The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer: Difference between revisions
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There is no discernible evidence that Mailer directly imitated Hemingway to any appreciable degree personally or as a writer. I do not believe he became the “neo-Hemingway tough guy who patronize[d] boxing and bullfighting and bars,” as Joseph Glemis dubbed him.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=156}} Mailer was too proud, too conscious of his own place in American letters to be a straightforward and unsophisticated follower, borrower, and/or imitator. With him it was all much more complicated than that. On the one hand, as an individual he worked hard to learn, say, how to box, which is a punishing way of imitating anyone. He was also interested for some time in bullfighting and other sports. But he was willing to pay the price for the lived | There is no discernible evidence that Mailer directly imitated Hemingway to any appreciable degree personally or as a writer. I do not believe he became the “neo-Hemingway tough guy who patronize[d] boxing and bullfighting and bars,” as Joseph Glemis dubbed him.{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=156}} Mailer was too proud, too conscious of his own place in American letters to be a straightforward and unsophisticated follower, borrower, and/or imitator. With him it was all much more complicated than that. On the one hand, as an individual he worked hard to learn, say, how to box, which is a punishing way of imitating anyone. He was also interested for some time in bullfighting and other sports. But he was willing to pay the price for the lived | ||
experience of boxing, whose semiotics and metaphysics in his mind had much to do with the language arts, as it did for Hemingway. In The ''Executioner’s Song'' Mailer consciously and transparently adopted Hemingway‘s less ornate, intentionally stripped-down narrative style. I would go as far as to suggest that Mailer’s creative nonfiction such as Armies of the Night might have been inspired by Hemingway’s prototypes of creative nonfiction in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Green Hills of Africa.'' It is our common{{pg|174|175}} | experience of boxing, whose semiotics and metaphysics in his mind had much to do with the language arts, as it did for Hemingway. In The ''Executioner’s Song'' Mailer consciously and transparently adopted Hemingway‘s less ornate, intentionally stripped-down narrative style. I would go as far as to suggest that Mailer’s creative nonfiction such as Armies of the Night might have been inspired by Hemingway’s prototypes of creative nonfiction in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Green Hills of Africa.'' It is our common{{pg|174|175}} | ||
knowledge that some critics have mentioned Truman Capote’s ''In Cold Blood | |||
(1966)'' as the source of inspiration for Mailer’s creative nonfiction. But the two examples of Hemingway’s experimentation with the genre texts precede Capote’s effort by three decades. Given Mailer’s astute mind and his trust in Hemingway as a writer, this possibility would appear to be more convincing than its supposed alternative. | |||
On the other hand, Mailer’s shared literary interests with Hemingway’s were considerably broader and deeper. They grew out of Hemingway’s fundamental literary philosophical concerns such as courage and bravery modes of transcendent behavior. As well-integrated spiritual and corporeal strength, courage offered both men the proper deportment required to find salvation in extremis. They also had in common a vision of living the possibilities of their gender as maximal manhood firmly rooted in the body. I would think that the aim of such vision for Mailer was not machismo as a sense of masculine entitlement. I would suspect a merely assumptive masculine entitlement as a given would have made its embodiment emasculating to him rather than an existential adventure. At its best and in its profoundest sense, it was a matter of seamlessly lodging the psyche within the body as whole and entire. For that reason, they sought a second process of embodiment for their world for posterity within the body of the language of the art of fiction. As Hemingway had predicted, this approach to fiction would then produce a world whose truth would be truer than true. Language had the power to bring cohesion to the chaotic world of lived experience as it bursts upon our consciousness. And the truth of this cohesive world would then be available to anyone who could read. These are complex matters and need more clarification. I shall delve more probingly in due time. | |||
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}} | |||