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

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 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}}
+<blockquote>
+The more I know about writing, the more of an achievement Hemingway’s style becomes to me. I know his flaws inside out. I’ve loved and hated him ''as if he were my own father'' for years. There is so much he did for one, so much he didn’t do. ''Truly the relationship you have to him is as a father.'' But he is a remarkable writer. His sense of the English language, I’d say, is virtually primitive in its power to evoke mood and stir the senses, emphasis added.{{sfn|Mailer|1982|p=161}}
+</blockquote>
+Now, one needs to pose the question: Are there detectable traces of an Oedipal guilt and anxiety in visionary hermeneutics appropriation that I attribute to Mailer in relation to Hemingway? My answer is a modified yes. Freudian psychoanalysis teaches us that the Oedipus complex is a universal concept, not merely a limited and localized ''notion.'' As such, it affects us all. However, it would be justifiable to remind ourselves that the degrees of the intensity of Oedipal complex and Oedipal guilt vary widely. The differentials of extent and intensity affect the quality and acuity of the Oedipal complex and therefore its consequences. As Freud in ''Totem and Taboo'' so perceptively recognized, the ritual slaying of the father and the birth of Oedipal guilt among the primitive horde were not the only result or the most consequential of patricide among them. The sons also engaged in vital subsequent rituals of atonement for their irreversible and unforgivable act. So the killing of the primal Father was an immensely ambivalent act. They partook of the totemic meal as an act of atonement. It was not in the least purely a revengeful, cannibalistic devouring of the father’s body. The totemic meal set in motion an unending series of significant revitalizing, self-generating imaginative powers.
+Thus, killing of the father and partaking of his flesh were essentially rituals of embodying him in order to ''appropriate'' his magical powers as patrimony. Partaking of the totemic meal was then not an altogether negative and negating ritual, far from it. Parallel to patricide, but going in the opposite direction, another force lurked behind the bloody event, which paves the way for a wider hermeneutics of patricide among the primitive horde. The sons also interpreted the killing of the father as rituals of self-preservation and regeneration through corporeal appropriation, integration, and identification with him. Taking the father’s body and blood had all the identifying or distinguishing marks characteristic of the sacrificial and the sacramental.{{pg|182|183}}
 === Notes ===