The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Jive-Ass Aficionado: Why Are We in Vietnam? and Hemingway's Moral Code
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| « | The Mailer Review • Volume 4 Number 1 • 2010 • Literary Warriors | » |
James Plath
Abstract: An analysis of the influence of Hemingway on Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? It is Mailer and D.J.’s adoption of the Hipster mind-set and way of talking that sets them apart from others, even more so than the hunter’s code of honor. And being an insider—someone who knows what the outside world can only imagine—is perhaps the most crucial element of aficion, as Hemingway detailed it.
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In Why Are We in Vietnam? Norman Mailer alludes to James Joyce twice (126, 149), and certainly his 1967 anti-war novel has a Joycean feel. It incorporates the same sort of monologic stream-of-consciousness narrative and language play as we saw in Ulysses, all tinged with the “color” that put "Ulysses" on trial in America for obscenity. But Mailer’s novel is also richly evocative of that other great modernist writer, Ernest Hemingway.
Hemingway was conspicuously singled-out with a few adjectives when Mailer told an interviewer six years earlier that if he has “one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read” (Conversations 76).A close reading reveals that Why Are We in Vietnam? may actually be that novel, but I’ll leave it to future critics to explore how it would have appealed to the sensibilities of the other writers mentioned. I’m going to focus on Hemingway, because apart from echoes of Joyce’s style, his influence here seems most prevalent.
As Laura Adams observes, “three of the most powerful influences on Mailer’s scheme of things have been war and Ernest Hemingway and the intersection of the two” (173). Mailer told an interviewer that Hemingway’s death made him feel “a little weaker” (Conversations 71), no doubt because he had felt a connection. Like Hemingway, Mailer wrote about boxing, he wrote about bullfighting, he talked tough, he hung out with tough friends, he went to war, he wrote about war, he backed the underdog, he infuriated feminists, he was suspicious of governmental structures, and he seemed to