The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation: Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer

Written by
Erik Nakjavani

---

Abstract: TBD

---

URL: TBD

[T]here is nothing in the critical field that should be of greater philosophical interest or prove more rewarding to analysis than the progressive modification of one mind by the work of another.

I. Prologue

Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway. This phrase brings into proximity two prominent twentieth-century American writers. The phrasal contiguity of the two names suggests an arrangement that at first glance conceals more than it reveals. For, upon reflection, their proximity sketches out areas that often tend toward more pronounced darkness rather than light. One repeatedly thinks about Hemingway’s influence on other writers. Colleagues at various academic conferences refer to it. It appears in scholarly journals, popular magazines, and newspapers. Still one does not readily see what might constitute Hemingway’s influence on Mailer, that is, aside from what amounts to and is derided by some critics as Mailer’s imitative behavior in the worst meaning of the adjective.

Mailer’s imaginal thematics, which often touches on the phantasmagoric, his baroque stylistics, and his distinctive intellectual concerns, all seem to be divergent from those developed and practiced by Hemingway. Does this

page 163

---

page 164

mean, then, that the conjunction “and” in my initial verbless and therefore as yet inactive sentence misleadingly sets forth commonalities between the two writers? I think not. Because I would expect one may at least adumbrate a theoretical common ground between them. The conjunctive “and” will exceed its usual grammatical function and eventually carry out an exceptional task. The promise of latent and multiple vistas of the connection between Mailer and Hemingway, which as yet remain unknown, will still become known. However, the fulfillment of this promise requires wide-ranging conceptual meditations and may take a long and nonlinear course. The meditative approach I am proposing will offer an inkling of possible signifying links between Mailer and Hemingway.

Clearly, Hemingway and Mailer’s names are heavily laden with literary, cultural,religious, educational, and socio-political implications. They often connote factual differences, even inevitable conflicts. Consequently, now and again, the differences may seem to be unbridgeable and militate against the prospect of serious comparative studies of the commonalities between the two writers. Since such study endeavors to go beyond wading in the shallows of mere superficial similarities and comparisons, the complexity of its conceptual framework will also proportionally increase. But I would like to go straight to my conclusion and confirm that such a study is indeed realizable, in spite of undeniable obscurities, or paradoxically because of them. For such seemingly impenetrable areas force us to rethink our theoretical guiding principles of literary influence and reconfigure constitutive elements.

Happily, Mailer’s own preoccupation—if indeed not outright obsession—with Hemingway as a singularly distinctive man and writer renders my effort somewhat easier. Mailer’s own articulations of his connection with Hemingway will allow me to make intelligible possible shared literary philosophical views and aspirations. His passionate fascination with Hemingway communicates itself as a combination of theoretical and experiential interests and practices. Altogether, they indicate a space where a serious study of their affinities and visionary literary kinship may come to light as viable. Such likelihood may not be easily discernible if one only limits oneself to the more traditional influence imitation theories. It would seem to me applying such theories to Hemingway and Mailer as tutor and tyro may well prove to be an egregious over-simplification and therefore more aporetic than heuristic. In my view, the whole problematic of Mailer’s relationship

page 164

---

page 165

with Hemingway sets in motion a pervasive expectant mood. A Heideggerian sense of ontological disclosures gives the impression of emerging from it, providing the clearing where the two language artists practiced their profession. This clearing also permits crisscrossing meditations, interpretations, and associative musings. As we well know, Mailer and Hemingway’s personalities and works tend to elicit such activities in their readers.

As a result, in due course I shall propose and will attempt to develop a subcategory to the traditional theory of influence to make intelligible the nature of Hemingway’s unusual influence over Mailer’s imagination. I classify it as visionary hermeneutic appropriation as influence. I hope the general theoretical thrust of such classification differentiates it from the more direct and more easily discernible thematic and stylistic influence as imitation. It will provide us with a useful working concept. I hope the reader will find it less daunting in its logic and practice than its designation at first might suggest.

It would seem helpful to begin our task of examining the particular mode of influence Hemingway exerted on Mailer with a brief overall assessment of Hemingway’s widespread influence on twentieth-century American writers, including Mailer. I shall then proceed to Mailer’s own appraisal of Hemingway’s influence on the writers of his generation. Above all, I will examine Mailer’s perception of Hemingway’s influence on himself as arguably one of the most ambitious writers of his own time right along with the older Hemingway. This sequence will make it possible to study how Hemingway’s influence on Mailer characterizes itself as a highly differentiated case.

II. HEMINGWAY’S TRANSPARENT INFLUENCE ON SOME NOTABLE AMERICAN WRITERS

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

page 165

---

page 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.” 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

page 166

---

page 167

is work according to his or her own desire and knowledge. They are dialogics, that is, the art and science of dialogue as it burst upon consciousness; hermeneutics, the method of interpreting and comprehending the scriptural work or text guided by the clusters of one’s desire and knowledge; and, finally, recreating the text in the light of all these three operations.

At this point, one may state that Hemingway’s attentive readers, reader writers, and critics (the other group of reader-writers) who may have an interest in the domain of literary influence either have taken mental notes or have made up their lists of writers influenced by Hemingway. It seems to be an irresistible activity. It may well be that each list brings forth the reciprocal effects of the texts read, in turn reading and analyzing the readers and list makers.

Taking into considerations the nature of Hemingway’s influence, I should like to offer a list of writers I consider to have been apparently influenced by him. I limit the list strictly to American male writers and include such diverse names as Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961),James M.Cain (1892-1977), Walter van Tilburg Clark (1909-1979), John Heresy (1914-1993), Robert Ruark (1915-1965), Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), Vance Bourjaily (1922-), Jack (Jean Louis) Kerouac (1922-1969), Cormac McCarthy (1933-), Richard Brautigan (1935-1984), Elmore Leonard (1935-), Raymond Carver (1938-1988), and Hunter Thompson (1937-2005).

This list is illustrative, of course—not at all intended to be either critical or exhaustive. It is at best exploratory and suggestive.I am aware that in each writer’s case the affinities with Hemingway and the extent and depth of his influence on him substantially differ. What does remain constant, however, is the existence of an inevitable vestige of the dynamic dialectic of uniqueness and influence, going from clear-cut direct imitation to intricate indirect influence in fictional conception and execution.

III. HEMINGWAY’S NONTRANSPARENT INFLUENCE

Hemingway’s style had an ability to hit the young writers in the gut, and they weren’t the same after that.

My intention in treating Hemingway’s influence on American writers at some length has been to show the nature and extent of the problem Mailer

page 167

---

page 168

was facing in dealing with Hemingway’s pervasive and detectable influence. Placing Mailer within my list would not have done justice to his own unique place in the history of twentieth-century American letters. For this reason, I made no mention of either his name or,I must add, Nelson Algren’s (1909-1981). I would say Hemingway’s influence on them falls into a different category. One may think of it as profound but not readily intelligible influence. They were two writers who were truly “hit in the gut” hard and for good and keeps by Hemingway. But the essence of how they experienced that radical influence remains mostly nontransparent.

Once one understands how—and how hard—with what lasting effects Hemingway as a writer “hit” a younger fellow-writer like Mailer in the “gut,” consequences can then be explored. A proper definition and explication of it may then emerge. Mailer and Algren both came to embody Hemingway’s influence, identifying with him, each in his own way. The result was the development of affinities with him, both as men and writers. Even though the nature, scope, and intensity of their kinship with Hemingway greatly varied, they both went beyond the boundaries of the dialectic of direct imitation and influence. As enlightening and fascinating as it is to compare simultaneously Mailer and Algren’s relationships with Hemingway, it would fall beyond the perimeters of the present study.

Accordingly,I would like to add the category of nontransparent influence to the broad sphere of Mailer-Hemingway studies. I designate it as visionary hermeneutic appropriation, primarily as it applies to Mailer. I shall later devote a section to its definition. To my mind, the critical narrative of Hemingway’s influence on Mailer belongs to the logic of this other sphere of influence,which sounds a bit technical but bears out to be less so in practice. I deem it to be a useful concept and place it as a category within the general theory of influence. I am persuaded it will provide forays into uncharted territories. Basically, it will embrace the proximal and the distal, the familiar to the unfamiliar, the expected and the unexpected from within and without the immediate and known boundaries of studies of Hemingway’s influence so far done.

IV. MAILER'S RECOGNITION AND ASSESSMENT OF HEMINGWAY's INFLUENCE

In “Prisoner of Success,” an interview with Paul Attanasio, Mailer stated with exceptional lucidity:

page 168

---

page 169

Works Cited

• Agamben, Giorgio (2005). The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Translated by Dalley, Patricia. Stanford: Stanford UP.
• Anzieu, Didier (1990). A Skin for Thought: Interviews with Gilbert Tarrab on Psychology and Psychoanalysis. Translated by Briggs, Daphne Nash. London: Karnak Books.
• Beauvoir, Simone de (1993). The Second Sex. Translated by Parshley, H. M. New York: Everyman's Library.
• Bloom, Harold (1979). The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP.
• Bowie, Malcolm (1993). Lacan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
• Freud, Sigmund (1946). Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Translated by Brill, A. A. New York: Random House.
• Gracián, Baltasar (2008). The Art of Worldly Wisdom. Translated by Fischer, Martin. New York: Barnes & Noble.
• Heidegger, Martin (1935). Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Hofstadter, Albert. New York: Harper Colophon Books.
• Hemingway, Ernest (1965). "The Art of Fiction". In Plimpton, George. Writers at Work. New York: The Viking Press. pp. 217–39. Hemingway1965.
• Mailer, Norman (1932). Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner.
• Mailer, Norman (1981). Baker, Carlos, ed. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961. New York: Scribner.
• Mailer, Norman (1935). Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribner.
• Mailer, Norman (1959). Advertisements for Myself. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.
• Mailer, Norman (1966). Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial.
• Mailer, Norman (1988). "Conversations with Norman Mailer" (Interview). Jackson: "UP of Mississippi". pp. 20–8, 155–75, 207–27, 291–8.
• Mailer, Norman (1975). The Fight. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.
• Mailer, Norman (1982). Pieces and Pontifications. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.
• Mailer, Norman (2003). The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing. New York: Random House.
• Mailer, Norman; Mailer, John Buffalo (2006). The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker, and Bad Conscience in America. New York: Nation Books.
• Marcel, Gabriel (1973). The Philosophy of Existentialism. Translated by Harari, Manya. Secaucus, N.J.: The Citadel Press.
• Nakjavani, Erik (1984). "The Aesthetics of Silence: Hemingway's "The Art of the Short Story"". The Hemingway Review. 3 (2): 38–45.
• Nakjavani, Erik (1986). "The Aesthetics of the Visible and the Invisible: Hemingway and Cézanne". The Hemingway Review. 5 (2): 2–11.
• Nakjavani, Erik (2003). "The Prose of Life: Lived Experience in the Fiction of Hemingway, Sartre, and Beauvoir". North Dakota Quarterly. 70 (4): 140–65.
• Raymond, Dwayne (2010). Mornings with Mailer: A Recollection of Friendship. New York: Harper.
• Valéry, Paul (1972). Leonardo, Poe, Mallarmé. Translated by Cowley, Malcolm; Lawler, James R. Princeton: Princeton UP. Valery1972.