The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer: Difference between revisions
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The centrality Mailer attributes to Hemingway among American writers would be seldom, if ever, far from his own mind during his writing life. It acquired the invisible center in his own gravity in his own writing. Initially,{{pg|170|171}} | The centrality Mailer attributes to Hemingway among American writers would be seldom, if ever, far from his own mind during his writing life. It acquired the invisible center in his own gravity in his own writing. Initially,{{pg|170|171}} | ||
Mailer’s comments about Hemingway were inspired by genuine fascination as well as frequent intimations of irritation. One may generally regard his irritation as making an effort not to be captivated by the older writer, in the sense of being creatively captured and subjugated. His sporadic early resentment toward Hemingway would seem to be prompted by the inclination to declare himself as the rightful archetypal son and inheritor of the master’s place. Yet this declaration had to be couched in a language that permitted him to continue to be a unique, talented, and independent writer. At times, I would imagine it implied that he, Mailer, would someday be considered an undisputed literary genius in his own right. He would become the new literary champion of the world. So, at the outset, his ambivalence toward Hemingway betrays a telltale sign of a justified Oedipal resentment as the master’s self-appointed heir apparent. | |||
In the fullness of time, Mailer developed a larger and steadier perspective on Hemingway and his work. I very much regret that he did not regard it necessary to devote a book to the subject. It would have been a remarkably enlightening book. His decision not to do so might very likely have been due to his ample but widely dispersed observations on Hemingway. “If one is going to make a statement about Hemingway,” said Mailer as early as 1955, “it can be done either by posing a riddle or else one has to write at least ten thousand words to say something new in the critical literature.”{{sfn|Mailer|1988|p=26}} Mailer ended up by saying and writing nearly as much on the subject and implying more during his writing life. One hopes that a Mailer scholar will gather these observations in a collection, which will no doubt prove to be instructive. | |||
Mailer’s comments on Hemingway in their aggregate manifest his own distinctiveness as an individual and writer. Concomitantly, there is a pervasive sense of identification with Hemingway through the agency of empathetic imagination. Mailer’s empathy with Hemingway and his early reservations about him make up the strong antithetical pole of a dialectical synthesis. From a theoretical standpoint, this dialectical synthesis is replete with critical import. For the general patterns of Mailer’s gravitation to Hemingway bear testimony to French poet and critic Paul Valéry’s belief in the truth of “philosophical interest” that “the progressive modification of one mind by the work of another” possesses.{{sfn|Valéry|1972|p=241}} | |||
In the absence of any transparent, extensive, unmediated stylistic or thematic influence by Hemingway on Mailer, my formulation of influence as{{pg|171|172}} | |||
=== Notes === | === Notes === | ||