User:KForeman/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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If I am right Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with toreo. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of In Our Time (Chapter IX–Chapter XIV)—in which, trying to write, he writes about them [the bulls] for me is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.

Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of Death in the Afternoon: “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.

Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit the realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase form is the record of a war. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived doppelgänger Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable toreo in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.

===Works Cited===

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 If I am right Mailer is at some level describing himself in Amado Ramírez, El Loco, and therein empathizing with him then that empathy may explain at once why he wrote the piece and why he included Hemingway in the title. No one has come close to Hemingway in the vital identification of the writer with the torero and the act of writing with toreo. Precisely in the first three pages of his artistic creed, Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway explained how he had discovered his style and toreo simultaneously and how they were inseparable. “I was trying to write then [. . .],” he says (2). “So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself” (3). To trace the early taurine sketches of In Our Time (Chapter IX–Chapter XIV)—in which, trying to write, he writes about them [the bulls] for me is to watch Hemingway’s style developing, with a nearly dizzying speed and avidity, from that of the outsider who has never seen a corrida and is only reporting what he has heard (Chapter IX), to a complete first-person insider (Chapter XIII), wherein the first-person narrator and the torero are one and the same, a fusion in which his early revolutionary style crystallizes.
+Hemingway tied toreo to style, to what he called on the second page of Death in the Afternoon: “[. . .] the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion [. . .],” his elegant version of Eliot’s objective correlative. Toreo provided him with the perfect vehicle because he understood it on an intuitive level and because he could concentrate on the physical aspects of the spectacle. Hemingway explained that the matador “[. . .] is performing a work of art and he is playing with death [. . .] and that the matador “[. . .] gives the feeling of immortality, and as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Precisely such a transference of emotion from artist to spectator or reader was what Hemingway was seeking and finding in his own work.
+Mailer didn’t understand the corrida as well. Without Hemingway’s knowledge and concentration, he was more like El Loco, one tube hot and one tube not, concentrating on the emotion rather than the physical sequence from which it arose. Even so, he made the same important connection between torero and the writer that Hemingway had made. The tacit the realization that he was treading familiar ground must have been part of Mailer’s original inspiration, as he more or less admitted in the beginning, and he suggests now a subtle attendant epiphany with the phrase form is the record of a war. Once we consider this larger context of the piece and the carefully worded meaning of that embedded phrase, his literarily conceived doppelgänger Norman-Amado, Amado-Norman—with its improbable narcissistic pun—takes shape like El Loco’s equally improbable toreo in those rare moments when he could stand still and get it right.
 ===Works Cited===