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

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-[t]he great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after. Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=187}}
+[t]he great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after. Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=278}}
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+I should think that this passage would be magical music to Mailer’s ears. In my mind I hear the voice of the young Hemingway reaching out to Mailer like a keening over the years and putting a powerful spell on him. It is direct hard-hitting talk about an unspeakably tough profession, which Mailer may well have noticed and admired. For the young Hemingway, it was all a matter of the senses and the comprehension that precedes understanding. It made a fragmented and constantly changing world whole. All that remained for a writer to do was getting it down on paper and making the world whole and entire. It represents the great totalizing function of a writer of fictional knowledge. It is a world in which a writer attempts to capture in language the human way of being. As Martin Heidegger reminds us “language belongs to the closest neighborhood of man’s being.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=189}}
+One might speculate that for Mailer the phenomenon of language as omnipresent and in exhaustible matrix of all significations makes the “lifeworld,” ''Lebenswelt'' of German phenomenology, translatable into fiction. The interweave of language and the lifeworld are proportionately boundless. One may judge the enigmatic nature of the affect Hemingway has on Mailer to emanate mostly from his fictional world as total lifeworld. What Mailer wanted was to ''embody'' as much as possible Hemingway’s vision of this lifeworld on various levels of his own psyche and its interpretive work. He did so concurrently as ''viva activa'' and as ''viva contemplativa.''
+Thus Mailer could speak of ''his own world,'' of ''his own philosophy,'' and finally of ''his own cosmology'' and mean it. Writing fiction offered both Hemingway and Mailer means of synthesizing their lived experiential vision. No matter how compressed or dilatory their style might be, or how distinct their thematics the practice of a new aesthetics of lived experience seems to give their{{pg|187|188}}
 === Notes ===