The main point, however, is Mailer laying claim to Hemingway’s vision through the agency of his own interpretation of it.It will make it possible for him to identify with Hemingway for better or worse and for good and for keeps. Mailer tells his readers, “I have come finally to have a great sympathy for The Master’s irrepressible tantrum that he is the champion writer of this time, and of all time, and that if anyone can pin Tolstoy, it is Ernest H.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=19}}
+Confined to the framework of this essay, I would propose that ''Advertisements for Myself'' is Mailer’s valiant form of confession and initiation into a visionary hermeneutic appropriation, which approaches a kind of literary conversion. It represents a writer’s self-transformation and regeneration as a genuine response to another writer’s thought and work. It does so, however, without any illusion, compromise, and least of all sentimentality. In no way such conversion implies loss of creative uniqueness and integrity, just the contrary.
+In relation to Bloom’s general theory of influence, I would relegate Mailer’s hermeneutic appropriation to the “state of exception,” as Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Agamben defines the “state of exception” in reference to Saint Paul’s word “katarego,” roughly translated as “I deactivate” in his First Letter to the Corinthians. Agamben calls it “messianic katarg sis,” or messianic deactivation.{{sfn|Giorgio|2005|p=104}} He further clarifies it as a “law that is simultaneously suspended and fulfilled.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=104}} I find it useful to compare “messianic katarg sis” and visionary hermeneutic appropriation, because both concepts fully connote fidelity and flexibility. As Agamben points out, “In our tradition, a metaphysical concept, which takes as its prime focus a moment of foundation and origin, coexists with a messianic concept, which focuses on a moment of fulfillment.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=103-4}} What sanctions such coexistence “is the idea that fulfillment is possible by retrieving and revoking the foundation, by coming to terms with it.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=104}}
+'''VIII. MAILER’S VISIONARY INTERPRETIVE APPROPRIATION AND THE
+OEDIPUS COMPLEX: “THE STATE OF EXCEPTION”'''
+In an interview, Mailer scholar and critic Michael Lennon elicited from Mailer the following keen remarks on the perception of his relationship to Hemingway:{{pg|181|182}}
 === Notes ===