The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself: Difference between revisions

The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself (view source)

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 against conventional society. It is very different from past literary rebellions: it begins in the instinctual life, and it is free both
 from established conventions and ideological complications.
-Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s favorite hero, as a personality
+Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s favorite hero, as a personality,
 stands at the opposite pole from Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. He
 acts independently of all the inhibitions which allowed Prufrock
@@ Line 171: / Line 171: @@
 to make a way of life from the energy and strategy of pure rebellion.{{sfn|Hoffman|pp=12}} }}
-In a recent article, Alex Hicks has made a strong case that we should see Advertisements as Mailer’s Künstlerroman or artist-novel—similar in scope to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and other examples. His the- sis is “that Advertisements for Myself is better appreciated as a novelistic au- tobiography than as an anthology-like collection of writings,” and he finds support for this view from Bloom, Frye, Jonathan Lethem and many others (Advertisements). The quotation from Lethem is particularly powerful, “Ad- vertisements for Myself is Mailer’s greatest book, simply because it frames the drama of the construction of this voice, the thrilling resurrection of his per- sonality as his greatest asset after the public pratfalls accompanying his sec- ond and third novels”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=14}}.Lethem saw Mailer “in the late fifties to have become a radar detector for the onset of . . . the post-modern cultural condition generally”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=13}} I find the arguments of both Hicks and Lethem cogent and persuasive, but I do wonder if elements of this artist-novel mode are not also found in Hemingway’s “Snows” and Fitzgerald’s “The Crack- Up”—albeit in a rudimentary form.
+In a recent article, Alex Hicks has made a strong case that we should see Advertisements as Mailer’s Künstlerroman or artist-novel—similar in scope to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and other examples. His the- sis is “that Advertisements for Myself is better appreciated as a novelistic autobiography than as an anthology-like collection of writings,” and he finds support for this view from Bloom, Frye, Jonathan Lethem and many others (Advertisements). The quotation from Lethem is particularly powerful, “Advertisements for Myself is Mailer’s greatest book, simply because it frames the drama of the construction of this voice, the thrilling resurrection of his personality as his greatest asset after the public pratfalls accompanying his second and third novels”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=14}}. Lethem saw Mailer “in the late fifties to have become a radar detector for the onset of . . . the post-modern cultural condition generally”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=13}} I find the arguments of both Hicks and Lethem cogent and persuasive, but I do wonder if elements of this artist-novel mode are not also found in Hemingway’s “Snows” and Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up”—albeit in a rudimentary form.
 I am also reminded of Burwell’s poignant description, quoted earlier, of the late Hemingway wrestling with the four narratives that he could not complete:
-{{quote|In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen- year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of  as he wrote in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have lim- ited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1-2}} }}
-Whenever we see an author creating as a character within his or her fiction an artist—any kind of artist—we should pay attention. In this literary phe- nomenon, we may see aspects of the Künstlerroman or artist-novel, certainly. But we may also regard it as a skillful use of aesthetic distance—as an ex- ample of Malcolm Cowley’s “double vision”—that is “the ability to partici- pate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively” {{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=20}}. That ability, Mailer certainly possessed, as did, in an earlier age, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.{{efn|These two perspectives—Künstlerroman and aesthetic distance—are not incompatible, of course. They are, perhaps, two sides of the same coin, and we should learn from both.}}
+{{quote|In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1-2}} }}
+Whenever we see an author creating as a character within his or her fiction an artist—any kind of artist—we should pay attention. In this literary phenomenon, we may see aspects of the Künstlerroman or artist-novel, certainly. But we may also regard it as a skillful use of aesthetic distance—as an example of Malcolm Cowley’s “double vision”—that is “the ability to participate emotionally in the experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively” {{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=20}}. That ability, Mailer certainly possessed, as did, in an earlier age, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. {{efn|These two perspectives—Künstlerroman and aesthetic distance—are not incompatible, of course. They are, perhaps, two sides of the same coin, and we should learn from both.}}
 === GREAT AUTHORS TRANSFORM ANGST INTO ART ===
+These three authors were dealing with their own angst in their writing, but
+they also were creating art. In a dramatically changing America, Hemingway,
+Fitzgerald, and Mailer each faced the “inescapable alienation of writer from
+author.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Each was trying to work out what we could call a
+proper authorial distance in their narratives.
+In his article on Hemingway called “The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as
+Life,” Jackson Benson writes, “One’s life, after all, is not a drama, nor should
+a drama ever be confused with a life. Both at the bottom are mysterious, but
+each is different in kind from the other.” {{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=358}} This is an important point in interpreting the work of each author. Writing about Hemingway, but applicable, I would argue, also to Fitzgerald and Mailer, Benson says this:
+{{quote| Out of his emotions and needs, as well as out of a conscious s desire to create and win approval, the author projects, transforms,
+exaggerates, and a drama emerges which is based on his life but
+which has only a very tenuous relationship to the situation, in its
+facts, that might be observed from the outside. That is to say, he
+writes out of his life, not about his life. So that one can say, yes,
+Hemingway’s life is relevant to his fiction, but only relevant in
+the way that a dream might be relevant to the emotional stress
+that might have produced it.{{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=350}} }}
+Benson has warned us of the dangers of the biographical fallacy.
 ===Notes===
 {{notelist}}