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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: | 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}} }} | {{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.}} | |||