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

{{dc|dc=A|s twentieth-century American writers}}, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer each strove to achieve lasting success and power as novelists, two of {{pg|259|260}} 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.

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|Leach|1930|p=20}} Mailer would approve.

The fanfare is minimal but literal. The entrance of the Old Lady and the descent into hell are heralded by a trumpeter at the end of Chapter 6: “[T]he trumpet sounds and the very serious, white-haired, wide old man, his name is Gabriel, in a sort of burlesque bullfighter’s suit . . . unlocks the door of the toril and pulling heavily on it runs backward to expose the low passageway." {{sfn|Hemingway|1932| p=61-2}} In the next chapters, Hemingway will literally burlesque the Armageddon wrought on art by the capitalist system of production, performing his erudition (in what he will reveal as a direct response to Huxley) by alluding to several dramatic forms and specific dramatic texts, including the morality play (one more burlesque than apostrophic), tragedy, and Romeo and Juliet (specifically the line “He jests at scars who never felt a wound”). His purpose, although never more overt than the passing reference to Gabriel and the Café Fornos (from forno, Italian for “Hell”), {{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=105}} is to illustrate that authorship (as opposed to writing) is a burlesque performance, a low-comedy, symptomatic of a system of decay and putrefaction. He invites the careful reader to compare his Author to Dante’s Virgil (addressed as “guide,” “Master,” and “Author” {{sfn|Dante|1994|p=[1.85]}}) and to thus perceive the analogy and its scathing commentary on the degradation wrought on art and artist by the mechanisms of popular consumption. {{efn|The specifics of how, why, and to what effect Hemingway constructs this allegory are presented in full in Justice, “A Pilgrim’s Progress into Hell: Death in the Afternoon and the Problem of Authorship” in The Bones of the Others, 92–118.}}

purpose was to confront alienation head-on in order to “clear a ground” for his next novel, which was already underway. {{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=8}}

In the opening paragraph of his “Note to the Reader,” which precedes the two Tables of Contents, Mailer overtly distinguishes author and writer. “The author,” he says, “taken with an admirable desire to please his readers, has{{pg|266|267}}also added a set of advertisements, printed in italics.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=7}} In the next sentence, Mailer states that “[l]ike many another literary fraud, the writer has been known on occasion to read the Preface of a book instead of the book."{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=7}} The distinction is subtle and probably instinctive; the role of the author involves production and requires awareness of his reader, whereas the writer is here presented as private consumer. That authorship is a fraught space is evident in Mailer’s ironic comment that he “will take the ''dangerous'' step of listing what I believe are the best pieces . . .” [emphasis added].{{sfn|Mailer|1959| p=7}}

Mailer then addresses the book’s structure with an explanation of his decision to provide two Tables of Contents, one chronological, provided for “anyone wishing to read my book from beginning to end,” and a second, organized by genre, “to satisfy the specialist.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=7}} That he considers formal decisions authorial, as opposed to writerly, is implicit in his overt conscious awareness of audience. It is thus not exceptional that a book concerned primarily with authorship reflects that concern in its structural form, and it therefore follows that its fractured structure reflects the shifting, multiple, and sometimes contradictory roles played by one man who is writer, author, authority (if only on himself), and celebrity. Further, as Mailer assigns interest in genre to “the specialist” (to whom he “offers” the second table of contents), his thinking implicitly extends alienation throughout other capitalistic roles—the “specialist,” or professional reader, will necessarily be always/already alienated from the text by virtue of its implication in their own labor. Mailer the professional writer thus extends a token of solidarity to the professional reader—that token being an acknowledgment that professionals must not relinquish awareness of hierarchies and protocols in the performance of their work, even when that work brings in a supposedly private space of consumption. Mailer’s conceptual thinking analogizes thus:

other things to prove, simply tells the reader in his “specialist” table of contents that his “advertisements” comprise the “Biography of a Style”. {{sfn |Mailer|1959|p=15}} Mailer’s author is the author; Mailer acknowledges that his readers can and will decide their own roles for themselves.

Mailer’s identification of the stakes of the struggle against this alienation in his “Second Advertisement” echoes the pre-dialogue “unbearably clean”{{pg|269|270}}moment in ''Death in the Afternoon''. In this “Second Advertisement,” Mailer recounts two experiences: the writing of and the alienation resulting from the success of ''The Naked and the Dead.'' {{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=91}} He situates his subject position during its writing as one of forever lost innocence in which writing was a space of “humility” and incredible creative fluidity in which he could “write twenty-five pages of first draft a week,” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=91}} feeling all the while that “it seems to be at dead center.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=92}} Its success had the lasting effect of catapulting him abruptly into a role for which he was unprepared: “Naturally, I was blasted a considerable distance away from dead center by the size of its success. . .My farewell to an average man’s experience (which he had needed to write the novel to begin with) was too abrupt,” and “I had been moved from the audience to the stage—I was, on the instant, a man—I could arouse more emotion in others than they could arouse in me.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=92}} Like Hemingway’s writer sitting in the stands, witnessing Hernandorena’s goring, Mailer figures the writer’s role as one of audience member; like Hemingway’s Author in his dramatic dialogue, Mailer figures authorship as a performative role that necessarily alienates author from writer by virtue of relative exposure to the raw materials of writing and the process of production. Both Hemingway and Mailer place tremendous value on the kind of clarity that being “in the audience” allows. But whereas in Hemingway’s time, the illusion remained that struggle could result in victory, by Mailer’s, that illusion had been shattered, at least for Mailer.

The “Fourth Advertisement” stands as the pivotal act in Mailer’s ''Advertisements'', the act that elevates the collection from a “great wreck” and “ragtag collection” {{sfn|Castronovo|2003|p=179}} to a narrative that has its own intrinsic drama, identified by David Castronovo as the “symbolic tale of one tormented consciousness trying to stay alive.” {{sfn|Castronovo|2003|p=180}} Although Mailer’s use of dramatic form is never as overt as Hemingway’s, he too was a product of highly canon-centric literary exposure, and despite his anticipation of full-blown Postmodernism, he remained subjugated to his innate internalization{{pg|270|271}}of classical Western literary form, in which the physical center of any narrative contains the pivot moment: the moment at which things that were previously only possible become either inevitable or impossible.{{efn|This is perhaps most evident in Shakespeare’s plays, usually occurring in III.ii, and subsequent literary works pre dating Modernism (Dickens’ ''Bleak House'' contains a striking meta-example; its central pivot occurs in iambic pentameter), but the phenomenon is hegemonic and not limited to literary prose writing. Bullfights and symphonies work on the same sort of narrative arc.}}

{{Cite book| author-last= Bruccoli|author-first= Matthew J.|date= 1996|title= The Only Thing That Counts: Ernest Hemingway-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence|location= -New York|publisher= Scribner|ref=harv}}

{{cite magazine |last= Castronovo|first= David|date= 2003|title= Norman Mailer as Mid-Century Advertisments|magazine= The New England Review|pages= 174-194|ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last= Dante|first= Alighieri|date= 1994|title= The Divine Comedy: Inferno| translator-last= Pinsky| translator-first= Robert|location= New York|publisher= Farrar, Straus and Giroux |ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last= Hemingway|first= Ernest|date= 1932 |title= Death in the Afternoon|location= New York|publisher= Scribner's|ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last= Justice|first= Hilary K.|date= 2006|title= The Bones of the Others| location= Kent|publisher= Kent State UP|ref=harv }}

{{cite letter |last= Leach|first= Henry Goddard |date= 28 June 1929|title= Letters to Hemingway|location= Boston, John F. Kennedy Library|publisher= TS. Hemingway Collection|pages= |ref=harv }}

{{cite letter |last= Leach|first= Henry Goddard |date= 2 May 1930|title= Letters to Hemingway|location= Boston, John F. Kennedy Library|publisher= TS. Hemingway Collection|pages= |ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 1959|title= Advertisements for Myself|location= New York|publisher= G.P. Putnam's Sons|ref=harv}}

{{cite book |last= Mailer|first= Norman|date= 2003|title= The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing|location= New York|publisher= Random House|ref=harv }}

{{cite book |last= McGann|first= Jerome|date= 1993|title= A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism| location= Charlottesville| publisher= U of Virginia|ref=harv }}