ABSTRACT
Norman Mailer's short story 'The Time of her Time', originally meant to be the core of an ambitious novel, describes a most improbable bullfighting school in the heart of New York City. The bullfighting reference may also be Mailer's tribute to Ernest Hemingway, author of Death in the Afternoon and lifelong aficionado of the bull ring. Eastman's comment is typical of the way that most critics have perceived the relation between Hemingway's masculinity and his writing style: they notice that a connection exists, but do not opt to explore it. And Hemingway becomes the ostentatiously masculine creator of 'feminine' absences. Plainly Hemingway's style is in one sense an extension of the masculine values he depicts: the restraint of emotion, the stiff upper lip, the macho hermeticism. Hemingway's concern with truth deserves a reassessment in the light of contemporary theories about 'truth' in writing specifically, those of Jacques Derrida.
