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

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 I would say that searching for the components of Hemingway’s nontransparent but nonetheless true influence on a writer such as Mailer could resemble the psychological mechanisms of paranoia. Or at least it may appear{{pg|173|174}}
+so to readers with a psychoanalytic proclivity and sensitivity. One may think of it as the “hermeneutic of suspicion,” formulated by French philosopher Paul Ricouer. The logic of Marxist hermeneutics essays to explain the role of economic class in determining our consciousness as Freudian psychoanalysis does with the unconscious. This type of intellectual and scholarly paranoia ''(para + nous)'' requires that the conscious mind extend itself beyond the limits it ordinarily imposes upon itself, because it suspects its own motivations. In so doing, the paranoiac mind suspects the existence of correspondences hitherto gone undetected, engaging in thoughts and acts to unveil and disclose them. Such paranoia may impel the scholar to see mysterious influences lurking in everything everywhere.
+It is perhaps preferable to the ''“naiveté”'' that is the dialectical opposite of paranoia, to use English psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott’s vocabulary. Literary critical paranoia may indeed be of help here to the extent that it mobilizes our sensitivities to look for what often lies hidden below the exhausted surfaces of our scholarly work. The paranoid critic of influence studies joins Mailer’s “[c]ertain artists, those who see associations and connections everywhere” mentioned in his “The Metaphysics of the Belly.”{{sfn|Mailer|1966|p=265}} In any case, let us not forget the example of the venerable Sir Isaac Newton and his apple.
+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}}
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