The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer: Difference between revisions
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Consequently, what confronts a creative writer such as Mailer and Hemingway, both of whom desire to establish a new fictional world with its own epistemology. Such a goal can only realize itself through exploration of new themes and their attendant stylistics. The problematics of how to come concurrently into possession of the enormous inherited wealth of tradition and surpass it is a thorny one. For some writers, it becomes an insurmountable problem, because it demands an alchemical inner process of transformation of the writer’s literary inheritance. Ready acceptance or radical rejection of literary influence sets up psychological tensions that surface in a writer’s lived experience as Oedipal guilt and its inevitable anxiety, which Bloom has so brilliantly detected and elucidated. | Consequently, what confronts a creative writer such as Mailer and Hemingway, both of whom desire to establish a new fictional world with its own epistemology. Such a goal can only realize itself through exploration of new themes and their attendant stylistics. The problematics of how to come concurrently into possession of the enormous inherited wealth of tradition and surpass it is a thorny one. For some writers, it becomes an insurmountable problem, because it demands an alchemical inner process of transformation of the writer’s literary inheritance. Ready acceptance or radical rejection of literary influence sets up psychological tensions that surface in a writer’s lived experience as Oedipal guilt and its inevitable anxiety, which Bloom has so brilliantly detected and elucidated. | ||
From this perspective, visionary hermeneutic appropriation, which through the alchemy of imagination in literature, allows a writer such as Mailer to now and then transform or at a minimum negotiate with the given as the received body of preceding literary works. In this fashion,Mailer could manage to be paradoxically both old and new and come to grips with the determinism of the Oedipal guilt. Symbolically, one might say Mailer appropriated the father’s body, mainly Hemingway’s, in order to support his own life of imagination. Accordingly, Mailer perceived the process not so much | From this perspective, visionary hermeneutic appropriation, which through the alchemy of imagination in literature, allows a writer such as Mailer to now and then transform or at a minimum negotiate with the given as the received body of preceding literary works. In this fashion, Mailer could manage to be paradoxically both old and new and come to grips with the determinism of the Oedipal guilt. Symbolically, one might say Mailer appropriated the father’s body, mainly Hemingway’s, in order to support his own life of imagination. Accordingly, Mailer perceived the process not so much | ||
as emulation but rather what I have called interpretive appropriation.{{pg|183|184}} | as emulation but rather what I have called interpretive appropriation.{{pg|183|184}} | ||
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Thus Mailer could speak of ''his own world,'' of ''his own philosophy,'' and finally of ''his own cosmology'' and mean it. Writing fiction offered both Hemingway and Mailer means of synthesizing their lived experiential vision. No matter how compressed or dilatory their style might be, or how distinct their thematics the practice of a new aesthetics of lived experience seems to give their{{pg|187|188}} | Thus Mailer could speak of ''his own world,'' of ''his own philosophy,'' and finally of ''his own cosmology'' and mean it. Writing fiction offered both Hemingway and Mailer means of synthesizing their lived experiential vision. No matter how compressed or dilatory their style might be, or how distinct their thematics the practice of a new aesthetics of lived experience seems to give their{{pg|187|188}} | ||
fiction its unity. In “The Existential Aesthetic,”Mailer maintained that “of all of the philosophies, existentialism approaches experience with the greatest awe: it says we can’t categorize experience before we have experienced it. The only way we’re going to be able to discover what the truth about anything might be is to submit ourselves to the reality of the experience.”{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=187}} Mailer’s statement is true whether one is a religious or an atheistic existentialist, because it is rooted in the phenomenology of experience, within which religious or atheistic experiences also dwell. Similarly, it is true whether the experience is physical, psychical or psychosomatic, as I am convinced all experiences are. This new experiential aesthetic theoretically approximated the Quantum Mechanics of the fictional discourse for Hemingway and Mailer. | |||
Lived experience appears to be an unchangeable given of the human condition, which would fall within the concept of “facticity” ''(facticité)'' of Sartrean philosophy. Paradoxically however, lived experience, ''le vécu'' of French phenomenology, bursts upon creative intentional human consciousness and can turn into the ground of an alternative world of literary alchemy through interpretive activities. Hemingway and Mailer fully comprehended that fiction emerging from lived experience was the Tao of fiction, as it were, dealing as it did with ''the real of the real.'' I believe they both trusted the validity and efficacy of this alternative fictional truth. Mailer found in such fiction what was the possibility of expressing the inexpressible and of comprehending the seemingly incomprehensible in the diverse, specialized conceptual discourses of his time that fragmented our world.{{efn|Please see my essay “The Prose of Life: Lived Experience in the Fiction of Hemingway, Sartre, and Beauvoir.”}} | |||
In my opinion, Mailer committed himself to a visionary fiction constituted by lived experience that was a sort of lingual religion, alchemy, and magic for him and Hemingway. Within such fiction, the body became the nodal point of psychosomatic phenomenon of lived experience, making possible an indissoluble subjective-objective union with the environing world. This ''corporeal'' comprehension presented a universal oneness that verges on the mystical for both writers. The human body as an indivisible continuum is the agency that makes lived experience possible. It legitimately permitted Hemingway and Mailer to go beyond the trappings of realism ''and'' solipsism. Such fiction miraculously invades the interstices of imaginal space-time through its inexhaustible connotative potential of language. Both writers, one after another, discovered in such vision of literature what Carl Jung has called alchemy’s “holy technique.”{{pg|188|189}} | |||
=== Notes === | === Notes === | ||