The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Death, Art, and the Disturbing: Hemingway and Mailer and the Art of Writing: Difference between revisions

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 Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their artistic striving to make, as Mailer puts it,“a revolution in the consciousness of our time,”is founded in existential notions of creating art and becoming an artist (''Advertisements'' 17). For existentialists, to become an artist, an individual must break through all illusions, see self and world more clearly, get to the core or “root” of life, and thus see life “as it really is” (Hemingway, “Letter to John” 354).The catalyst for this perceptual shift, according to existentialists, is profound emotional experience. Specifically, the existentialists’ study of the intense emotional experience that accompanies facing death, an experience that shakes individuals out of their normal ways of being, seeing, feeling, and thinking, is an essential part of their philosophy of creating art and becoming an artist.
-According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 2, 9) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it, of making “something of his own,” of creating “art” and becoming “artist” (100) or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom 8–9). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death 278) and the importance of“creating their lives as ‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 3)—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work (63).It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art.This existential focus on the study of death,the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
+According to the existentialists, it is through the study of death that individuals recognize the importance of seeing life “clearly” and as a “whole” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 2, 9) and come to understand the urgent necessity, as Hemingway puts it, of making “something of his own,” of creating “art” and becoming “artist” (100) or “author” of one’s own life, meaning, structure, content, and commitments (Yalom 8–9). The study of death reveals to individuals, according to existential scholar Charles Guignon, the importance of seeing their lives as a “whole” (Hemingway, Death 278) and the importance of“creating their lives as ‘works of art’”(Guignon xxxv).Significantly, the profound emotional experience that brings individuals to see their lives as a “whole” is bound to the realization that the structure of human nature is a synthesis between the temporal and the eternal—what Hemingway refers to as “the feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” (Hemingway, ''Death'' 3)—in which the individual moments of one’s life (the temporal or parts) require an overarching unity or meaning (the eternal or whole) to give authentic meaning to one’s life and/or work (63).It is through facing up to one’s own certain death—and the uncertain hour and day of one’s death—that the individual comes to the realization that he/she is responsible for creating his/her life and work as art by expressing the eternal in his/her nature, something Hemingway envisions as the enduring emotional experience of the bullfight, something he strives to convey through his writing and an essential aspect of his existential-oriented philosophy of creating art. This existential focus on the study of death, the realization of the temporal and eternal nature of human existence, and the profound emotional experiences that bring individuals to the realization that they must express the eternal in their nature form the basis of both Hemingway and Mailer’s philosophy of writing and their goals as writer-artists.
-HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY
+==HEMINGWAY AND MAILER: THE ART OF WRITING EXISTENTIALLY==
 Where Hemingway seeks to express the eternal through his art by capturing
 “the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be valid . . . if you stated it purely enough, always”(Death ),Mailer envisions as“the existential state,of the novel writer”in which the writer-artist strives to capture and convey enduring emotion and experience and is constantly faced with the death of his art (“Hazards”).Whether it is the death of the writer’s abilities, the death of his art via his critics, or the actual “existential state” the writer-artist must enter to capture and convey the eternal through his/her art, for Mailer, and as we can see in Death in the Afternoon, for Hemingway, the professional writer-artist, like Hemingway’s matador, must face up to his/her own death—albeit existential death—on a daily basis in order to create art.