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The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/An American Dream: American Existentialism: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|What Mailer never comes to grips with is the fundamental question of how Hip provides a viable aesthetic for the writer of fiction ... Mailer’s negative and confused ‘theology’ will not serve to promote his career as a novelist, for Hip has no direct bearing on the problem the writer faces when he settles down to the task of composing fiction. There is no such mythical creature as a Hip novelist. (33)}} | {{quote|What Mailer never comes to grips with is the fundamental question of how Hip provides a viable aesthetic for the writer of fiction ... Mailer’s negative and confused ‘theology’ will not serve to promote his career as a novelist, for Hip has no direct bearing on the problem the writer faces when he settles down to the task of composing fiction. There is no such mythical creature as a Hip novelist. (33)}} | ||
Hip, Glicksburg explains, is a way of life, not a way of art. Glicksburg’s prim practitioner “settling down to the task of composing fiction” is distancing himself from the press of existence in order to reflect abstractedly upon it. But in his formulation of hip as “an American existentialism,” Mailer proposes a code according to which the acts of living and of writing are mutually constitutive. ''Advertisements'' is both an argument and a demonstration of the thesis that expression and experience “have an umbilical relationship” (''Advertisements'' 379). The hip novel will be a natural extension of the hip existence. Mailer underwrites his romantic conception of the writer with a style of existentialism that foregrounds the antirationalist stance of Heidegger and Sartre. Robert Denoon Cumming has criticized Mailer for loosening the term “existentialism”from its philosophical constraints, using it carelessly as a term for “romantic activism” (8), and thereby obscuring the true complexities of this branch of philosophy. But, of course, Mailer never boasted any | Hip, Glicksburg explains, is a way of life, not a way of art. Glicksburg’s prim practitioner “settling down to the task of composing fiction” is distancing himself from the press of existence in order to reflect abstractedly upon it. But in his formulation of hip as “an American existentialism,” Mailer proposes a code according to which the acts of living and of writing are mutually constitutive. ''Advertisements'' is both an argument and a demonstration of the thesis that expression and experience “have an umbilical relationship” (''Advertisements'' 379). The hip novel will be a natural extension of the hip existence. Mailer underwrites his romantic conception of the writer with a style of existentialism that foregrounds the antirationalist stance of Heidegger and Sartre. Robert Denoon Cumming has criticized Mailer for loosening the term “existentialism”from its philosophical constraints, using it carelessly as a term for “romantic activism” (8), and thereby obscuring the true complexities of this branch of philosophy. But, of course, Mailer never boasted any pretensions to being a careful student of continental philosophy. In a 1965 | ||
interview in The Paris Review, Mailer explained, | |||
{{quote|I’d hardly read anything by Sartre at this time, and nothing by Heidegger. I’ve read a bit since, and have to admire their formidable powers, but I suspect that they are no closer to the buried continent of existentialism than were medieval cartographers near to a useful map of the world. The new continent which shows on our psychic maps as intimations of eternity is still to be discovered. ('Cannibals and Christians'' 215)}} | |||