User:APKnight25/sandbox

Written by
Hilary K. Justice

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Abstract: TBD

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Note: TBD

Authorship and Alienation in Depth in the Afternoon and Advertisements for Myself”

In 1930, still smarting from compromises required of him by the publishing industry, Ernest Hemingway received a letter from an editor and puller the "emergency stop" cord on the speeding train of his career. Crumpling the letter in his fist, he stepped out of the car and onto the platform of non-fiction; he stood there, in this empty page of a place, his eyes focused in the distance as though there he saw the Spanih bullfights he had long wanted to capture in words. But a shadow passed between his eyes and his object - a Hemingway-shaped shadow, both him and not him, though which he could not see clearly.

He admitted the shadow to his work, naming it "Author," as if a separate identity might contain and isolate it, trying to preserve the kind of clarity on which he had earned his reputation as a writer. He tied it up neatly and stuffed it into Hell, leaving its figure slumped, presumed dead, on the platform behind him.

The train changed course for Purgatory.

In 1959, Norman Mailer, in whose baggage rested eight rejection letters for his last novel, alighted at the same station, and the shadow greeted him or perhaps alighted with him. He already knew its name; he had used it well enough. He could no more shake it than Hemingway before him. He challenged it to debate, or perhaps a boxing match - perhaps, maybe letter, to a bullfight.

The course changed again.

AS TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN WRITERS, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer each strove to achieve lasting success and power as novelists, two of

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These works, Death in the Afternoon (1932) and Advertisements for Myself (1959), occur at almost precisely the same point in their careers — after initial critical success for quasi-autobiographical war novels, after the consequent achievement of celebrity, and after a major disappointment when that celebrity alone was not enough to overcome the restrictive vicissitudes of their respective moments in publishing culture. Although their disappointments differed in degree — Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms was published with missing profanity and an enforced blurring of the direct, explicit prose that he preferred (Bruccoli and Trogdon 119).

Mailer’s The Deer Park was rejected by eight publishing houses before a ninth (Putnam) picked it up solely because he was Norman Mailer (Mailer, Advertisements 230–231) and with their next full-length books, both writers took urgent stances against the capitalist imposition of the social, implicitly performative role of “authorship” over and against their shared goals as writers who sought to capture truth in language as a prerequisite to presenting their works publicly.

Notes

1. The specifics of how, why, and to what effect Hemingway constructs this allegory are presented in full in Justice, “A Pilgrim’s Progress into Hell: Death in the Afternoon and the Problem of Authorship” in The Bones of the Others, 92–118.

2. There is no dialogue in chapter 13; for an expanded table of correspondence, see Justice, 105.

3. This is perhaps most evident in Shakespeare’s plays, usually occurring in III.ii, and subsequent literary works pre-dating Modernism (Dickens’ Bleak House contains a striking meta-example; its central pivot occurs in iambic pentameter), but the phenomenon is hegemonic and not limited to literary prose writing. Bullfights and symphonies work on the same sort of narrative arc.

Works Cited

Bruccoli, Matthew J.,ed. (1996). The Only Thing That Counts: Ernest Hemingway-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence. New York: Scribner.CS1 maint: Extra text: authors list (link)

Costronovo, David (2003). "Norman Mailer as Mid-Century Advertisment". The New England Review. pp. 174–194.

Dante, Alighieri (1994). The Divine Comedy: Inferno. Translated by Robert Pinsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Hemingway, Ernest (1932). Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner's.

Justice, Hilary K. (2006). The Bones of the Others. Kent: Kent State UP.

Leach, Henry Goddard (28 June 1929). "Letters to Hemingway" (Letter). Letter to. Boston, John F. Kennedy Library: TS. Hemingway Collection.

Leach, Henry Goddard (2 May 1930). "Letters to Hemingway" (Letter). Letter to. Boston, John F. Kennedy Library: TS. Hemingway Collection.

Mailer, Norman (1959). Advertisments for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Mailer, Norman (2003). The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing. New York: Random House.

McGann, Jerome (1993). A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Charlottesville: U of Virginia.