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|1996|p=119}} | 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}} 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. | ||
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. | 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. | ||
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No one knows whether Leach’s letter interrupted Hemingway’s actual writing or merely his preliminary thinking about his next book. Although Hemingway establishes on the first page of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that this so-conceived “bullfighting book” will be as much about writing and authorship as bullfighting (the analogy is thoroughly developed throughout | No one knows whether Leach’s letter interrupted Hemingway’s actual writing or merely his preliminary thinking about his next book. Although Hemingway establishes on the first page of ''Death in the Afternoon'' that this so-conceived “bullfighting book” will be as much about writing and authorship as bullfighting (the analogy is thoroughly developed throughout | ||
the book, hinging on the similarities in the economic, institutional and cultural mechanisms by which any art form is produced for a paying public), the first several chapters merely introduce the milieu, the spectacle, and its value to the writer, who tries in the night to remember which amongst thousands of details results in a feeling—for it is by strict focus on and adherence to such details, the narrator believes, a writer can convey real feeling and avoid cheap tricks and sentiment. The detail is the contrast between a gored matador’s thighbone and his dirty underwear {{sfn| | the book, hinging on the similarities in the economic, institutional and cultural mechanisms by which any art form is produced for a paying public), the first several chapters merely introduce the milieu, the spectacle, and its value to the writer, who tries in the night to remember which amongst thousands of details results in a feeling—for it is by strict focus on and adherence to such details, the narrator believes, a writer can convey real feeling and avoid cheap tricks and sentiment. The detail is the contrast between a gored matador’s thighbone and his dirty underwear {{sfn|Leech|1929|p=20}}. Mailer would approve. | ||
For the first six chapters, Death in the Afternoon promises to unfold as the observations of a writer (the narrative “I”) engaging with the culture, history, form, and presentation of the Spanish bullfight and, by extension, the character of the Spanish nation and people. Even had Hemingway not delivered something far more difficult, problematic, and admittedly obscure, | For the first six chapters, ''Death in the Afternoon'' promises to unfold as the observations of a writer (the narrative “I”) engaging with the culture, history, form, and presentation of the Spanish bullfight and, by extension, the character of the Spanish nation and people. Even had Hemingway not delivered something far more difficult, problematic, and admittedly obscure, | ||
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work, and he fought to make his personality enrich his books,” especially in ''A Farewell to Arms'' and ''Death in the Afternoon'', both of which are exemplary of how “[a]n author’s personality can help or hurt the attention readers give | work, and he fought to make his personality enrich his books,” especially in ''A Farewell to Arms'' and ''Death in the Afternoon'', both of which are exemplary of how “[a]n author’s personality can help or hurt the attention readers give | ||
to his books." {{sfn |Mailer|1959| p=21}} | to his books." {{sfn |Mailer|1959| p=21}} | ||
Mailer’s preliminary conclusion regarding the problem of alienation is, again ironically, that “[t]he way to save your work and reach more readers is to advertise yourself, steal your own favorite page out of Hemingway’s unwritten ''Notes From Papa On How The Working Novelist Can Get Ahead''." {{sfn |Mailer|1959| p=21}} Seemingly unaware of the problem that those “unwritten” notes are implicit in ''Death in the Afternoon’s'' Author/Old Lady dialogues (and the consequent | |||
problem that those dialogues had the opposite of their intended effect), Mailer indulges in some gymnastic contortions of his own. Despite the fact that the “First Advertisement” does “steal” that page (topically and thematically, however un-self-consciously), and despite the fact that Mailer states how unsuited he is to that sort of self-advertisement, both happen within exactly that sort of advertisement in the service of that sort of advertisement. | |||
It seems evident that Mailer missed at least the “thinking” part that structured Hemingway’s burlesque according to Dante’s circles of Hell, yet one page further finds Mailer listing his own “sinners” or “criminals,”which map as neatly onto Hemingway’s as Hemingway’s do onto Dante’s: “I must get | |||
better at overriding the indifference which comes from the snobs, arbiters, managers and conforming maniacs who manipulate most of the world of letters."{{sfn |Mailer|1959| p=22}} Mailer further defines his struggle as wanting to “write so well and so strongly as to call my shot, but unfortunately I may have fatigued the earth of rich language beyond repair”{{sfn |Mailer|1959| p=22}}.Writing “so well and so strongly” was the ambition of both writers. Both discovered they could not call their shots (Hemingway in publishing ''A Farewell to Arms'' and after publishing ''Death in the Afternoon''; Mailer in trying to publish ''The Deer Park''). Both writers acknowledged the contamination and depletion of their central resource, language (Hemingway’s Author addresses this equally overtly, warning that “all our words from loose using have lost their edge."{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=71}} The six and a half declarative pages of Mailer’s First Advertisement thus provide an | |||
eerie echo of all nine Hemingway dialogues in both generalities (content) and specifics (language)—in the thirty years between their publication, nothing about authorial alienation had changed. | |||
Mailer’s identification of the stakes of the struggle against this alienation in his “Second Advertisement” echoes the pre-dialogue “unbearably clean” | |||
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