A Visionary Hermeneutic Appropriation

Meditations on Hemingway’s Influence on Mailer

Abstract

An examination of influence theory making intelligible the nature of Hemingway’s unusual influence over Mailer’s imagination. This analysis shows how Hemingway’s influence on Mailer characterizes itself as a highly differentiated case. Mailer’s speculation on the nature of Hemingway’s freely chosen, everyday exposure to death is reminiscent of Martin Heidegger’s notion of “being-toward-death.” It does not connote a morbid obsession with death but rather a maximally authentic “way-of-being” human. Imagination constituting the highest faculty of the mind in romanticism, Mailer’s lament for Hemingway turns out to be a vibrant imaginative song of life but in a different register, Hemingway’s own.