The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer: Difference between revisions
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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}} | 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}} | ||
the reader to understand the meaning of a given text as an intended object of his or her own consciousness. It carries in it the reader-writer’s individual desires, fantasies, dreams, daydreams, culture of reading, and socioeconomic circumstances. In short, each interpretation carries in its fold the interpreter’s prior lived experiences. Second, the text, thus read, implies a concomitant epistemology, which the reader-writer can appropriate. | |||
On the plane of his way of life, as Mailer so well knew, Hemingway also exercised an exceptional charismatic influence on readers and writers. To some extent, he still continues to do so. One thinks of his way of life as an instance of Martin Heidegger’s ''“Dasein,”'' a genuine way of being human, which would be open to various interpretations and imitative practices. In a way, Hemingway as an individual makes available to us a specific semio-logical text, as it were. If so inclined, one can engage with it through simple imitation or more labyrinthine paths of influence. | |||
The uncommon influence that Hemingway exercised on readers and writers is largely due to his instinctive inclination to write open-ended fiction and creative nonfiction. Even at the lexical and syntactic levels of his work, the slide from vivid denotation to unrestricted connotations guarantees unlimited interpretive semantics. Based mostly on lived experience and its endless twists and turns, opacities and vagaries, unpredictabilities and mysteries, his fiction | |||
and creative nonfiction are largely unlimited enterprises in the domain of signification and interpretive disclosure. For Hemingway the purity of heart was to will everything, which embraces Kierkegaardian belief on the plane of the | |||
unity of the whole of existence. Nearly all of Hemingway’s sentences, as in all | |||
good fiction, are potentially polysemic and subject to an endless existential | |||
hermeneutics as are the lived experiences they try to recreate imaginatively. | |||
The truth of such fiction can only be regarded in the plural: truths. Thus, Hemingway initiates a dialogue with all of his potential reader writers, to which they can respond emotionally, cognitively, and even actively pursue either by imitation or under the enchantment of influence. “Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it,” he said in “The Art of Fiction,” an interview with George Plimpton. “Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1965|p=229}} It would be hard to find a keener or more accurate description of existential hermeneutic activities and modes of recreating and making a text your own. | |||
To sum up: the combined agencies of three phenomenological operations in the act of reading make it possible for any reader of Hemingway to read{{pg|166|167}} | |||
=== Notes === | === Notes === | ||