The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer: Difference between revisions
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The mind-body continuum as the primal presence of the human presence in the world is then the essence of Hemingway’s discipline. I suspect that | The mind-body continuum as the primal presence of the human presence in the world is then the essence of Hemingway’s discipline. I suspect that | ||
Mailer is empathetically projecting upon Hemingway what he himself already desires or possesses as a large but somewhat slumbering unconscious drive. Accordingly, Mailer believes that for a truly good male writer the most effective way of being a writer is to fulfill the highest potentials of his gender. His life revolves around becoming fully man, subjecting himself to{{pg|189|190}} | Mailer is empathetically projecting upon Hemingway what he himself already desires or possesses as a large but somewhat slumbering unconscious drive. Accordingly, Mailer believes that for a truly good male writer the most effective way of being a writer is to fulfill the highest potentials of his gender. His life revolves around becoming fully man, subjecting himself to{{pg|189|190}} | ||
punitive masculine trials such as boxing and everyday acts that he deems to manifest bravery. He deems courage, bravery and the honor they entail indispensable to attaining the primeval promise of being. As he clearly expresses it in ''Cannibals and Christians,'' “Masculinity is not something given to you, something you’re born with, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor,” that is, with courage.{{sfn|Mailer|1966|p=201}} | |||
Of course, by the same logic of gender potential, neither is femininity given. All writers, male or female, struggle to define themselves within their given gender. They make daunting forays into the vast mysterious terrains of the human condition through language and imagination housed in the unimaginable complex of the body. If authentic, these forays put all serious writers in extremis. It reminds one of Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that “[o]ne is not born a woman, but rather becomes, a woman.”{{sfn|Beauvoir|1993|p=267}} Admittedly, there may be differences between Mailer and Beauvoir’s statements, but the general thrust of them is identical. They basically attest that mere physiological givens or societal determinations of one’s sex do not totally determine one’s gender possibilities. | |||
From the depths of the preceding elucidation of Mailer’s interpretation of Hemingway’s discipline surfaces a specific philosophy of creative writing. I detect in it the upsurge of an integrative mind-body continuum, anchoring the writer squarely in our world and conferring upon him or her the courage to be and to write. The truth of mind-body wholeness belongs to the sphere of the writer’s lived experience and produces its own distinctive ontology and resultant epistemology. | |||
'''XI. THE BODY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS''' | |||
<blockquote> | |||
[T]he human being even as he or she dreamed or theorized was unmistakably a bag of guts, with motor devices and pleasure seeking organs attached.{{sfn|Bowie|1993|p=15}} | |||
</blockquote> | |||
We have seen that in Mailer’s philosophy of the art of creative writing, the desired developmental process of becoming a man is one of battles fought well and honorably fought. Such freely chosen fights are adventures into the unknown; but whether won or lost they always bestow upon the fighter writer a brave new way of being human. Of the role of the body within such{{pg|190|191}} | |||
=== Notes === | === Notes === | ||