The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself: Difference between revisions

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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|1996|p=119|ref=harv}}</blockquote>
+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|1996|p=119|ref=harv}} </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=230-231|ref=harv}} 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=230-231}} 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.