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

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 </blockquote>{{pg|177|178}}
+'''VII. MAILER’S VISIONARY HERMENEUTIC APPROPRIATION AND
+BLOOM’S THEORY OF ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE'''
+Can the particular concept of visionary hermeneutic appropriation that I ascribe to Mailer in his relationship as a writer to Hemingway find a justifiable place within the context of Harold Bloom’s magisterial ''The Anxiety of Influence?'' Bloom forcefully applies his theory to Hemingway’s influence on Mailer. I maintain that such placement is possible on the condition that I relegate my own formulation of influence in the Mailer-Hemingway case to a category within Bloom’s own theory of anxiety of influence as an ''exception.'' This effort necessitates a brief exposition of Bloom’s justifiably elaborate theory of influence.
+In ''The Anxiety of Influence,'' Bloom offers an analysis of the phenomenon of influence in the development and maintenance of the “poetic,” in which the poetic is to be taken in its traditional sense of literature as a whole. We owe Bloom a large debt of gratitude for this work in the field of influence studies. Passionate, dense, and erudite, one can only underestimate it at one’s own great loss. Bloom analyzes how “poets” guarantee continued literary creation, and dissemination as influence, while paying an exorbitant but necessary price for it in the anxiety of influence.
+Bloom informs us that “[t]he precursors flood us, and our imagination can die by drowning in them, but no imaginative life is possible if such inundation is wholly evaded.”{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=154}} Concise, astute, and confident, it is a truly compelling statement. ''The Anxiety of Influence'' legitimately demands that we attempt to periodically test it here and there. Such probes keep the theory of anxiety of influence supple, flexible and therefore applicable to new demands made upon it by new literary visions.I find this exploratory probe to be warranted in the Mailer-Hemingway case. Such activity, I hope, accords ''The Anxiety of Influence'' the attention it so highly deserves as relevant to our contemporary concerns.
+My line of reasoning demands more elucidation. In the essential chapter “Clinamen or Poetic Misprision” in ''The Anxiety of Influence'' Bloom states,
+<blockquote>
+What gives pleasure to the critic in a reader may give anxiety to the poet in him, an anxiety we have learned, as readers, to neglect, to our own loss and peril. This anxiety, this mode of melancholy, is the anxiety of influence, the dark and daemonic ground upon which we now enter.{{sfn|Bloom|1979|p=25}}
+</blockquote>{{pg|178|179}}
 === Notes ===