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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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{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__ | {{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__ | ||
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}} | {{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}} | ||
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Mailer saw clearly the problem of writer/author alienation in the mid-twentieth-century. However, in contrast to Hemingway, he “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage.”{{Sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} We can also see a contrast with the kind of heroes that Mailer creates in his writing, compared with the heroes of the earlier Modernist era. In an older article from the 1960s, Frederick J. Hoffman suggests that Mailer’s heroes, such as Sergius O’Shaugnessy, seem to be polar opposites to T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock. They act with passion, and they act without inhibitions. | Mailer saw clearly the problem of writer/author alienation in the mid-twentieth-century. However, in contrast to Hemingway, he “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage.”{{Sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} We can also see a contrast with the kind of heroes that Mailer creates in his writing, compared with the heroes of the earlier Modernist era. In an older article from the 1960s, Frederick J. Hoffman suggests that Mailer’s heroes, such as Sergius O’Shaugnessy, seem to be polar opposites to T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock. They act with passion, and they act without inhibitions. | ||
{{quote|Mailer’s writings explicitly state the terms of the modern revolt 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 stands at the opposite pole from Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. He acts independently of all the inhibitions which allowed Prufrock to postpone action; his major impulse is both to murder and to create, to express passion through instinctive acts. He is the “marginal ego,” the dislocated and “disaffiliated” self, who tries to make a way of life from the energy and strategy of pure rebellion.{{sfn|Hoffman| | {{quote|Mailer’s writings explicitly state the terms of the modern revolt 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 stands at the opposite pole from Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. He acts independently of all the inhibitions which allowed Prufrock to postpone action; his major impulse is both to murder and to create, to express passion through instinctive acts. He is the “marginal ego,” the dislocated and “disaffiliated” self, who tries to make a way of life from the energy and strategy of pure rebellion.{{sfn|Hoffman|1960|p=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 thesis 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.{{sfn|Hicks|n.d.|}} 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=xiv}} 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=xii}} 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 thesis 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.{{sfn|Hicks|n.d.|}} 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=xiv}} 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=xii}} 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. | ||
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* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}} | * {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}} | ||
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.] | * {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.] | ||
* {{cite journal |last=Hoffman |first=Frederick |title=Norman Mailer and the Revolt of the Ego: Some Observations on Recent American Literature |url= |journal=Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature |volume=1 |issue=3 |date=1960 |pages=5–12 |access-date= |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}} | * {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}} | ||
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }} | ||