The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Jive-Ass Aficionado: Why Are We in Vietnam? and Hemingway's Moral Code: Difference between revisions

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 <blockquote>ever read ''The Concept of Dread'' by Fyodor Kierkegaard? No, well
 neither has D.J. but now he wants to know how many of you assholes even knew, forgive me, Good Lord, that Fyodor Kierkegaard has a real name, ''Sören'' Kierkegaard. Contemplate that. You ass. (Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' 34)</blockquote>
+D.J. too has a moment in which he recognizes his mortality, and “D.J.
+breathes death—first time in his life—and the sides of the trail slam onto his
+heart like the jaws of a vise . . . like attack of vertigo when stepping into dark and smelling pig shit, that’s what death smells to him” (136). With Harry,
+Hemingway’s dying hero from “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” he sensed death’s
+presence and“he could smell its breath” (Hemingway,“Snows” 54). But of all
+the things that D.J. and the Hemingway heroes share in common, it’s an ostensible cure for dread—a moral code for doing things precisely and with
+passion—that gives them a sense of importance as well as being, and offers
+both respite from those dread-full nights and the courage to confront the
+possibility of death by day.
+As Barry Leeds notes, “The story of the hunting trip embodies certain
+mythic elements (notably the initiation into manhood of D.J. and Tex) and
+proceeds along a line of progressively more crucial conflicts between man {{pg|201|202}}
+and nature” (181). But the conflicts also manifest themselves as an alpha male
+competition and a clash of values over the right and wrong ways of doing
+things—what Hemingway dubbed ''“aficion”'' in ''The Sun Also Rises:'' ''“Aficion'' means passion. An ''aficionado'' is one who is passionate about the bullfights. All the good bull-fighters stayed at Montoya’s hotel; that is, those with ''aficion'' stayed there. The commercial bull-fighters stayed once, perhaps, and then did not come back” (131).In ''The Sun Also Rises,'' aficion is linked to bullfighting, but Hemingway scholars have extended the term to apply to the
+Hemingway code hero and code aspirant who live according to principles
+that elevate them above others. As Robert Penn Warren observes,
+<blockquote>Hemingway’s characters are usually tough men, experienced in
+the hard worlds they inhabit, and not obviously given to emotional display or sensitive shrinking. . . . His heroes are not squealers, welchers, compromisers, or cowards. . . .They represent some notion of a code, some notion of honor, that makes a man a man, and that distinguishes him from people who merely follow their random impulses and who are, by consequence, “messy.” (79)</blockquote>
+For the Hemingway hero, this meant high standards and an equally high
+skill level, whether it is keeping his lines “straighter than anyone” as Santiago did in ''The Old Man and the Sea'' (Hemingway 32), or knowing “how to
+blow any sort of bridge that you could name,” as with Robert Jordan in ''For
+Whom the Bell Tolls'' (4). And in the matter of hunting, it means precise, accurate shots that make for clean and humane kills.
+Someone familiar with Hemingway will find it difficult to read ''Why We Are in Vietnam?'' without thinking of ''Green Hills of Africa,'' Hemingway’s fictionalized account of his much-anticipated 1934 safari with his wife, Pauline, and Key West best-friend Charles Thompson—a safari which, according to
+biographer Michael Reynolds, “degenerated badly,” turning into an alpha-male contest of measurements between Hemingway and Thompson (162-65). But more than that, it was a contrast between Poppa’s (Hemingway’s) ''aficion'' and Karl’s (Thompson’s) apparent indifference to or ignorance of the higher values.
+Poppa’s values are established early in the novel. In addition to insisting
+that guns be kept clean and in perfect working order and becoming angry if
+they’re not (Hemingway, ''Green '' 146), he also has a keen sense of the “rules” of {{pg|202|203}}
+hunting.“God damn them,”he says of Karl and his guides and bearers.“What
+the hell did he have to blow that[salt]lick to hell for the first morning and gut shoot a lousy bull and chase him all over the son-of-a-bitching-country spooking it to holy bloody hell”—too much shooting at the wrong place, which
+spoils the hunting for miles, and then a bad shot that makes the animal suffer
+(148). D.J. has a similar reaction when he watches his friend squeeze off a bad
+shot on a wolf: “Tex took him down with a shot into the gut and at first he
+could have been there dead,the animal fell and for an instant the hills clapped
+together” and “D.J. was on with the blood, he was half-sick having watched
+what Tex had done, like his own girl had been fucked in front of him and better, since he had had private plans to show Tex what real shooting might be”
+(Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' 68-69). Hunting is linked to manhood in
+both Hemingway’s and Mailer’s novels, and though “Rusty’s got cunt in him”
+(120), D.J. is “the only one not to shoot at the female grizzer” (121).
+In ''Green Hills,'' Poppa’s superior skills and knowledge are demonstrated
+later, when he insists on going after kudu at dusk, leaving the guide who insisted, “Hunt tomorrow” (Hemingway 164). Then, confronting the kudu he
+knew would be there, Poppa “saw the bead centered exactly where it should
+be just below the top of the shoulder and squeezed off” (165). And when he
+thought it ran off into the forest they pursued and he shot again, only to realize that he had felled the first one with a clean shot and a second one as
+well, he was even more ecstatic that he hadn’t just wounded the first animal.
+Both had trophy racks, and there was much elation . . . until they got back
+to camp and saw that Karl had somehow bagged a bigger one (205). The
+hunt was pure competition, not recreation, and that’s the way the hunting
+trip plays out in Mailer’s novel.
+Like Pop, the Great White Hunter in ''Green Hills'', and Wilson in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,”Big Luke is the big expert on hunting in his particular stretch of wilderness, and his derision or validation of those who hire his services somehow matters.It does to D.J.,who himself has already pronounced similar judgment on the “medium-grade and high-grade asshole” (Mailer, ''Why Are We in Vietnam?''50) that compete in his corporate culture. Even Rusty, the corporate “father” as well as D.J.’s, is in it hoping to bag a big-enough bear for Big Luke to say that he got off “a fair shot” (51)—just a little show of approval, which is all, one suspects, that D.J.ever wanted from his father.{{pg|204|205}}
+The closest D.J. comes to that approval is when he and Rusty break off
+from the rest of the group as Hemingway’s hero did—“‘Son, let’s split from
+Luke the Fink cause he ain’t going to get your ass or mine near a grizzer’ (123). Alone and apart from the main competition, they become “real good,
+man, tight as combat buddies” (128). Rusty tells D.J. how much he learned
+about hunting from his father and passes on this bit of advice, which ironically D.J. already knows: “‘the only time a good man with a good rifle is in trouble is when he steps from sunlight into shadow, cause there’s two or
+three seconds when you can’t see’” (132). Together they decide to let an old
+caribou pass without shooting at him and stick to the grizzly they’re trying
+to bag—and the bear, which is “about as frightening as a stone-black seven foot three-hundred-pound Nigger,” (135) provides D.J.’s chance to shine, perhaps because he knows how a “bear” of this metaphorical nature thinks, him being a “black-ass cripple Spade” from Harlem, and all (208). In the matter of black culture, white noise, and an elevated form of hunting that respects nature, D.J. has ''aficion''. There are “those who know and those who do not
+know when a very bad grizz is near to you (a final division of humanity)
+and D.J. knew, and D.J. was in love with himself because he did not wish to
+scream or plead, he just wished to encounter Mr. D., big-ass grizz” (140)