The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself: Difference between revisions
APKnight25 (talk | contribs) Copied over section from my Sandbox. Contains beginning of article, notes, beginning of citations, and Works Cited. |
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These works, ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) and ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), occur at almost precisely the same point in their careers — after initial critical success for quasi-autobiographical war novels, after the consequent achievement of celebrity, and after a major disappointment when that celebrity alone was not enough to overcome the restrictive vicissitudes of their respective moments in publishing culture. Although their disappointments differed in degree — Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms was published with missing profanity and an enforced blurring of the direct, explicit prose that he preferred. {{sfn|Bruccoli and Trogdon| | These works, ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) and ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), occur at almost precisely the same point in their careers — after initial critical success for quasi-autobiographical war novels, after the consequent achievement of celebrity, and after a major disappointment when that celebrity alone was not enough to overcome the restrictive vicissitudes of their respective moments in publishing culture. Although their disappointments differed in degree — Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms was published with missing profanity and an enforced blurring of the direct, explicit prose that he preferred. {{sfn|Bruccoli and Trogdon|1996|p=119}}</blockquote> | ||
Mailer’s ''The Deer Park'' was rejected by eight publishing houses before a ninth (Putnam) picked it up solely because he was Norman Mailer {{sfn | Mailer | 1959 | p= p230-231}} and with their next full-length books, both writers took urgent stances against the capitalist imposition of the social, implicitly performative role of “authorship” over and against their shared goals as writers who sought to capture truth in language as a prerequisite to presenting their works publicly. | Mailer’s ''The Deer Park'' was rejected by eight publishing houses before a ninth (Putnam) picked it up solely because he was Norman Mailer {{sfn | Mailer | 1959 | p= p230-231}} and with their next full-length books, both writers took urgent stances against the capitalist imposition of the social, implicitly performative role of “authorship” over and against their shared goals as writers who sought to capture truth in language as a prerequisite to presenting their works publicly. | ||
Their stances in response to the writer/author alienation would initially differ thus: Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. Neither approach solved or could resolve the problems faced by the creative writer who must by definition become public property once he or she achieves publication, let alone critical or popular success. Consciousness of this problem and their ensuing struggles with it, expressed in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'', seems to have prevented both Hemingway and Mailer from publishing a fully formed novel for a decade (Hemingway’s ''To Have and Have Not [1938]'' was initially two long short stories, which he lumped together and published as a “novel” to quiet his critics). Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship. | Their stances in response to the writer/author alienation would initially differ thus: Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. Neither approach solved or could resolve the problems faced by the creative writer who must by definition become public property once he or she achieves publication, let alone critical or popular success. Consciousness of this problem and their ensuing struggles with it, expressed in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'', seems to have prevented both Hemingway and Mailer from publishing a fully formed novel for a decade (Hemingway’s ''To Have and Have Not [1938]'' was initially two long short stories, which he lumped together and published as a “novel” to quiet his critics). Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship. | ||
What is most curious is that both writers sought to address the question of authorship in such structurally complex, generically ambivalent works—so curious that the complexity and ambivalence themselves require critical scrutiny. Neither ''Death in the Afternoon'' nor ''Advertisements for Myself'' fit | |||
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neatly into any particular generic category. Both can be described as “nonfiction,” although that classification is at best reductive. They are problematic, difficult-to-classify works whose generic hybridity is intrinsic to their internal and external logics; in both cases, though, that fundamental pertinence defies ready legibility. | |||
Both works include multiple genres. ''Death in the Afternoon'' presents readers with non-fiction reporting (on bullfighting), non-fiction self-reflection (on writing), short fiction (told by a character named “Author” to a character named “Old Lady”), dramatic dialogue (which reveals the drama as a morality play), and literary criticism (a pugilistic response to a critical piece by Aldous Huxley). All of the genres in ''Death in the Afternoon'', save the nonfiction, occur within the frame of the Author/Old Lady dialogues. ''Advertisements for Myself'' includes both new and previously published material in the forms of non-fiction essays, polemics, poetry, a play, excerpts of fictional works-in-progress (and abandoned works), a facsimile of an advertisement (placed by Mailer himself in The Village Voice), and meditations and musings on all of the above plus the thousand or so other things that attracted Mailer’s attention during the writing and made it into the words. | |||
Both works thus appear to be generic train-wrecks, the cacophony of a once-single voice and genre fractured and turned against itself by competing, unrelenting, and mutually exclusive internal and professional expectations. The cacophony was too great, the fracturing of their structural lenses too kaleidoscopic for either writer to produce a full-length novel for years. | |||
On May 2, 1930, ''Forum'' editor Henry Goddard Leach approached Ernest Hemingway, requesting a celebrity statement on life, the universe, and everything: “To put it briefly, what we want from you is a statement of your personal credo, your convictions and beliefs concerning the nature of the world and of man . . . it would have to touch intimately on your own hopes and fears, the mainspring of your faith or the promptings of your despair.” In exchange, Leach offered the author of ''The Sun Also Rises'' and ''A Farewell to Arms''—and future Nobel prize-winner—$500. | |||
Hemingway was furious. He already had held Leach in contempt for the latter’s 1929 request for a short story of “about two-thousand words,” which | |||
Leach condescendingly reminded him must contain “narrative, or at least plot.” Hemingway’s response in 1929 had been to scribble angrily in the margins of stories in progress several pointed responses, including a never used story collection title, ''Unsuited to Our Needs''. In 1930, his response to the more | |||
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=== Notes === | === Notes === | ||