The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer: Difference between revisions

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 Happily, Mailer’s own preoccupation—if indeed not outright obsession—with Hemingway as a singularly distinctive man and writer renders my effort somewhat easier. Mailer’s own articulations of his connection with Hemingway will allow me to make intelligible possible shared literary philosophical views and aspirations. His passionate fascination with Hemingway communicates itself as a combination of theoretical and experiential interests and practices. Altogether, they indicate a space where a serious study of their affinities and visionary literary kinship may come to light as viable. Such likelihood may not be easily discernible if one only limits oneself to the more traditional influence imitation theories. It would seem to me applying such theories to Hemingway and Mailer as tutor and tyro may well prove to be an egregious over-simplification and therefore more aporetic than heuristic. In my view, the whole problematic of Mailer’s relationship{{pg|164|165}}
+with Hemingway sets in motion a pervasive expectant mood. A Heideggerian sense of ontological disclosures gives the impression of emerging from it, providing the clearing where the two language artists practiced their profession. This clearing also permits crisscrossing meditations, interpretations, and associative musings. As we well know, Mailer and Hemingway’s personalities and works tend to elicit such activities in their readers.
+As a result, in due course I shall propose and will attempt to develop a subcategory to the traditional theory of influence to make intelligible the nature of Hemingway’s unusual influence over Mailer’s imagination. I classify it as visionary hermeneutic appropriation as influence. I hope the general theoretical thrust of such classification differentiates it from the more direct and more easily discernible thematic and stylistic influence as imitation. It will provide us with a useful working concept. I hope the reader will find it less daunting in its logic and practice than its designation at first might suggest.
+It would seem helpful to begin our task of examining the particular mode of influence Hemingway exerted on Mailer with a brief overall assessment of Hemingway’s widespread influence on twentieth-century American writers, including Mailer. I shall then proceed to Mailer’s own appraisal of Hemingway’s influence on the writers of his generation. Above all, I will examine Mailer’s perception of Hemingway’s influence on himself as arguably one of the most ambitious writers of his own time right along with the older Hemingway. This sequence will make it possible to study how Hemingway’s influence on Mailer characterizes itself as a highly differentiated case.
+'''II. HEMINGWAY’S TRANSPARENT INFLUENCE ON SOME NOTABLE AMERICAN WRITERS'''
+There are many American writers who appear to have made Hemingway’s work and way of life their own. They have done so through direct influence and imitation. Two interrelated operations make the effects of such influence intelligible. First, there is a process of phenomenological hermeneutics in the sense that Martin Heidegger understood it as interpretation and understanding. Analogous to the task of gods’ messenger Hermes, the reader writer endeavors to understand Hemingway’s work in the context of his or her own interpretation of it. In practice, this task is readily achievable as a given in human heuristic activities without considering the more technical underpinnings of hermeneutics as such. The act of interpretation permits{{pg|165|166}}
 === Notes ===